How to Make Good Choices: A System for Decision Making

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. Today, we're going to be exploring one of the most important skills we can develop, how to make good choices. We'll talk about what good decisions tend to have in common, look at some common mistakes people make when making decisions, explore different decision-making styles, and help you figure out what yours might be.

Then later in the episode, we'll walk through a few real world examples to make all of this very practical. And to help us out, I'm joined today, as usual, by clinical psychologist Rick Hansen. He's also my dad. Dad, how are you doing today? I'm really great. As you know, I'm... just back from a three-week meditation retreat. I want to put a little nod in here for the teacher, Stephen Snyder. Wonderful teacher. I truly recommend him very highly. You can search him online.

I think we may have had him as a guest. Yeah, we've had him on the show. It was a while back. I think of that conversation often, actually. It was a really good one. That's really great. So I'm in pretty good shape. And if I begin to babble, well, that's my excuse. Okay. I love this topic partly because, as the saying has it in medicine, good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. And I think good decision-making comes in part from learning the lessons of...

bad decision-making. And I'm really happy to disclose, you know, At least some of my major mistakes in that regard. Forrest may have his own private list, you know, about my mistakes. Just between me and God, baby. Hopefully he'll keep it private. Anyway, as context, I want to say... something about context. In other words, good decision-making, particularly about things that matter, comes from, you know, a lot of underlying factors that we spend a lot of time on in this podcast. Self-worth.

being able to calm yourself, mindfulness, self-awareness, things like that. Because we've talked about them a fair amount, we're going to sort of stipulate them or hope for them for the record and then otherwise get into the nitty gritty. So that's kind of point one. Point two, we're going to be generalizing about how to make good choices or best odds strategies because we don't know. Life's uncertain. We're not clear about...

your particular situation. We're not giving specific advice. We're not responsible for the choices you make after listening to this podcast. Really? Okay. Now that we've covered ourselves legally here, anyways, keep going. And then last, I want to add that to make a distinction that I know Forrest is very familiar with as an elite poker player.

It's to realize that sometimes based on your state of knowledge, I worked for a mathematician back in my 20s, interesting job, who was a risk analyst. And based on your state of knowledge, if you have a choice between... red and blue, and you pick red because that's your best odds, even if it turns out that blue is better, it was still a good decision, right? Based on your state of knowledge at the time.

which is a way of focusing on improving your state of knowledge and your decision-making process, while also being at peace with the inherent uncertainties in this life.

That's great, Dad. I think that's really, really good context for what we're going to be talking about today. Before we get too far into it, I want to give people a quick reminder. If you've been listening for a little while and you haven't done it yet, please subscribe to the podcast. That really helps us out. And if you'd like to support us in other ways, you can find...

us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. It'll be a really good decision. You will not regret that decision, yes. So there's one particular bit of context that I was thinking about a lot when preparing for this episode. I would like to mention here before we get into more of the content. If you're making a decision at all, by definition, it means that you have some degree of freedom in your life, right?

You have some agency, and I talk about agency on the podcast all the time. Making choices means that we can affect our circumstances in meaningful ways. That feeling... is incredibly powerful agency is this huge psychological resource when we don't have it life gets really problematic if you think about the kinds of circumstances where people don't have agency those are some of the worst circumstances out there

At the same time, making choices can be a very stressful process for people. It's often accompanied by a lot of uncertainty, this feeling of paralysis, a lot of questions inside of ourselves about whether or not we're making a good choice. So it's one of those things where it can feel like a bit of a double bind along the way. It's easy to feel bad when we have agency and also to feel bad when we don't have agency.

And it's hard to feel good about our choices when the choice-making process itself feels like crap. So we've got two big focuses here. First, making better decisions, which is going to be 90% of what we talk about today. But then second, I think really importantly, like doing what we can to make the decision-making process a bit more enjoyable to essentially find the good and take it in in the ways that we can along the way, which, you know, is one of the big things we talk about a lot, Dad.

I'm really glad that you're starting for us with both the affective and the cognitive, the emotional and the conceptual, the intuitive and the rational elements here. A lot of research shows that good decision-making, including in high-pressure situations, it involves both the head and the gut, to put it metaphorically. I can say a little bit for myself that...

I tend to go through an analytic process on a major decision, and we're going to do some examples of this. Forrest is going to make me pull out the yellow pad, as he puts it. I tend to be analytical, and then after doing that, I just kind of tune into my gut. What do my innards really, really think here? So that combination is very important. And it's a good way to make sure you're gathering information through both deliberate, top-down.

rational channels. You also want to be open to information that's coming in intuitively, non-verbally, a vibe, an image, maybe something that you wake up with after a dream. The more information we gather, the more uncertainty we tend to reduce. This is an analytic and standard way to think about this. And therefore, the better our state of knowledge is at the time when we have to make that call.

There's always a question, of course, about what's called marginal analysis, incremental benefit at what incremental cost. Yeah. So based on the information that you've accumulated to date. conceptually and intuitively and emotionally to date, do you know enough to make the call? Or on the other hand, Is there additional benefit in gathering more information or would the cost of that additional increment of information not be worth it? And this way of thinking about it can help you.

Be on your own side to gather the information you need to make a good call and yet not be subject to what's called paralysis by analysis. What else? What else, Forrest, do you think? That's a great example of...

Just a characteristic of a good decision right there, Dad, that it balances the more intuitive aspects with the more rational aspects and the more analytical elements with the more emotional elements. I would say that good decisions almost always have some kind of process associated with them. How rigorous it is is going to vary individual to individual. How emotional it is versus how analytical it is, sure, it's going to vary.

If you're making a big choice without any process associated with it, you're probably going to get yourself into some problems here. There's a real place for trusting your gut, but that probably shouldn't be your whole process. And what I love about processes in general is that they help us simplify things. A lot of the time, I think that people get kind of out over their skis because they're constantly adding. They're bringing in more information and more information and more information.

But they don't actually spend that much time reducing the information down or cutting out the things that don't matter. Like they try to create a list of values and the list just grows, grows, grows. They never do the, this was allegedly an Einstein thing, but I think that it's actually improperly attributed to him, but whatever. The thing where you create a list of 20 things and then you have to lower it to three things that you really care about. And that process of refining...

is a really important part I think of the whole process. Another thing that stands out to me is that they're made with the end in mind. It's hard to have a sense of where we want to go or how we want to get there if we don't actually know where we want to go. And that's a big thing that you've highlighted to me in the past, Dad. That's been helpful for me. Well, that's great. You know, another way of making that point is to surface the question, what's your why?

What's the why? And in terms of the end in mind, one thing that I've seen first is that some of these people, and you were brilliant about this in our book, Resilient, they get caught up in the form. of a particular situation, the form of a relationship, the form of a career, the form of how they look, but they don't realize that that form is just a means to the end of an essence.

of what they really want to experience and be and have deep woven into the fabric of their own life. So getting some clarity about what's your deep why. What's the underlying why? And especially if you're kind of swirling back and forth, if you're kind of at that level, maybe you need to go to a deeper level. To also paraphrase apparently something Einstein might have said.

We need to solve our problems at a level that's deeper than the level at which we created them. So what's your deeper why? And one of the key aspects of that I've seen for many people is they get caught up in... activities and they mistake activities for results. Oof, yeah. We care about the result. Yeah. And people can kind of hide out in activities. Well, as long as I'm still churning, no one can criticize me for lack of effort.

okay but you're not actually changing anything significant in your life right you know maybe i'm yeah every day i you know work my ok cupid you know stuff to find someone i really care about but i'm not getting any results well maybe it's worth looking at something that might actually be more productive in producing results alongside that being able to do all of that dad requires a degree of effort from a person. And this is all the classic short-term pain, long-term gain stuff, all of that.

But to take it out of the world of Hallmark cards and into the world of a little more analysis or a little bit more science-driven, it's helpful to keep in mind that the brain hates expending effort. Hates it. hates it, it's allergic to it. From an evolutionary perspective, every time that you spend effort, you're burning a calorie. You got to get those calories somehow, and calories are scarce, so we don't want to spend those calories, right? And getting calories exposes you to predators.

Yeah, exposes you to predators. A lot of costs to getting calories. So you want to save them when you can. So we tend to be very biased in our decision-making process toward... essentially preserving homeostasis. This is something we're probably going to talk about a little bit later, but we all have a base. and we're comfortable around the space. This is our secure base. Changing that base, a lot of effort. So people tend to retreat back to the things that they're familiar with.

even if they're in a very different stage of life for them, even if they've become a very different person, they've explored a lot of things, they've got a lot of new capabilities, they don't have to be so worried about the things that they were worried about back then.

But the brain remembers, right? And it doesn't want to change in those ways. So it's just something to be conscious of that we have a predisposition to being a little conservative about shaking things up or spending effort in the ways that we need to.

Another thing maybe to flag here just before we keep on moving is environmental stuff. What are the kinds of environments that you're putting yourself in through the decisions that you're making? There are particularly these three values or characteristics that stand out to me.

It's competence, relatedness, and autonomy. And these are highlighted by self-determination theory. We've talked about it on the podcast in the past. If you're putting yourself in more environments and more relationships around more people, where you tend to feel more competent,

connected to them and autonomous in your behavior, those are great indicators. If you're leaning the other way, maybe not so much. I've never thought about this, but to me what you're getting at here, or some of the implications, a couple of the implications here. You can certainly name the big three from self-determination theory. There are a million others you could highlight, yeah. Yeah, their values. The general acquisition of competence, mastery, capability.

skill, inner skills and outer skills. Great. Second, relatedness, positive, nurturing, fulfilling, wholesome, so forth. Relationships, that's another life value in terms of what's your why. And autonomy. That's another major why. What are the decisions that will give me more room to breathe in my career, in my relationship, in my neighborhood, in my family system, more autonomy? Okay. So those are values.

What also strikes me though, by implication, is that these are factors that improve decision-making. That to the extent a person has confidence in... legitimately in kind of their broad competencies, to the extent that a person feels embedded in a network of generally good relationships, to the extent, as you said from the start, they have some sense of agency.

the decision-making around important things, the choices they make and the process of choosing will probably go a lot better. So we can think of these qualities not just as end values, but as means, you know, to good decision-making. And then... Last, just about that, if you're running for your life, or you're just fried, you're exhausted, you're in the H-A-L-T HALT acronym from Alcoholics Anonymous, you're hungry, angry, lonely, and or tired. Under those conditions,

The quality of your decision-making isn't necessarily, is probably not going to be as good as if you could bootstrap yourself. If you can buy the time to bootstrap yourself into a good night's sleep, a good meal. watch some cat videos on YouTube, and you're kind of elevating the basis upon which you can make a decision. This for me has been extremely important. And part of what relates to is...

Not procrastinating, but realizing, you know, I don't have to make an irrevocable fork in the road kind of decision right now. I really can defer it. And I'm going to bet on the me. 10 days from now. I bet that me 10 days from now, you know, Rick plus 10 or what have you, is going to make a better decision or is more likely to make a good choice than I'm going to make one today. I can say one more thing.

about effort, embrace the suck. It's the idea that certain things are just, like you said about effort, they're just a pain, you know? Like... go to grad school. I was in grad school for six long years at three different schools. And there was a fair amount of suck. And I just had, if I was whining about it or fighting it or resisting it, it just made it worse.

So embrace it. You're just causing yourself more pain. Yeah. So there's a sweet spot. It's not that you're putting up with anything that might be damaging to yourself. You're just finding a way to frame inevitable discomfort. Sometimes... A relationship runs out of gas, or sometimes you just realize it's not even just out of gas, but that your partner is real trouble. It's really easy and simple. Well, it's a process. You just...

And, you know, you realize it. And so to do it, to embrace the suck, it helps to have those contextual capabilities around self-compassion, distress tolerance. self-soothing and so forth. It helps to have a perspective of common humanity. You know, whole bunch of people made it through grad school. If they made it, I can make it. Whole bunch of people.

got through a divorce. If they made it, I made it. I can make it. A whole bunch of people have gotten through chemotherapy. It sucked. And if they can do it, I can do it. You know, these are ways to help yourself. Getting social support of other people who've gone through that particular suck or other similar bummer situations or are going through it right now, that's reality that can really help too. We'll be right back to the show in just a moment.

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these different external variables, the traits of different people, weighing different values, different priorities that we might have, even thinking in terms of some of the things we've said so far. But the single biggest variable for a person making a choice is themselves. It's their own tendencies, their own nature, their own sticking points internally. It's very difficult to make a good choice.

without having a feel for yourself as a choice maker. What are your own tendencies? What are the pitfalls that you tend to run into? What are the issues that you tend to have when making a choice? And it's only with that self-awareness that we can then make better decisions out in the world because we can compensate for the way that we are.

guide that process is by getting a better sense of our own decision-making style. And this actually comes from a piece of research that was done back in 1995 by Scott and Bruce. The title of it is Decision-Making Style, The Development and Assessment of a New Measure. And I thought this was really cool because I tried to look for some frameworks on how to make a good choice when I was prepping for this episode. I ran into this stuff.

And I thought it was very consistent with what we've been talking about so far. So I'm going to just kind of run through it a little quickly here and hopefully in a way that's engaging for people. And then Forrest, if we could, along the way or at the end.

Let's describe ourselves in terms of these five dimensions. And one way to think of it is that they're dimensions, some are peaks, some are valleys for a given person. So it's a question of kind of your profile and where's the center mass of...

you know, the distribution. And we can talk about ourselves too. Totally. And as we're going through this, as you're listening along, think for yourself, like what sounds right to you? There are even some sample questions and these things, like it's really a cool process. So, okay, here it is. There are these five styles, and they're broken into two different categories. First, it's your core decision process. And this is about what you were talking about.

kind of at the beginning dad rationality and intuitiveness these two different variables then there's something called the decision regulatory process and these are the other factors that regulate your rationality, or your intuition. And they're called avoidance, dependence, and spontaneity, or impulsivity. These dimensions, as you said, they are independent. but they're not mutually exclusive. So you can be both rational and avoidant, for example, or both intuitive and spontaneous.

And for the record, if I had to bet, I would bet that those are actually two of the more common combinations for people. That more rational people tend to struggle with avoidance a little bit more, whereas more intuitive people tend to struggle with spontaneity a little bit more. Of course, let me interrupt. Sorry. These are two different categories. So can you be both intuitive and rational, or can you be both avoidant and impulsive?

All of the dimensions were assessed independently as near as I could tell in the study. So somebody could be high in rationality and high in intuition. But the broad finding is that for most people, for the significant majority of people, they were either consistently rational or consistently intuitive. So it's interesting that they could both be high, but for most people, that was not the case. I'm trying to imagine someone who is neither rational nor intuitive.

Tough breaks, man. Tough to get off the couch. It's tough to go out the front door. Okay. Hey, there might be people listening who are like, I don't really feel like I'm that in touch with either.

And then maybe some of the things we're doing during the episode could actually help that person out a lot. But okay, so to break it down kind of quickly here. Rational decision making. You could probably already guess, but this is more of a systematic evaluation of different kinds of options. You're considering all of these different scenarios.

scenarios, you're writing things down on your legal pad or whatever it is that you're doing, and you're really evaluating everything in this kind of critical, structured, top-down sort of way. This is how I tend to make decisions. This is my lean. I suspect it's also your lean, Dad, but hey, I could be wrong. Who knows? You can tell me later. The vulnerability of this decision-making style is exactly what you said earlier. It's analysis paralysis.

It's getting really in the weeds and just going round and round and round with something because you can always find another variable to consider. A more intuitive decision-making style, this is a more holistic approach, and it uses forms of often subconscious pattern recognition, which is then perceived by the person as an emotion, a hunch.

or a gut feeling. And that's a very deliberate distinction that I'm pulling out here. A lot of people tend to view more intuitive processes as not being based on anything. who knows what's going on, right? Some kind of mystical process. That's really not what's happening. What's happening is that you're going through a often subconscious process of pattern recognition.

You're seeing different things, you're drawing things together, and it's really emerging in this kind of holistic, simultaneous way inside of you. Some of the vulnerabilities, well, it tends to be very emotionally biased, so it's easy to miss some logical details. And this... highlight something that can be a little complicated to talk about, which is that when we make a choice, we are basing it on something. When we have a view about somebody else, we are basing it on something.

When you go through a rational process, you're really uncovering what you're basing that choice on. When you're going through an intuitive process, you often really are not. So what this means is that you're operating based on instinct a little bit more. And instinct is enlarged.

part just a fancy way to say bias. And that's something to be really considered if you tend to be a more intuitive person. Does that make sense, Dad? It's really interesting here. I mean, I'm mapping a little of this to the Myers-Briggs distinction. of what people call and you have to understand what it means of course thinking compared to it's called feeling but it's really about judging let me tell you about me

Okay, we're going to do me as a case study here. A little, and I know you want to get to spontaneous, dependent, and avoidant. Yeah, but then we'll do those quickly. I'm just looking inside. So we make decisions, we make choices in light of values. And, you know, I have kind of a rubric I offer to see what you see, care about what you care about, plan what you plan, and take action, right? Those are the four. So seeing what you see.

to me, is rational but also intuitive because it's a way to bring in information. You're not going forward in the fog full speed with your eyes closed. You have a sense of where you are and what's happening around you. But then care about what you care about. What are your values? What's your why? And I think of the why process as fundamentally emotional, somatic, and moral.

as some combination, informed by reason, but ultimately our values are grounded in our biology and are something that's deeply felt. So I'd say for myself, and then we make a plan. And the plan also, you know, might have some intuitive elements to it, but a lot, it's pretty rational to make your plan, hopefully. So I guess...

Maybe when I think about decision-making, I'm just kind of unpacking it in this way. Maybe other people can relate to it. And maybe, for me at least, that is a lot how I do it. And then I kind of step back and... Tune into my innards. Do they like the plan? Are they signed up for the values? Do they buy what I think I'm seeing? And go, no go. Okay, green light, go.

How would you unpack that in the rubric here, the framework here? Yeah, I mean, I think that sounds like you're bringing together a certain amount of analytical process and a certain amount of intuitive process, for sure. Which is also probably based on... The fact that you're, you know, a 72-year-old guy who spent 52 of those years engaged with pretty serious mental health practices. So you've got a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.

My sense, and this is going to be one of the takeaways from all of this, you can make a really, really good decision either analytically or intuitively. And that's what the research suggests. It suggests that there really isn't a better way between those two to make a choice. But bad choices...

tend to come from either more avoidant or spontaneous approaches to decision-making. In other words, you're a little bit too loaded. Again, kind of alluding to something you mentioned earlier, Dad, toward avoiding a choice altogether or just making it really quickly to get done with it. Or you're too loaded toward either being purely intuitive or purely analytical. And that's where I think most poor decisions from a process standpoint tend to come from.

i think that's right you know it's kind of classic um it's a middle path thing you know for lack of better way of putting it yeah knowing when to hold them and when to fold them yeah this is a very complicated way so far of saying that there's a healthy middle path here

the path between two extremes, and we want to kind of incorporate these different aspects in useful ways. The two kinds of mistakes, you know, we were joking earlier before we started this podcast about how you do want me to roam free, but within the pasture. Okay. When recording these episodes. Yeah, exactly. I want you to be loose, but tight.

I submit. Free, but confined. No, resistance is futile. I've learned that with you. But anyway, what you're talking about is basically, on the one hand... Don't, to use the metaphor of the Buddha, you know, a long time ago, chain yourself to that post with a 10-foot cord that always constrains you inside a much larger pasture. On the other hand,

You know, be careful when you come really close to the edge of the cliff and don't just... Fence is there for a reason, baby. Impulsively, yeah, yeah. Plunge over the cliff at the edge of the pasture. So I like that. I think that's kind of good. All right, really quickly here. Spontaneous, dependent, avoidant. Spontaneous decisions, exactly what it sounds like. There's this underlying feeling of trying to get it done as quickly as possible. Sort of shooting from the hip.

often to avoid some anxiety associated with the choice-making process. Then avoidant, you're trying to escape the whole choice situation. Maybe you're doing this through analysis paralysis, maybe you're doing this by just kind of kicking the can down the road whatever it is that you're doing you're trying to not make a choice then there's this other variable that i thought was really interesting which is dependent and it's the only one that in the research

didn't seem to have much of an association with choice quality. It was just different styles. And it's basically how much advice do you get along the way. How many people are you asking? It's dependent on the advice of other people. Like, what do other people think? Are you referring to outside authority? Or are you more driven by like, oh no, I just do what I want to do?

Oh, that's really good. And again, you can think of the two errors. On the one hand, never revealing what you think or never realizing that maybe it would help you to connect with some expertise. Or on the other hand, do you tend to go from one person after another and, you know, never just not feel comfortable till you've talked to everybody on the planet before you finally decide what to have for dinner?

So we've talked about two kind of key mistakes here so far. Excessive rationality, excessive intuition on the one hand, one way to make a mistake, another way to make a mistake. really avoidant or really spontaneous. We want to kind of find that middle path. Are there other things that stand out to you, dad, whether it's in choices that you've made or just working with other people around this process that seem to be really common pitfalls here?

I'm really glad you asked a context here. There are these primary human motives to approach reward or avoid pain. I believe that there's actually a third. extremely important motivational system in which we attach to others that cannot, particularly in the human species, be deconstructed merely into some arithmetic of pluses and minuses, you know.

approaching pleasure and avoiding pain. So we have these primary motivations, but let's kind of keep it simple and just talk about approach avoid as we have so far. E. Torrey Higgins really interestingly kind of elaborated. that fairly traditional model into what he called promotion compared to prevention. And this has to do in part with amygdala activation.

doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. And some people have an amygdala, and there are two of them, amygdalae, alarm bell in the brain, that is, you know, tracking opportunity and threat. That would imply approaching. and avoiding pleasure or pain, opportunity or threat, but their amygdala is more reactive to threat, to the possibility of pain, than it is reactive to the possibility of pleasure.

And so they tend to be more avoidant. They tend to be more withdrawal-oriented. Then you have other people. They're kind of in between. And you have some people who have what the author of the study called a joyful amygdala, who actually have a brain that really lights up at opportunity.

and the possibility of promoting something and tracks red lights and angry expressions on the faces of others. You know, it tracks threat or the actuality of pain, but it's more motivated toward the former than the latter. Very, very interesting. And there's a lot of research that does show, sorry, those of you who are cautious turtles, that in fact, generally speaking, tilting... somewhat toward a promotion orientation, an approach orientation, is associated with better mental health outcomes.

Now, that's obviously situation-specific. If you're in a refugee camp or a crime-infested neighborhood or realizing that your partner is really scary, dangerous, you know, a prevention orientation is really appropriate here. But in general, approach orientation is really good. And given the negativity bias of the brain and the way people overlearn from experiences of pain or observations of pain occurring in the lives of others.

a lot of us could use a bit of a tilt toward more of a promotion orientation. The way we've talked about this in the past is developing more of a pursuit mindset. The notion that you're moving towards something generally feels a lot better to people than the feeling that you're running away from something, even if the situation could be reasonable. interpret it as one or the other. Just trying to flip your brain to be in more of that what am I going after is a great way to immediately.

feel a little bit more positive, feel a little bit better inside of yourself about whatever it is that's going on. What are you orienting toward? Another big thing in this that I wanted to talk with you about, Dad, because it's been a huge issue for me, as you know. is various forms of rigidity and excessive certainty. This was particularly the case for me when I was more of a teenager, kind of early 20s. But I think this is a huge place where people make mistakes when making choices.

Whatever it is that we have a view about, and we can have views about a bunch of different things. The three categories I like are about ourselves, about other people, and about the world broadly. And we can frame these views in terms of different kinds of value statements. I am this kind of person. Other people tend to fill in the blank. The world is... How do you think about it? These views that we have...

are generally not conscious in that we're not like holding them in our mind all the time as we're thinking. And they operate kind of silently in the background and they exert huge pressure. on everything that we do. Every decision that we make is informed in part by these choices. And the more rigidly attached that we are to those views, those values, whatever it is, the more confident we are in them.

the smaller and smaller our world becomes in this funny kind of way, because we are in some ways bound by those views. So if we can create a little bit more space around them and kind of open up. All of these things can become possible for a person that in the past they just would have thrown in the trash without even really considering because that option wasn't consistent with the person's worldview.

And so this is a huge place of intervention for people. This is a little bit more in the context for a person than in the content of how to make a good choice. But I just think it's such a big one that I wanted to be sure that we named it here. A couple aspects of that come to me. One is just assumptions about the way it is. And I have to tell you, I've had many conversations with people in which the decision, the choice, is whether to make an effort.

towards some goal. Call up someone to have lunch together, apply for a job, start a small business in some way, and they will just say, oh, with great certainty, oh. It won't happen. There'll be some kind of door slam. Call it the door slam. Nope, not possible. And wow, that is so limiting, just like you said, and poignant.

Because, of course, they learn to slam the door to survive, to avoid pain and avoid threat. And maybe in their nature, kind of temperamentally, they tend to be more, they're born with an aversive amygdala. You know, it just lights up more. It's their temperament. Still, that assumption of impossibility is just not good. And I see people who

Basically, they make a case for their own limitations. And I don't mean a realistic case, like, hey, I'm just not gonna be a professional athlete, right? That's realistic, but they just go overboard. And it's almost like there's this internal traitor inside themselves that they're allying with and identifying with who's undermining them.

So that for me would be one example here. Another weird example is definitely one that I have to watch out for. It's to be attached to a goal no matter what. And this is particularly important if you're the kind of person who... embraces the suck that you can keep crawling through a field of broken glass you know towards some goal but after a while you realize

is it really worth all the blood? You know, am I really going to obtain it? Am I ever going to get them to love me? You know, am I ever going to get blood from that stone? Am I ever going to get promoted here in this, you know, company? And is my business ever really going to succeed? And can be... you know, persistent to a fault and based on attachment to a particular goal outcome. So that's another kind of rigidity, I think, that we have to be careful about.

This gets to a lot of material related to limiting beliefs of different kinds. We've done an episode on limiting beliefs. You can check it out if you're interested in this a bit more. I want to get to our examples here, Dad, because I think that they're going to be just so rich.

I do want to say one or two more things really briskly here in terms of common pitfalls. People are probably already familiar with these if you're listening to this kind of a podcast episode, but hey, just to name them real quick. First, the sunk cost fallacy, huge issue for people. I invested two years in this relationship. I spent the money on the this, and it turns out, not for me. Not working out.

There's a huge pull, a huge gravitational pull of the investments that we've already made in something. And a big skill to develop, whether it's making good choices in real life or making good choices, as you said in the introduction, Dad, at the poker table, which is something I've done in the past.

you need to be willing to not keep on throwing good money after bad. So that's something I do want to flag here. Another thing I want to flag here really quickly is something called defensive pessimism. And this is a coping strategy for people. where they tend to anticipate negative outcomes as a way to manage their anxiety and protect themselves from disappointment.

And this is that kind of inner trader that you were talking about earlier, Nat, this part of themselves that is just like, oh, that's not even a possibility. It's not even on the table. So they don't have to risk the possibility of getting excited about the thing or going after the thing and then having it not work out for them. So those are two that I just wanted to mention here before we get into the examples that I have with you.

Yeah. Can I ask you another question? What do you think about the kind of lingo out there about follow your passion? And some people say it's bad advice. There's stuff from Cal Newport about there. Yeah. So I just had an episode with Cal Newport. Yeah. Calvin's a guest on the podcast. He's an incredibly smart guy. And one of his things, one of the books that kind of put him on the map, I think it was titled something along the lines of So Good They Can't Ignore You.

And one of the big standout lines from the book that got a lot of press was, follow your passion as bad advice. The problem here for a lot of people is that standard advice, like find the one. i'm looking for the one that kind of thing implies hey there's one you got to find them and if you don't find them you're kind of doomed same thing with follow your passion you've got one passion you got to find it if you don't find it you're screwed whatever it is

The reality is that for most people, there are actually quite a few people out there that they could build like a perfectly lovely life with if they gave it the opportunity. There are quite a few careers out there that they could really enjoy. Like you want to end up.

passionate about what you do. You want to end up happy in the relationship that you land in. But the notion that you're just going to start that way is a total fool's errand and it really sets people up for disappointment. So it's another thing to maybe think about a little bit while you're making these choices. While agreeing definitely with that and agreeing with the value of psychological flexibility. Yeah.

which is a major principle in acceptance and commitment training therapy and Steve Hayes and Diana Hill and others, you know, psychological flexibility. On the other side of it, We're certainly not denying, and we're also encouraging, listen to your heart. Listen to your heart. Oh, for sure. Yeah, totally. The particular form that a...

significant passion might take. Don't get maybe too attached to the form. I think that's some of the benefit there of what Cal's saying. On the other hand, if deep down inside, you love working with numbers, you're analytical, you care about that. That's a kind of a passion for you. And that's important to you. If you get sucked into a sales job, let's say. or being a therapist, God forbid. Oh, sure. It's not right for you. It doesn't feel right. Or maybe deep down inside.

there's just a calling in you to engage spiritual life or to be a minister or to be an artist or to really move your body. These are important things, obviously, to listen to as well. Yeah. I think that part of the advice here... In terms of... what's your why. Totally. Part of the advice here is essentially to think more. This is a different way of talking about means and ends to me. Yeah.

to kind of like simplify it and to think maybe more in terms of like categories, acceptable categories, as opposed to acceptable specifics. Because once we're in the world of specifics, We're really narrowing the field of what could be possible for us again. And we want to keep our options open. So, okay. So here's what I want to do here, Dad. Love it. You are a legend in my friend group, as you know.

For many reasons. For starters, you're basically Mr. Rogers. They hold you up in that fashion. And secondarily, because I can think back so specifically to multiple times in my life, one time in particular, but multiple times in my life. where I was trying to think about something, and you essentially busted out this yellow legal pad. You have all of these yellow legal pads around the house. They're all half-filled with text. It's great. And you went through... this very methodical approach.

toward, okay, let's put our question at the top of the pad and let's work our way to the bottom. And you actually did this very saliently with Elizabeth as well, when she was kind of trying to figure out what you want to do with her life. And she really refers back to this. This was particularly about paying for graduate school to go be a therapist.

And you just kind of went through it methodically. You crunched the numbers. You put the things on the table. And she really flags it as like a totally formative moment for her. Had a huge impact on the choices that she ended up making. And so the Rick Hansen yellow legal pad has a certain kind of iconic character inside of our stories and stuff. So here's what I want to do. I want to give you two examples that I suspect.

are very common examples of a kind of thing. Or you could think of maybe a related example for you instead of your life if this doesn't apply perfectly, but it applies kind of close enough. And I would love it if we just kind of walked through.

How, mostly you, but you know, I'll try a bit as well, how we'd think about this in a kind of practical way. Like where would you start? What would you be thinking about? What would you be considering? The questions you would be asking yourself. Pressure's on. Yeah. So...

I'm going to end, you know, maybe in this could be like a little bit of a soft role play where I kind of try to think more in terms of being the person or if you want a response about something, we can do that. But really, I just want to let you be free here. This is the roaming part, dad, just so you know, this is the part.

you get to roam. Yeah, where the fences are lowered. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's a role reversal that I know you're relishing. That's right. It's so good. This is a fun time. So you're just going to be liberated, buddy. It's good. Okay. Two examples. Let's start with the first one. I'm 25 years old and I'm working in a job that's, you know, it's okay. I've got a job. I like having a job, but I know it's not forever. I'm trying to figure out what a good path for me would be.

But this feels like a really big question for me. And I keep on getting kind of overwhelmed by how big this question is. Like, I don't even really know where to start. i don't really know what the options are for me like what should i do here how should i start thinking about this i really relate to this question i feel for this person and partly i'm talking to young rick

You know, myself, way back when. So I would say, first off, in the sense of it being overwhelmed by the bigness, it's really understandable. It seems really big. You know, low stakes, doesn't matter. It's just the rest of your adulthood. You know.

It's probably going to involve a million dollars or more of financial consequences of one kind or another. No big. It'll affect who you might end up with. Who you end up with. Yeah, absolutely. It's like low stakes. No, it's understandable. Where you live.

Yeah, it's understandable. And you can take heart in the fact that this kind of decision about career opportunity... typically involves a lot of steps in which you can change course, you can reverse your step, you can take your time, you're going to have multiple at-bats. These days, certainly in America, I think there's some evidence that the typical person changes their occupation two and a half times over the course of adulthood. So there's plenty of room to breathe here. Also...

You can have some confidence in me here because what I'm going to tell you is good. It's so rare for you to pull for authority here, Dad. This is an uncommon move for you. You're not normally like, you know. Listen, young one, I will show you the way. Okay, I'm excited for where we're going here. Now, judge for yourself. Judge for yourself. As the Buddha himself said a long time ago, see for yourself what rings true and works. But okay. All right, here we go.

Also, as context, realize that many people don't have the luxury of this inquiry. They're just locked in. You know, they've got to work two jobs. They've got to support a family. Maybe they're undocumented. They've really just got to make it work. Maybe they're dealing with tough conditions and they've got to keep their health insurance. They're just locked in. So they don't have much choice here. So we want to acknowledge that right off the top. Okay. First of all...

What's your why? And I have seen that with regard to occupation, career, that it really helps to think in terms of three circles and the intersection of the three circles. And this also helps to break down what might seem like a huge problem into smaller pieces. First circle is, what do you love doing? Not just like doing, love doing. What kind of conversations with people?

What kind of activity? What kind of settings? What kind of results? Do you just love? And it doesn't have to be restricted to... business settings or occupational settings. It could be just in life in general. What do you love? Okay, second, what are you talented at? Not skilled, necessarily.

talented. You're just naturally good at it. And again, think about outside the frame of a typical business setting, just in general. What are you really kind of good at? Sometimes you might want to ask other people who know you well. What are you naturally really talented at? For myself, I was good at math, but not great at it. And I didn't want to make my career with people that I knew, and I had known some of them in high school.

who were just great at it. On the other hand, you know, verbal ability and empathy combined with, you know, as I slowly realized over time, a warm heart, huh, maybe I ought to be a therapist. Third, what do you care about? What are your broader values? For some people, this is just not a relevant question in their career choices. For many people, it really is.

Do you care about children? Do you care about the planet? Are you really clear you don't want to work for a fossil fuel company? Social good as an aspect of what you do. This is kind of a core values question. Yeah, maybe you're the kind of person who has always been drawn to animals, non-human animals. Well, think of those three. Loves, talents.

values. If you can build your career at the intersection of those three circles, the rest is details. I want to ask you about a specific aspect of this question, Dad, which is the more... kind of analytical numbers-driven piece of the question. A lot of people, when they're considering a choice that's going to impact them financially,

For starters, again, we start with appreciating that we have the space in our lives to be able to take a financial risk of some kind if you are so privileged. So that's a great place to start just by understanding and appreciating that. But then secondarily, just interacting with money at all is often extremely stressful for people. It often really wigs them out. And the reality is that we just have really bad education.

broadly speaking, about finances, about the way the economy works, about all of that stuff. So people are often really under-resourced to interact with these kinds of questions. Some of the stuff that my friends have gotten the most mileage out of in talking with you about it has been the more kind of analytical

almost numbers-driven side of things where you just kind of will break things down in a systematic way. I've done some work with coaching clients where I've done very similar things and it's been really helpful for them. So I'm wondering just how you kind of think about or approach that process. We can't get into specific numbers here, obviously, but just like big things to think about. Oh, that's great. That goes to, if I could, a broad principle about, again, this is someone who's 25.

Take the long view. These days, people are living longer and longer, certain kinds of careers, especially ones that are not hard on the body, really extend late into the 70s. And so what is true is that the cost... of laying the foundation so now let's suppose you're starting to identify some identify some options there at the center of those three circles they'll probably have some costs you'll have to

Maybe go to school. You might have to kind of serve an apprenticeship. You might have to leave your current situation and try on different companies and so on. There'll be some costs. All right. Those costs will be amortized. They'll be spread out over the entire lifespan of your career, which could well be for someone who's 25, 40 or 50 years. Those costs are spread out. But the gains.

for you personally, with ripple effects for others that you care about, will accumulate exponentially also over the course of your entire career. And very often what happens, and I did this, this is one of the foolish bases for my bad decision makings in my 20s about career, is that people will make short-term decisions based on immediate costs. They'll try to cut corners.

They won't want to take on that debt. You know, they'll be afraid of the debt emotionally and they'll give up the long-term benefits. They won't, you know, just kind of embrace the suck. Gosh. Maybe you'll need to, as I did for a while, sleep on the floor and eat noodle ramen and, you know, day after day. And that's just the way of it to get through that time in your life. So that distinction.

And the idea that you're wanting to set your future self up in a really good way. So it can help to locate things in time. I still remember this who was a high school student at the time. This client of mine was grappling with decisions and trying to figure out what to do. I think they may have just graduated high school. Anyway, they're in my office. And I'm going, huh, let's do this. So I take out a yellow pad, right? The classic yellow pad. See, there it is. To scale.

I started laying out the years. I said, okay, how old are you? 18. Okay, good. You're an adult. I didn't have to take their parents into account. Okay, fine. You're an adult. You're 18. Let's just lay it out. Okay, now you're 20, you know, 10 years out, 10, you know, like. 10 columns or rows in my pad, I turned it sideways. Now you're 28. At this point, they're starting to kind of turn pale. 38, 48, 58, 68, 78. Yeah.

88, 98. Let's say you get all the way, and after that, it's a big mystery. Okay, fine. Wow, how interesting. Do you want to have children? Oh, I do. Huh, interesting. So you want to have children by roughly what age? Well, I don't know, 35, 36 at the latest. Okay, interesting. How long do you want to be married before you have a child? Oh, wow. At least a few years.

Oh, so, well, if I want to have a child certainly by 35, I better be married by 30. Oh, oh, interesting. When does, if you want to be married by 30, that means you're kind of. you know, engaged by 29 typically. And so you need to meet this person. I'm starting to work this person back. You're putting fear into the heart of every single person over the age of 30 right now. I just want you to be aware of what you're doing here. You know, you're really.

Okay, well, again, I told you, it'll work. Yeah, exactly. You know, you got to see the truth of things. No, and I think that part of that is... I meant that in a tongue-in-cheek way. But it's true that there is a relentless practicality to a lot of what you're describing here. And my biggest piece of advice about this more analytical side of the process or this more numbers-driven side of the process is to be willing to do it at all.

Yeah. That's my biggest piece of advice. Yeah. So, me, speaking personally, I was terrified of checking my bank account for the first like 24-ish years of my life, essentially. I never checked my bank account. I was terrified of it. Hated doing it. I had actually gotten myself into a little bit of credit card debt by the time that I was like...

early mid-20s or whatever it was. It was a whole thing. It was very complicated emotionally to face this reality, but in order to start digging myself out of the reality, I had to face it. We cannot address these issues. We cannot make a choices without being grounded in the reality of the situation. And that's really what you're highlighting here. Yeah, and it's framed really not as drudgery, but as a noble, loving gift. to your future self yeah

what kind of life do you want to set yourself up for? Not driven by craving and very unrealistic ambitions, but what kind of life do you want to set yourself up for? And do you treat yourself like you matter? Does your life matter? This is your roll of the dice. This is your incarnation on the game board. It matters. And I think for a lot of people, it's like, ah. But it's beautiful to get in touch with you do matter. And so it makes sense to realize, what do I really want to have in this life?

And maybe intuitively, as I had to face it myself, which partly drove some of my poor decisions, that I was just, I was afraid to embrace my own life. I was afraid to... put both feet on the game board rather than always having one leg out the door and i needed to face the ways i kept kind of swerving into, you know, I just want to be comfortable today. Let's get high. Let's watch TV. You know, let's go to bed. I'll be better tomorrow. And the days, you know, became years.

So it's because you matter, you count that you're thinking this way and helping yourself. And bottom line, if you really want to have certain things happen by the time you're, sorry, 40 or 50. or be able to have options when you're 60 or 70, you know, well, work backwards from that result, you know, to see what you want today.

As you know, a friend of mine, when I was moaning and groaning about how I had to put up with all this crud to become licensed as a psychologist before I became an old man at 40, and my friend Tom said to me, Rick, do you plan on being 40? What? Yeah. And he said, well, how do you want it to be? You want to have that license or not? So, okay. So I want to say that about money. I just want to make a point that I think it's great what you're saying analytically.

It's just arithmetic. It's a lemonade stand arithmetic. What's your ballpark actual hourly rate in whatever the thing is? And what will... You financially, you know, let's suppose you shift your career, but it costs you, I'll make up a number here, $50,000 to get into that new career. Let's say you're 25 by the time you're 30. Let's say it costs that.

well two thousand in training and yeah deferred wages whatever that's right yeah fifty thousand dollars non-trivial well i'll just very quickly do this on the back of the envelope there are two thousand labor hours in a year So maybe we're talking about a full-time salary, or maybe we're talking about someone who is billing 20 hours a week, let's say as a professional. Well,

hypothetically play it out, if your actual hourly rate, and also it's going to increase over time, not just due to inflation, but you're going to get promoted if you're in a different career path. Become more skilled. You're going to become more skilled. You could charge more in the... private market if you're out in the market as a therapist or a coach okay fine so let's suppose that the average increase the benefit that's netted against that incremental cost of fifty thousand dollars is

to use a simple number, $10 an hour. And let's say that's applied to 1,000 hours a year. That's half time. 20 hours a week times 50 weeks, 1,000 hours, fine. So now... that increment starting in age 30 is worth ten thousand dollars to you well by the time you're 35 you've paid off the cost of the fifty thousand dollars five years ten thousand a year ten bucks an hour more

You've paid it off. And I can tell you, Forrest, I've seen so many people, when I do this little magic for them, you know, this hot magic, they're like, whoa! And then the rest is gravy. 35 to 70, that's 35 years and an extra $10,000 a year. That's a lot of money, as well as all the other rewards.

Of course, you can get really in the weeds with all of the math, the investment potential of the money that you're not earning versus the this versus that. We can get very in the specifics here, but the overall point. of the compounding factor of landing where you in the best possible situation for you is totally well taken. Yeah, that's exactly right.

And part of what you're doing here, Dad, that I really want to emphasize logically in what's going on in this process is that you're breaking a big thing down into smaller things. You're saying rather than being like, oh, career values, oh my God, all of this stuff that I'm thinking about, what should I do? You're breaking it down into answerable questions. What am I good at? What do I value?

What are the kinds of situations I tend to excel in? Things like that. From a more financial perspective, you're not thinking in terms of, oh my God, everything I ever make forever. It's okay. What kind of an hourly do I need in order to make X dollars a month to cover Y expenses? you're really simplifying it in this kind of rigorous process. And again, most people in my experience are very uncomfortable with that kind of a process because it shines a flashlight into some really

murky corners. Some answers were maybe they don't want that answer. But you have to know what reality is before you are able to make a good choice based on that reality. You've got to start there. So if I could with this person, I would offer two final kind of principles here. One is the principle, think of the trunk of a tree. compared to the major limbs and then the specific branches, twigs, and leaves. Very often, you can start doing things today that will...

be useful and move you forward no matter which major limb of the tree you eventually choose. In other words, you can go down a particular path. that will serve you well before you have to make a fundamental choice, you know, take the left fork or the right fork. That's a useful way to think about it. So maybe this person might say, okay, I've...

identified based at the intersection of the three circles, these several careers. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the next six months and I'm going to spend, you know, on the order of an hour a week. Not horrible, but I'm going to do the work because I'm investing in myself because I care about myself to actually learn about those careers. I don't have to choose one yet, but I know what the next steps involve.

Right? So it's kind of heuristic. You're helping yourself in a bootstrapping way. Take the steps that are worth taking, whatever choice you make. And another piece of that is to realize, again, for example, huh. I'm not sure exactly what career I really want to go into, but you know, getting an MBA will help me no matter which way I go. So I'm going to think about getting an MBA because it's an intermediate step.

altogether, I'm just not well set up to make this decision. I'm going to invest a year in my own psychology. You know, this one's hard for me to decide on. And I have a lot of insecurities. I'm really scared about job interviews. Also, maybe I just don't have really good writing skills. You know, my school just wasn't very good and I avoided school and partied. But now I really need to kind of improve my skills in some way. Or programming. I'm going to learn some basic computer skills.

because they're going to serve me well no matter what I do. So it's okay. It lowers the pressure to take the steps that are right in front of you that will set you up to succeed and win no matter what choice you make. That's really useful. Last thing I want to say is to bet on yourself. Again, one of the reasons I made bad choices in my 20s is I lost my nerve in some ways, and I lost faith with myself.

I just, you know, I did not have good, strong, internalized, supportive allies inside. And I just, I just, no. Believe in yourself. Get on your own side. You will succeed. And I'll just tell you straight, with a lot of business experience, there are a lot of people out in the world of work who...

do not have very good character. They're not very reliable. They don't have a lot of old school classic virtues like, hello, come to work on time, you know, or, oh, keep your agreements or acknowledge when you make a mistake. Whoa. Number one. Number two, they're not persistent. They don't make efforts. They kind of phone it in. And third, they don't have much of a learning curve. So if you, you bring...

good character to it. Make efforts and learn along the way. You will be in the top 5% to 10% of anybody in your chosen occupation or profession. And you will succeed. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors. Now, back to the show. That was great, Dad.

For our second example here, which I do want to do, we've been running a little bit long with this one, but I think that it's a great topic. It's a great episode. I really like everything we've talked about so far. And if anything... This second situation is even more in your wheelhouse than the first one is because it pulls in part from your longtime experience as a couples and family therapist working with a lot of people. I'm in a relationship with somebody.

Or I'm thinking of entering one with somebody. And it's been going okay. There are some pluses and some minuses. I'm not really sure what to do. I can't really decide whether I want to invest more deeply in it. or if it's kind of time to move along to the next one. And just in general, I'm having a hard time finding that kind of inner authority or an inner sense of connecting with my own feelings.

about this kind of a romantic situation. Really, really, really, really good. So part one, we'll do this in maybe three parts. I might think of a fourth part by the time we get there. Okay. We're vibing. Three parts. Part one, are you doing everything you can to improve the relationship? Are you doing things like taking care of your own side of the street?

Being an open-hearted communicator yourself, being attentive to your partner's needs in reasonable ways. And also, are you talking about how you kind of wish the relationship had more X, Y, or Z or less ABC? Are you trying to have, and are you having a repair process, let's say, with the other person? Are you doing everything you reasonably can so that you're acquiring knowledge based on truly testing?

How good, how big, how deep, how juicy, how great can this relationship become? So that's part one. Really important to do that part. It's worth doing it because often... the relationship will get better when you do it. And if it doesn't, that's telling you some really, really important things. So let's suppose that you've done that and the relationship is pretty good.

Or if you think of the mosaic, maybe there are 10 by 10 matrix, 100 tiles in the mosaic. Let's say some are green, some are gray, and some are red. A lot of gray, a couple of green. and several flashing red lights, let's suppose. Or maybe there's really no red light. It's not bad. Just a lot of gray. Just a lot of gray, and the green is fairly pale. This gets at, in part, how old are you and what stage of life are you in? It's one thing, as is not terribly uncommon, to be in a relationship.

Let's call it a marriage. And there you are. You've got teenage kids. There's a fair amount of water under the bridge. Bodies are getting older. Your partner just seems increasingly clear. They're just sort of... going to be what they are. They don't have much of a growth curve. They're not interested in it even. And what do you do? It's not horrible. You don't hate sleeping next to them. Sex is tolerable. They're not a jerk.

And wow, the cost of blowing up your family, divorce, money, the kids, custody. And you just think kind of privately to yourself, you know, I'm going to hang in here for a while.

And again, also, there's the whole question of privilege. You know, like my dad's parents, you know, when you're... uh living together on a ranch in the middle of nowhere during the great depression you know you really got exactly a lot of a lot of eligible targets out there yeah plus you got to really lean on each other and there become a lot of other values in the mix besides you know

kind of narrowly romantic ones. And then sometimes people make a fateful choice and they wait till the last kid goes off to college and then they have a really difficult conversation with their partner and hopefully it ends well. and they move on. Or they just say, you know, I'm going to really enjoy my partner. It's pleasant. It's kind of a beige relationship. It's like a tepid bath. But you know...

I don't want to date again. I don't want to get out there. It's crazy. I love them. What if you're 25 or nine or 32 and the years are starting to tick by? then it's kind of often really tough for us, in my personal experience. It's tough. How do you make that decision? It's really helpful, of course, and important. presuming that you've taken care of your side of the street, you've done everything you can to look really hard at your own standards and expectations.

And the notion of the soulmate who's the be-all and end-all is a very, very, very modern invention. It's a construction. It also is relevant to appreciate that most people were dead by the time they turned 50 until quite recently. And so the lifespan of a relationship is really different. So how do we think about it? I've known people who... are just secretly fixated on a certain kind of physical dimension to their partner that is increasingly rare.

And they're unlikely to find it. And it's kind of a form of obsessive, addictive attachment to a particular thing. It could be something really, really different on the one hand. On the other hand, and here's where I'm not offering advice.

I'm offering a kind of bias, which is if deep in your heart, you're 27, 28, 32, you've invested a few years with this person, and deep in your heart, When you actually contemplate being married to them and raising children together, let's say, it just feels like all the air is going out of your balloon.

just feels like the bottom's falling out of your heart. Maybe because deep down, you just feel they'll never really know you fully. Or deep down, they're just never really going to care about a number of things that are really important to you. like personal growth or the life of the mind or a certain aliveness.

in the home environment you know they basically just want to come home from work grab a beer and watch television and you know that's their vision that's what they grew up with and that's what they want and deep down ah you know I'm biased toward listening to that. And I'm biased toward betting on yourself, having faith in yourself, and knowing that you'll do the work, you'll do the work to find that person who's one in a thousand.

or at least one in 100, who's a good match for you as a one in 100 in particular ways. You know, I'm kind of biased in that direction myself. And then what do you do if you have that kind of bias? A lot of soul searching. What kind of relationship do I have? How likely is it really for me to find something that would be substantially better without being biased toward feelings of inadequacy?

and assumptions that you'll never find that kind of person? And are you willing to take the risk of leaving the familiar but fairly tepid bathtub for potentially... a more bracing and alive, you know, deeper end of the pool somewhere else? And are you willing to take that risk knowing that you may not find that? And then, you know, make your choices ethically as well.

Sometimes people get so, I'll finish here, kind of anxious around the decision-making that they deliberately bolt or they deliberately do something like have a quick affair that... blows up their relationship because then the affair will have made the decision for them. And I really encourage you to, you know, if you're going to do this, go down this road to do it with your head high and with care and concern for your longtime partner so far.

And looking back and thinking about how is this going to look down the road? And how do you want to look back at yourself? What kind of a person do you want to be now that you will be glad you had been 10 years in the future? Great advice, I think, in general, both from a process standpoint and in terms of some of the specific content of what tends to matter inside of a relationship. Something that I've been really thinking about a lot recently.

Are these two different, not both questions exactly, but two things that I think are just really important. First big question, is there an openness to change inside of the relationship, both in you and in the person that you're with? Are they open to being different tomorrow than they are today? And if they are fundamentally not open to that, that's going to create a lot of problems for you throughout your relationship, particularly if you are now under the age of...

I think there's a point at which people kind of calcify, they get used to each other, you establish the patterns, you know, it kind of is what it is at a certain point. And I think that we can accept that a little bit too. There's a place for acceptance. But like, hey, some openness to change here is a huge deal. As you like to say, dad, do they have a learning curve? Do they have a growth curve? One of the things that really pulled me toward Elizabeth, now my fiance.

is that I just saw a total upward trajectory around all of these different kinds of issues and all of these different kinds of things. She has a real learning curve. Second thing that I think would totally transform most people's approach to relationships, write down... Three to five things that you cannot compromise on. Three to five things you cannot compromise on these three to five things.

Yeah. This is maybe a different color. Yeah. Hey, who knows? I got one of those. I forget how you pronounce it. Those like like turn notebooks or whatever. I use them all the time. Okay. I whip out the notebook. Write down the three to five things that you cannot compromise on and be honest with yourself about it. If it's cringy, if it feels shallow and stupid, if it feels like, oh, am I allowed to ask for that?

Write down the things that you know inside of you, you cannot compromise on. Look at that list, pick a really good three to five, and then be willing to compromise on everything else. essentially everything else. But you have to know the things that you are not willing to compromise on in order to open yourself up.

to being flexible about essentially every other aspect of what's going on here. Of course, within reason, this is all normal range, but hugely powerful for people to be able to do that. That's fantastic. And one little... further detail here as people whether it's about career or relationship invest in yourself and so in regard to relationships very often what people are doing is they're making them

you know, an assessment, a calculation about a prediction and a fact about how much of a catch they are on the relationship market. Should I leave this safe harbor and venture out, you know, past it? Will anybody want me? Well, there are two parts to that. One is become someone they would want, to some extent, in appropriate ways, but look inside. What do people want?

Understandable. You would want that too. Get real. Not to placate people, not to walk on eggshells, not to put up with mistreatment, not to succumb to patriarchy, but genuinely. I was talking with someone who, I was telling something I learned back in the day as an incredibly shy and dorky guy starting to talk to girls, you know, in high school and then college. I realized.

For me as a man, so many women are not used to men actually listening to them. That immediately raises your profile. Now, obviously, many women are pushed into this subordinate position, so this advice wouldn't necessarily apply. Second...

Look for good in other people. And then last, if they don't think that you're a catch within an hour or so of contact with you, they probably never will. So if they reveal to you that they don't really see you as that... top 10, top 100 catch, they are disqualified. They've done you a service. It's not a rejection. It's a reframe. Think of it as an opportunity. They've done you a service because now you're removing them from the prospect pool. And on that, I rest my case.

I love this, Dad. This was totally great. I loved recording this episode with you. We talked about so much and we could have just kept going because it's a huge, huge topic. But thanks for, you know, whipping out the yellow pad with us. Anytime, anytime. Look forward to it. Really loved today's episode where I talked with Rick about how we can make better decisions. And this relates to a process that he's gone through.

with me, with some friends of mine where he's really guided them through the process of making a good choice on one of his semi-legendary yellow legal pads. So we started by differentiating between content and context here. We mostly focus during this episode on the content of making a good decision. In other words, what kind of process can lead us to better outcomes?

But this process is layered on your individual context, which includes a lot of internal factors or skills like your self-worth, self-esteem, self-efficacy, all of this different stuff. Can you tolerate failure? Anything that might matter to you. And we talk about those things on the podcast all of the time. We talked about them a little bit during today's episode, but we mostly focused on content.

We started by highlighting some features of good decisions. What do they tend to have in common? And a major theme throughout the episode was how good decisions tend to incorporate a blend of intuitive factors, more emotional factors.

and analytical factors or more logical factors. They tend to have some kind of a methodical process associated with them. If you're just purely shooting from the hip or doing things based off of your gut feeling, well there's there's a place for a little bit of that but you don't really want it to be all of the equation

on the other side of the coin you don't want to get trapped in paralysis by analysis where you're just going around and around and around you're collecting more and more information but you never seem to be getting any closer to making an actual choice Good decisions are also made with the end in mind. We can't draw ourselves a map to get to a place if we don't know what that place is. And a big piece of that is knowing your why.

Why do you want whatever it is that you want? What are some of your core values? What are some of the things that are influencing your decision here? Can you really piece it out? Then we want to embrace effort. And there's all sorts of advice related to this. The notion of short-term pains for long-term gains, the idea that our growth compounds over time. So spending a little bit of effort now tends to

to lead to a lot of result in the future. Whatever it is, however you want to frame it, the brain doesn't like to spend effort. So it needs to be really convinced to do that. This means that we have a bias toward not making choices. that mean that we need to be more effortful in our lives. And this ends up landing us.

often in repetitive situations. Freud called this the repetition compulsion in psychoanalysis. You can call it wanting to go back to your homeostatic base, whatever language it is that appeals to you personally. We have a real tendency to repeat situations, to try to get blood from the same stones. We need to actively correct for this tendency of the mind. And part of that is, as Rick put it, embracing the suck from time to time. Some things just take effort.

Then also good decisions are made with an awareness of our individual tendencies. Everybody's a little bit different here. We all have our own strengths, our own vulnerabilities, the little pitfalls that we tend to fall into as people, as I mentioned during the episode.

I am definitely an analysis person, and that can make me a little avoidant from time to time about making different kinds of choices. I just kind of keep on accruing information or keep on trying to grow these different abilities of mine. promise myself that one day I'll be able to do the thing. And then sometimes the thing just doesn't happen.

And this relates to a person's individual decision-making style, which comes from a piece of research in the mid-90s that I ran into while prepping for today's conversation. This is from Scott and Bruce. It's Decision-Making Style, the Development and Assessment of a New Measure. And they tracked five styles broken into two categories. At the top, rationality and intuitiveness. And then kind of beneath those, but still very important, avoidance, dependence, and spontaneity.

And one of the key findings from the research is that while people can be both rational and intuitive, the overwhelming majority of people are either consistently rational or consistently intuitive. As you would probably guess, a rational decision-making style is one where there is more of a systematic evaluation of different options.

you're considering these different situations, and you're putting probabilities or possibilities attached to them, you're really thinking it through in that kind of a methodical way. A more intuitive approach means that we're being a little bit more holistic about the whole thing, and we're using often subconscious forms of pattern recognition to inform our decisions.

These decisions can often feel more spontaneous, more emotional. Like this, these feelings just kind of emerge up from us and we just suddenly kind of know what we should do. Now, really interesting finding is that both rational and intuitive decision-making can be great for a person. They can both totally work out for somebody. But where people tend to get into trouble is by being either way too rational or...

way too intuitive. In other words, they're trying to be a little too logical reasonable, or they're trying to be a little bit too emotional most of the time, and they're not considering the other factors as much as they maybe should. Going into the other three styles, spontaneous, dependent, and avoidant. Avoidant is an attempt to escape the choice situation and to avoid or delay making a choice. Spontaneous is you're just trying to make it as quickly as possible. It's the other side of that.

coin. And then dependent is when there is a lot of advice seeking, where you're really reaching out to other people to help you out. And the general finding for most people is that you want to really follow the middle path here. A person can make a mistake by being too spontaneous or too avoidant.

They can make a mistake by being too dependent or not asking anybody, by being too intuitive or too rational. So we're really trying to find the way between these different paths. And so once you have a real sense... of what your individual tendency is you can start to actively correct for it you can start to ask yourself questions like okay i've gone through this really rational process how do i feel about any of this

Or you can say, okay, I've got this instinctive emotional urge. Can I start to consider more of the other variables here? And hey, maybe doing that will actually really help me identify my emotions even better. Or maybe they'll change how I feel. We talked about a number of other common pitfalls that people have here. One that I want to highlight at the end is excessive certainty. This is one that I really struggled with for a long time.

Rigid view limits our ability to make good decisions because we're starting with all of these assumptions that may or may not actually be true. So we need to be willing to, to use a phrase, to update our priors, including about other people. We need to be willing to integrate new information, to view ourselves in a different light, and to change our opinions about things.

I then set up Rick with two different situations. In the first situation, it was somebody who is in their mid-20s and they're trying to figure out what to do with their career. In the second situation, it was a person who is deciding whether to stay or go. a relationship that is going okay but not great. Rick gave a bunch of great advice here. There is something that I want to highlight as a theme in both of his answers, and it's embracing the truth.

there is a kind of brutal reality associated with really putting things on the piece of paper, whether the piece of paper is an actual literal piece of paper or kind of a metaphorical one, where you're committing yourself. to getting clear what do you love doing what are you talented at what do you really care about what are the traits this other person seems to have what are the traits that you have right now

that might be very appealing to another person, or maybe might be not so appealing to another person. Are there some numbers here that are going to guide a career decision?

What are those numbers? What are the current numbers? What do you want the numbers to be in the future? How can you go through a methodical process of taking a look at your life as a whole, the ins and outs of it, really identifying that i need to make x in order to be comfortable or really identifying this is the way things are right now and i don't think that the person that i'm with

has much of a growth curve. Many people, in my experience, really avoid confronting the reality of their situation. They do whatever they can to not get the onto the piece of paper. And I get it. I've been there. That kind of stark confrontation with reality can be incredibly uncomfortable for a person. It was incredibly uncomfortable for me for a very long time. But you're just not going to be able to make a truly good decision without going through that kind of a process.

As we get to the end here, I want to mention something that we actually didn't talk about during the episode at all that I wish that we had. This will be a kind of Easter egg for the people who made it this far. A big part of making good decisions is learning how to come to peace with the fact that one of your options has, in a sense, died. Choosing one thing means that you're not choosing another thing. Most of the time, not always, but much of the time.

Our choices are exclusionary in nature. We're choosing one set of paths, and we're letting another set of paths vanish. This was very difficult for me for a very long time. And at the same time, this is just the way life is. It's how things are. We have to learn how to come to terms with it. But for many people, it is a real struggle, and it makes it very, very difficult to commit to a decision and stick with it. And it's often quite an emotional process.

I don't have enough time here to talk about how we can get better at that. Maybe if people are interested in it, if we get some mail about it, if people write some comments, if they're watching on YouTube. down below and it stands out to people as something they would like to hear more about. I'd be happy to go into it maybe in a future episode.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I really liked doing this one. I got a lot out of it personally. I hope you did as well. And if you would like to support the podcast, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash being well podcast.

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