Making big decisions can feel paralyzing. Whether it’s choosing a new job, moving to a different city, or deciding if you should break up with someone, these choices can keep you agonizingly stuck, forever cycling through pros and cons.
My guest can help you finally choose and move forward. That’s what she does for a living. Nell Wulfhart is a professional decision coach who has all her clients reach a decision within a one-hour session. Today on the show, she explains why people get stuck when faced with big choices, why we often take way longer than we need to make a decision, and how this actually makes our lives worse. Nell then walks us through two practical exercises she uses with her clients to home in on the right option, and shares her tips on overcoming the paralysis that often attends making a big decision, as well as how to deal with the regret that inevitably comes with making tough choices.
Maybe by the time our hour together is over, you’ll have finally made the big decision that’s been weighing on your mind.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- AoM Podcast #486: How to Get Better at Making Life-Changing Decisions
- AoM Podcast #740: Life’s 10 Biggest Decisions
- AoM Article: Use the 90/10 Rule to Decide Where to Live
- Sunday Firesides: You Already Know
- Sunday Firesides: Treat Life Like an Experiment
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Making big decisions can feel paralyzing. Whether it’s choosing a new job, moving to a different city, or deciding if you should break up with someone, these choices can keep you agonizingly stuck, forever cycling through pros and cons. My guest can help you finally choose and move forward, because that’s what she does for a living. Nell Wolfhart is a professional decision coach who has all her clients reach a decision within a one-hour session. Today on the show, she explains why people get stuck when faced with big choices, while we often take way longer than we need to to make a decision, and how this actually makes our lives worse. Nell then walks us through two practical exercises she uses with her clients to home in on the right option, and shares her tips on overcoming the paralysis that often attends making a big decision, as well as how to deal with the regret that inevitably comes with making tough choices. Maybe by the time our hour together is over, you’ll finally have made the big decision that’s been weighing on your mind. After the show is over, check out our show notes @awim.is/decide. All right, Nell Wolfhart, welcome to the show.
Nell Wolfhart: Thanks so much, Brett. I’m excited to be here.
Brett McKay: So you are a decision coach. You help people make decisions. How did you become a decision coach? Because it doesn’t seem like it’s something you go to school for.
Nell Wolfhart: Not yet, anyway. I basically have always been the person that friends and family came to for help making a decision, because I’m very decisive, I’m very opinionated, and I am a real straight talker. But the problem is that when a lot of people ask you for advice, you find yourself giving advice constantly, just like I can’t keep it in my mouth. And eventually one of my friends very kindly and gently said, please stop telling me what to do. Maybe other people could use this service. And it turns out that they can. People, I’ve discovered, have a really hard time making decisions, and it’s nice to have a completely neutral third party to help you figure out what to do.
Brett McKay: So did you just put out your shingle on the internet and say, hey, you can hire me to help you make decisions? Is that how it happened?
Nell Wolfhart: That’s exactly right. And this is advice I give to people all the time. I think a lot of people don’t realize how easy it is to start a business, but you can just put up a website and tell people that you’re offering this thing, and boom, you have a business.
Brett McKay: First lesson there, making decision. If you want to start a business, just do something.
Nell Wolfhart: Oh, God, I give that advice constantly.
Brett McKay: So you specialize in helping people make major decisions. They typically come to you when they got a really hard decision, and they’re having a hard time figuring out what to do. What kinds of decisions do people have the toughest time making? And you see frequently in your line of work.
Nell Wolfhart: I think there’s like four major areas. One is usually a career decision, like somebody gets a job offer and they’re not sure if they should take it or not. The second one is relationships, usually should I break up with this person? The third one is, should I have a kid? And the fourth one is, where should I live? So those are the four major topics. And usually the decisions I help people with are pretty life-changing, but I have also helped people pick what novel idea to work on, what color to paint their kitchen, whether they should get a tattoo removed. Basically the whole spectrum, anything you can imagine, I’ve probably helped somebody choose it.
Brett McKay: So I imagine by the time people come to you for help, they’ve probably spent hours and hours, maybe weeks trying to figure out what they’re supposed to do. And they’re probably on the internet and asking Google and going to Reddit and maybe now they’re asking ChatGPT.
Nell Wolfhart: They are.
Brett McKay: Right, and they’re clearly stuck on this decision because they’re coming to a stranger on the internet for help. How do they describe why they’re stuck?
Nell Wolfhart: Well, first of all, I would say that people actually come to me often after months or even years of trying to make the same decision. I know, and honestly, this breaks my heart because I just want people to make decisions faster. This is like something that they will put on my tombstone. I say it so often. So people are stuck because they are afraid of making the wrong decision and they are terrified of feeling regret. So, basically we’re all like this. We’re trying to avoid, bad feelings or uncomfortable feelings, right? And that is the thing that holds them back from making any kind of choice because when you leave all the doors open, then you get to still like feel good about all the options. You don’t have to make a decision. Maybe it doesn’t work out and then you beat yourself up and you feel like a loser. Honestly, it’s all about the fear of feeling bad.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I imagine like FOMO, fear of missing out. You feel like if you make a decision, you’re giving up, you’re losing a path. Like you grieve maybe the loss of those possibilities you once had.
Nell Wolfhart: Exactly, and by the time people come to me to make a decision because they have spent so long weighing the pros and cons of each decision and they’ve had the same conversation with themselves in their head for like, weeks or months or years and they’re just so intimately familiar with all the good parts of both choices that it makes it even harder to make a decision because they know exactly what they’re giving up and what they’re missing out on.
Brett McKay: Do you find that when people come to you, they already know what decision they want to make but they just can’t consciously acknowledge it and your job is to kind of help them crystallize something they already, on some level know?
Nell Wolfhart: Oh, totally. It’s not universal. It’s not for every client, but I would definitely say that there’s something in them, like they’re leaning towards a certain option. And my job is literally just to converse with them, ask them lots of questions and sort of, yank that answer out of them. And then basically it’s just me writing them a permission slip, a virtual permission slip. No one has yet asked me for a paper permission slip, but a permission slip to go ahead and do the thing that they wanted to do. So they know, but they don’t know that they know.
Brett McKay: Right. I imagine this is particularly the case with people who come to you to ask whether they should break up with someone. I mean, if you’re at the point that you have to ask a decision coach on the internet if you should break up, you should probably break up with that person.
Nell Wolfhart: Yes. I always feel like I’m sort of putting myself out of business by saying this, but it’s true. If you’re at the point where you are thinking about calling a stranger on the internet to tell you whether or not to end your relationship, nine out of 10 times, the answer is going to be yes.
Brett McKay: Yeah. You push your clients that come to you to make a decision within like just in a one hour session. Is it possible to make a big life changing decision in an hour?
Nell Wolfhart: Well, by the time people get to me, as you said before, they’ve usually been mulling this decision for quite a long time on their own. So we always make the de cision in the hour, like every single time, like nobody leaves a session without a decision because exactly, they’ve spent so much time thinking about this and debating and maybe asking their friends and family or asking Google or whatever that they just need to take some kind of action, any kind of action and move forward. And a lot of people have asked me, why don’t you offer more sessions? I think I’m going to need like three sessions to get through this decision, but I don’t even let them do that because the whole point is that you make the decision and you take action. And honestly, no matter what the decision is, just taking that action is going to be better than continuing to debate and wonder and mull and agonize, you know?
Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, I think intuitively people think if you’re making a really big decision, like it’s smart to spend a lot of time thinking about it and doing calculations, but typically, I mean, most times it’s just the best thing you do is just make a decision and move on.
Nell Wolfhart: 100%, and I’m not saying take no time to make your big decisions. Definitely you should take some time, but I think people probably take. Usually I say you should think about how long you need to make a decision. Like, I don’t know, you get into grad school and you’re trying to decide if you should go. Maybe you think you need like three months to make that choice. So I tell people to take that approach to every decision, figure out your deadline and then cut it in half. Give yourself half that amount of time to make the decision because it’s not going to actually impact the quality of the decision, and then you get all the rest of that time back. I mean, honestly, I would say 10% is enough. Like 10% of the time you think you need to make a decision is sufficient for making a good decision, but that really scares people. So I bumped it up to 50.
Brett McKay: All right, so that’s interesting. So the quality of your decision making isn’t linked to the amount of time spent making it.
Nell Wolfhart: Again, I’m not saying, like, make a huge decision, like have a kid just overnight wake up and move forward with it. Like, definitely not. Take some time, think about it. But I have found that for most people, like the vast majority of people and the vast majority of decisions that taking longer to make it makes it harder to make the decision and it really makes your life worse while you’re making the decision. For a lot of people, there’s one decision that they wake up at three o’clock in the morning and it pops into their brain. They’re taking a shower and they’re still thinking about it. Like these decisions really take over your life and they suck a lot of energy out of it and they think all that thinking is productive, it’s getting them somewhere, but I think a lot of it is kind of a waste of time.
Brett McKay: One of the most interesting classes I took in college, I think about it, I still think about it, it’s like been over 20 years. I took a class on the philosophy of decision-making and we talked about different ways people, humans make decisions. We talked about heuristics. We talked about really complicated ways people make decisions. There’s like this thing called the multi-attribute optimization chart where you create these charts and then you give weighted ratings to the different things. Then you kind of add it up and like, but I remember one thing that stood out to me, my philosophy professor said, oftentimes people, like the most important decisions you make, like whether you should marry someone, whether you should have a kid, he says, those are actually gonna be your easiest decisions typically for most people. It’s like, I didn’t really think much about whether I should marry my wife. I didn’t do a multi-attribute optimization chart to figure out whether I should marry my wife. I was like, yeah, I love her.
Nell Wolfhart: So romantic.
Brett McKay: We’re getting married. And I think about that a lot.
Nell Wolfhart: I mean, I read all that stuff. Like I read all the research that comes out on decision-making. I read all the books that people write on decision-making. I think about, yeah, the waiting and the decision trees and the blah, blah, blah. But honestly, I think for most people, that stuff is so unhelpful. First of all, basically you have to learn something in order to even start it. It’s sort of like getting into notion or something like that. The learning curve is quite high. Then it just kind of extends the decision-making process, I think, in an unhelpful way. For me, all those things. I mean, I love a pro and cons list, but that’s kind of as far as I’ll go. I think the weighting of the options and the decision trees and all these different things, for most people, are not that helpful. I think it’s just kind of a way to keep working at the problem and working at the problem and working at the problem, and probably you figured out the answer to the problem way before you even started creating this tree.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and I’ve done these things before, these weighted optimization charts, and the thing I found, it gets unhelpful because decisions, there’s so many factors, and then once you start thinking about it, like, oh, there’s actually more factors than I originally thought. Right. So just trying to figure out whether you’re going to move somewhere. It’s like, well, okay, it’s a great job, I’m going to move there. But then you’re like, well, wait a minute, what’s the commute like? What’s the cost of living? What’s the schools like? What’s the weather? And then I find I just start getting more and more muddled when I start doing that.
Nell Wolfhart: Right, exactly. And honestly, I coach people on that exact thing all the time. A lot of couples, sometimes with kids, who are thinking about moving from one place to another place. And it’s really complicated, right? There’s schools, there’s jobs, there’s temperature, there’s cost of living. Like the factors go on and on and on. And yeah, it’s really hard for them to make the decision. In some cases, they have literally been talking about moving from one place to the second place for years, and they’ve never sort of fully committed. So they’re always one foot in, one foot out. And my solution to that is to just pare way, way back. Instead of making this huge list of every single factor and trying to figure out this or that or the other thing, let’s just pick the three things that are most important and figure out which place is going to tick those three boxes. That’s more or less it. The other stuff you could spend, like I said, five years trying to weigh them all against each other. And I just don’t think that’s helpful. I think it’s easier to just have moved somewhere. And you know what? Worst case scenario, you can usually just move back.
Brett McKay: Yeah. It sounds like, as I’m listening to you, you’re taking a very… Okay. My listeners are probably going to be like, oh my gosh, Brett’s bringing up this guy again. One of my favorite philosophers, Kierkegaard, Soren Kierkegaard. And he’s like, you just got to make the decision. Take the leap of faith. You can’t figure it out. You can’t do all this deliberation. You just got to just make the decision. And that gives you the ultimate freedom. You just have to make the choice.
Nell Wolfhart: I think that point of that gives you the ultimate freedom, that’s exactly it. Trying to make a decision is so exhausting. It’s so limiting. And honestly, it gets really boring after a certain point.
Brett McKay: Oh, yeah.
Nell Wolfhart: And yeah, I feel like for most people, they forget that a lot of decisions are reversible. You get so caught up in say, a job offer, that it becomes the only thing in your world. And it’s like, do I take the job offer? Do I stay in my job? Do I take the job offer? Do I stay in my job? And you forget that like, oh, you could take the job offer. And if it doesn’t work out, then you’ll find another job. The most likely worst case scenario in these situations is not you’re going to end up living in your car or in prison. The worst case scenario is that you’re going to end up in a job that you don’t like very much. And if you’re looking for other jobs, you might already be in that scenario.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I want to talk more about this later on, about the reversibility decisions. I think it’s a release valve or an escape valve that can help people actually make a choice. Let’s talk about kind of what a session looks like with your clients. And something you do is you give your clients two exercises. One is to make a list of their values. So what kind of values are you talking about here?
Nell Wolfhart: Okay. I’m not talking here about like religious values or like corporate values, whatever those are. I’m really talking about just the things that make your everyday life good. So for me, that’s not setting an alarm in the morning. That’s having total control over my physical body, like where it is, what it’s wearing, what it’s eating, not to be sitting in a place that somebody told me to be in at a certain time. Getting to wear sweatpants every day is very important to me, getting a lot of sleep, time with friends and family, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s really just about thinking about the way you like to live your life and the things that make you happy. For some people, it’s like financial security. For other people, it’s autonomy. For other people, it’s like getting to spend all day with my dogs. It doesn’t really matter. But just to think about your daily life and the things that make it feel good.
Brett McKay: Have you found that there are values that people underestimate as to how much effect they’ll have on their day-to-day happiness?
Nell Wolfhart: Yes. Number one is community, spending time with other people. I find that for so many people, community is the thing that they always bump to the bottom of the list. It just doesn’t get that much importance in their lives. But people are lonely. They are too lonely. They’re way too isolated. They don’t see enough adults outside of the adults that they live with, even on a weekly basis. And so many people feel this way. So I often give the advice that working on your community and maybe seeing one friend a week might be the single thing that you could do that would most quickly improve your quality of life.
Brett McKay: Any other ones?
Nell Wolfhart: There are some that I think are kind of significant for certain people. Like when I see autonomy on a list of values, that is often very highly correlated, I’ve found, with people who want to be self-employed, like who should eventually be entrepreneurs of some kind or freelancers. There’s just a very high correlation between those two things. I also think not enough people put fun on the list of values. I think fun should be quite high on most people’s lists.
Brett McKay: I think so too, I agree. So in previous conversations I’ve heard preparing for this interview that you’ve had with other podcasters, you talk about some of your values. So you mentioned some of them like not dressing up for work, not having a set schedule. I heard warm weather is important to you.
Nell Wolfhart: Yes.
Brett McKay: But you’re in Switzerland right now. How’s the weather in Switzerland?
Nell Wolfhart: Actually, right now it’s pretty hot because we’re talking in the summer. But it’s true. I mean, you can’t always get 100% of the things on your list. But I moved to Switzerland for my partner’s job, and I would say that my partner is higher on my list of values than warm weather.
Brett McKay: Okay. So there is some multi-attribute optimization going on. Not very complicated, but you do have to weight these things.
Nell Wolfhart: I encourage people at the maximum to put them in order of priority if they can. But it is also something that’s really hard for people to do, and sometimes it causes them additional stress trying to figure that out. So sometimes that’s just something that emerges in the course of our session.
Brett McKay: Okay, so you want to know your values because you want to choose the option that’s most in line with them. Something you’ve said is that when you make a decision that’s not in line with your values, you’re just taking a shortcut to unhappiness.
Nell Wolfhart: Yes. Yes. And that is, like, really true. I talk to a lot of people in bad situations, and then when we go through their values, it’s like, oh, this is why you’re not happy. The life you’re living is like totally out of alignment with the things that are really important to you. It’s not rocket science.
Brett McKay: Yeah, well, speaking about, if you’re making a decision and you have a partner involved. Like the case of you moving to Switzerland. What do you do if you’re making a decision that affects both you and your partner or also your kids and your values don’t line up with your partner’s values. Like how do you figure that out?
Nell Wolfhart: I encourage people to often do that values exercise like as a family. It doesn’t have to be like two or four people’s individual lists, and they all value different things. It’s like, what are the things that are important to us as a team, as a group, as a couple, and to work from there? And also, a lot of parents are making big decisions that, of course, affect their kids, like moving to a new location. And they respect their kids’ opinions, and they want to make sure their kids are happy and thriving, et cetera, et cetera. But in the end, the parents are the deciders, and they get to make the choice.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So a few years ago, my wife wrote an article called The 90-10 Rule, and it’s about figuring out where to move. And the idea is that whenever we’re thinking about moving, we sometimes just hone in on this one factor that sticks out in our mind, but it doesn’t really affect the majority of our life. So your example is you decide to move further out into the suburbs because you want a bigger house, you want a guest room or something like that, but you only end up using that guest room just a few times a year. So that’s 10% of your life. But in the process of moving further out in the suburbs, you’ve doubled your commute every day to work, and that’s part of the 90% of your life. You’re really going to feel that. It’s going to affect you. Another example is you decide to move out to Colorado because you love the mountains. So you move out there, and the problem is you only go to the mountains just a few times a year. So it’s just like 10% of your life. And then the rest of that 90% is your kid’s school, your house, doing errands. It’s part of that 90%. And maybe Colorado isn’t as good for that. So basically, you want to make a decision that prioritizes the things that affect your life in the biggest portion of your day-to-day life, not just one factor that might stick out to you the most. So you just don’t want to focus too much on that 10%, and then the rest of your life is terrible.
Nell Wolfhart: This is so common, and I have a lot to say about this. So when I’m doing a session with someone, I always start off by asking them just some general background information. And I always ask them what they do for fun, because I do think it’s really important. If you’re making a big decision, it’s going to impact every aspect of your life. And so it’s important to think about how the decision will change each of those parts of your life. And the values exercise kind of goes along with this, because if someone says, like, I hate commuting, or I like to spend a lot of time with my family, and they’re considering a job that’s going to be like 60 hours a week plus a two-hour drive, like, Okay, we can see that there is a real mismatch here. So the whole idea is to take a 360-degree view of your life, not just focus on the number one value or the number one priority. I also think this is really funny that your wife came up with this 90-10 rule, because I just wrote a newsletter with my own 90-10 rule about how I think that most people, when they’re making a big decision, most of you are like 90% of the way decided, and you make that 90% decision, like, very quickly. But it’s the last 10%. It’s like it’s getting to moving forward, the getting to action part, the last 10% that I think really bogs people down. So there’s a lot of 90-10 rules out there.
Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s that last mile effect. That’s usually the hardest mile.
Nell Wolfhart: Yeah, it’s just like because it feels so irrevocable, I guess, and just be able to take that final step and actually put the decision into action. That’s where a lot of people get, like, totally paralyzed.
Brett McKay: Okay, so the first exercise, list out your values. But the values thinking about are just like the day-to-day stuff that affects you on a day-to-day basis that have a big impact. So weather, commute, spending time with friends and family, autonomy, things like that. Like, those are the things you should think about. Prioritize them. And then if you’re married or have a family, maybe do that together so you can kind of get on the same page. The second exercise you recommend is to imagine your ideal life one, five, and 10 years in the future. I’ve tried this type of exercise before, and I think for me, imagining your future life can be hard because you’re trying to figure out, well, what does future me want? Am I going to like that? Any tips for making this exercise more fruitful?
Nell Wolfhart: Yeah, people hate this exercise. In fact, I hate doing it myself. It is really, really hard for us as humans to predict the things that we’re going to want in the future. But I make everybody do it anyway because I’ve found it to be really helpful when it comes to making big decisions. So it’s basically about thinking, like, your ideal life. And the thing that I discovered when I started asking people to do this is that most people were not putting down, like, I want to be on a mega yacht in the Aegean Sea five years from now. Most people are putting things like, I’d like to be working part-time and get a dog and maybe take a trip twice a year, most of their dreams are very achievable, but I think it’s helpful to just write it down and to get as detailed as possible about it because then when it comes to making a decision, you can look at the choices in front of you, you can think about the future you want, and you can really see which one of these choices is going to get me to the future that I want, it becomes much more obvious.
Brett McKay: So once you imagine your future self, what do you do then? Like, do you map something out for yourself? Like, what do you do with that?
Nell Wolfhart: I think it’s more like, okay, in five years, I’d like to have a kid, I’d like to own a house, I’d like to take two vacations to see family a year and one vacation just me and my wife. You know, whatever, whatever. I want to have my own business or maybe like a side business going, or I want to have advanced in my career, or I want to have, a lot of people have written a book, want to have written a book by that point. And then you can look at the choices you’re trying to decide between and think like, okay, if this is the life that I want, if I know that I’m going to want at least these things that I’ve written down in five years, is this job going to help me get to that point? Is moving to this new city going to help me get to that point? Et cetera, et cetera.
Brett McKay: Okay. So we’re imagining our desired future and then we’re seeing which option allows us to draw the most direct line to that desired future. What do you do in the case where you’re like, let’s say you got a job offer in California and in 10 years you do want to be in California, but for the next five years plus, you still want to be in Oklahoma. So you can draw a direct line from the job offer to where you want to be in 10 years, but you can’t draw a line from it to where you want to be in five years. So like, do you take that decision now that will take you to where you want to be in 10 years or do you hold off on it?
Nell Wolfhart: I think if in five years you want to be in Oklahoma and 10 years you want to be in California, then you stay in Oklahoma or you move to Oklahoma if you’re not already there, but you make sure that that choice is going to help you get to California at the 10 year mark. If moving to Oklahoma in five years is going to wipe out all possibilities of getting to California in 10, forget it. So then you do adjust the plan. Maybe you go to California sooner. It’s hard to think of a situation in which that would really occur, but who knows? So that seems to me like a pretty straightforward decision. Like if you know this is what you want in five years, okay, go ahead and do that. And just remember all the time that you have had this ultimate idea of being in California and make sure as you go along through your life that you’re making decisions that are going to get you to that point when you want it.
Brett McKay: I’m sure I imagine a lot of people going through that situation, but what if that opportunity doesn’t come to go to California again? What if I got to take it now? But that might not be the case because you’ll probably get another job offer in California someday. So just don’t worry about it.
Nell Wolfhart: Yeah, I would say in most cases, a lot of opportunities. It is really rare to get like a once in a lifetime opportunity that will never appear again. You can usually get what you want, even if it’s not in exactly the right order or the perfect way that you’d want it.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so those two exercises, the first one, list out your values. And then the second one, imagine your ideal life one, five, 10 years in the future. Let’s talk about in the decision-making process, a lot of people often go to friends and family to ask other people for advice.
Nell Wolfhart: Yes.
Brett McKay: When is it and when is it not useful to ask other people for advice?
Nell Wolfhart: Okay, this is a really touchy issue because by the time somebody gets to me, they’ve often talked to like 20 or 30 people. And usually the first thing they say when they get on the phone with me is like, I’m so sick of talking and thinking about this. 20 or 30 people is too many, way too many. I usually recommend three to five people maximum because when you talk to more than that, their opinions just get layered on and layered on and layered on. And it becomes even harder to figure out exactly what is it that you specifically want. So it’s good to talk to people that know you well, but you also know them well. I talk to a lot of people who are making a decision, maybe a college decision or a career decision or a moving decision that their parents are going to hate. And they say like, my parents always want me to be here. They want me to do this. So, you know best yourself the people that you’re talking to. Don’t ask people for their opinion when you know that they are not usually supportive of your decisions because it just creates turmoil and further obstacles to you doing what you want. I often recommend that people inform their parents of a decision instead of explaining as they’re going along. So instead of talking to them and saying like, oh, well, we’re thinking of moving to New York. Make the decision and then inform them. We’ve decided to move to New York.
Brett McKay: Yeah, because your parents, they’ve got skin in the game. They’ve got their interests, and they’d want you to stay here, and they’re probably not going to give you the most unbiased advice. But is it good to find people who disagree with you? Like, kind of give you a different point of view because it might bring up issues you’re not thinking about?
Nell Wolfhart: Oh, definitely. Yeah, I think that can be really helpful. I mean, when people get on the phone with me, I often tell them something that surprises them or that they didn’t expect me to say. I think it’s good to talk to people with a variety of opinions. But again, five maximum. Like, cut yourself off after that.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I imagine this is why, going to a decision coach is helpful because, like, you don’t have any skin in the game. Like, if someone moves to California, it’s like, well, okay, you can move to California, whatever. So you can maybe help them see some things they’re not thinking about in a neutral way. Whereas if you went to your best friend and say, hey, I’m going to take this job in Connecticut, and I’m going to move away from you, they’re going to be like, oh, well, here’s all the reasons why you shouldn’t do that because secretly, it’s like, I’m going to miss you if you move. So I’m going to tell you why Connecticut is awful.
Nell Wolfhart: Exactly. Exactly like that. Like, I have absolutely no personal investment in what any of my clients decide to do except that I want them to be happy. And I think just getting to know them over the course of our session, asking questions, being able to look at the situation with some perspective is helpful for people as opposed to talking to people who have known you for a long time or even like a therapist. I mean, I’m a big fan of therapy, but sometimes people spend, a year talking to a therapist about a single decision. And I think they might be better served by making that decision, taking action, and seeing how it works out.
Brett McKay: Let’s say you are absolutely agonizingly stuck between two options. Let’s talk about some ways you can mentally reframe your thinking to help you get unstuck. How can thinking about the sunk cost fallacy help? And for those who aren’t familiar, what is the sunk cost fallacy?
Nell Wolfhart: So the sunk cost fallacy is when you think about all the time and effort and maybe money you’ve put into something, and you use that as a reason to make a decision, even though that time and energy and money is long gone. It is sunk as if to the bottom of the sea, and it will not come back no matter what decision you decide to make. This comes up a lot in relationship choices. If someone’s deciding to stay in a relationship or not, and they think like, oh, but we’ve had all these years together. Like, you’ve had those years. Those years are not necessarily relevant for moving forward with the decision. Like, the years are already gone. You can’t re-spend them in a different way. So when someone is agonizingly stuck between two decisions, first of all, I would say that they can be actually in a good position because if you’re so stuck, that probably means that either option is fine, it is very rare for someone to be stuck in between two options, like that one is really good and one is really terrible. Actually, relationships might be the one exception to that when people call me and they’re like in a really bad relationship, but they truly feel stuck. But I would say for most decisions, location decisions, career decisions, should I get a dog or not get a dog decisions, either option will be fine. And the fact that you’re so stuck really just means that like those options are probably pretty equal. So taking any kind of action and not letting your life be sort of bogged down by more decision-making for weeks or months or years is the most helpful thing you could possibly do.
Brett McKay: One question that I found useful to help with the sunk cost fallacy, let’s say you’re trying to decide whether to stop something because those are hard decisions to make because that’s when the sunk cost fallacy can really creep in. You’re like, well, I’ve invested all this time and money into this thing, so if we stop it now, it would just all go to waste. The manager theorist Peter Drucker, he had this question you can ask yourself to help you cut through that. And the question is, if you did not already do this thing, would you start it now?
Nell Wolfhart: Right. Yeah, I think that’s a really helpful question to ask. I think a lot of people can reframe things by like, if they’re thinking about quitting something, and I personally am a huge fan of quitting, big fan of quitting, way too many people stay stuck in situations that they should have left than quit things too early. That is for sure. So yeah, I like the idea of approaching it like if someone offered me this volunteer gig or this job or this relationship right now, would I take it? Would I start doing it? I think that’s a great way to frame it.
Brett McKay: What about reframing things so they’re not so binary? Because I think sometimes in our head, we’re like, well, it’s either or, but maybe there could be a third option or a compromise option.
Nell Wolfhart: Oh, yeah. I have been in many sessions where somebody comes to me with what they think is, two options. These are the only options, and I come up with another option or even a fourth option. And again, I think that’s sort of a factor of taking too long to make a decision that you become like hyper-focused on the two things in front of you. But there are many situations in which you can find a different option, you’re stuck in your job and you also want to spend time with your kids. So you’re like, oh, should I quit my job? Like, maybe you can go part-time. Maybe you can freelance. Maybe you can be a consultant. I mean, that’s the most obvious and like easy answer. But I think a lot of people just, they forget to consider like the third option to sort of zoom out, look at the whole picture and think like, is there another way that I could do this? Because there often is.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Another thing you talk about in order to battle sunk cost fallacy is instead of thinking what if to think even if. What do you mean by that?
Nell Wolfhart: Yeah, this is something that I actually heard on a podcast about 10 years ago, and I’ve been trying to remember what podcast it was ever since, so it’s not my original thought, but because people tend to push back on any decision they make with like, oh, but what if this happens? What if that happens? Things that are really full of fear. So, if I never hear the word mindset again, I will die happy, but if you can manage to change in your mind the phrasing of what if and just substitute even if, so like, even if this job doesn’t work out, then fill in the rest of the sentence, you know? So instead of saying like, oh, what if I regret my decision? Change it to even if I regret my decision and fill in the rest of the sentence. So it does two things. It sort of reinforces that you will figure things out, that you have faith in yourself, that you are not like at the mercy of the elements, and it makes you create a little backup plan that you can keep in your pocket, a little plan B for when things, if things go wrong.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think this can help, especially if you have a tendency. I have this problem. I think it’s helpful to imagine the worst-case scenario, but I have a tendency to catastrophize, and it’s like, if I make this decision, then this thing will happen, and then this thing will happen, and then basically it all leads to like I’m homeless and broke.
Nell Wolfhart: Right. Right.
Brett McKay: It’s usually not the case.
Nell Wolfhart: It’s usually not the case. Well, have you started changing in your mind what if to even if?
Brett McKay: I’m starting. This would be useful too. I mean, this happened to me when I was in law school a lot because your whole grade is contingent on this one exam you take at the end of the semester. And then after the exam, you do these postmortems in your head for days. It’s like, oh, my gosh, I missed this issue and I missed that question. And you start thinking, oh, my gosh, I’m going to get a D in this class. And because I’m getting a D, I’m not going to get a law review. And because I’m not in law review, I’m not going to get a job offer, and I’m going to have all the student debt. And my wife had called it I started logging out. She’s like, you’re logging out. You need to quit logging like a log, like a big giant log. I think back then, like even if would have been useful. It’s like, well, even if I get a D, we’ll figure something. It’s going to be okay. And I ended up getting like a C in a class, and I learned it wasn’t the end of the world.
Nell Wolfhart: Right. It’s often not the end of the world. When you said logging out, I thought, oh, she means logging out from reality.
Brett McKay: No, it’s like a log. I would just lay there on the couch like a log and just be like, oh, my gosh, here’s the worst case thing. We’re going to be broke.
Nell Wolfhart: Oh, no.
Brett McKay: We’re going to be fine.
Nell Wolfhart: Right. That’s hard to live with.
Brett McKay: No, yeah, for sure. Well, that’s another reason why making decisions fast can be useful because someone who’s trying to make a decision, they’re often not pleasant to be around.
Nell Wolfhart: Yeah. I have had more than one person tell me that they found me or they reached out to me because their partner was like, I just couldn’t listen to you anymore.
Brett McKay: And I think another thing, too, to help with those worst case scenarios or thinking about, oh, if this happens, then this bad thing will happen, is just think of decision making as experiments. The stakes don’t have to feel so fraught. You’re just trying something. It doesn’t have to be permanent. And even if it doesn’t work out, you’ve learned something from the experience that you didn’t know before and you maybe couldn’t have known without trying it. So you just got more data.
Nell Wolfhart: Oh, I love that. I think that’s great. I talk about experimenting and testing things out all the time to the point of really boring everybody around me because I think you mentioned a little earlier something about sitting and wondering what you should do. That is not how we make good decisions. We make good decisions by trying the thing and seeing if we like it or not and collecting information and getting that feedback, not by sitting at home and thinking like, I don’t know, would I like to go to grad school or should I switch careers and become a social worker? And there are so many ways to test things out and to experiment that I just would encourage people to try before making a huge decision because you can really play around and discover so much information really, really quickly. And then you can make a decision with actual tangible data, not just with like, well, I thought I would like this.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Even if you make a big decision, let’s say you decide to move and you find out, oh man, I really don’t like it here. You can move back. Even a costly decision in time and money, yeah, it’s going to hurt, but you can reverse it. Like most big decisions, you can quit the job, you can move back. It doesn’t have to be set in stone.
Nell Wolfhart: You really can. And I’ve had people quit jobs to take new jobs and then go back to their old jobs. That happens all the time. It’s easier than you think it is to go back and to make a change. And a lot of times people don’t do it because of I think some feeling of shame or embarrassment because they’re like, oh, I made a mistake or I tried this job and it wasn’t what I thought it would be or I moved to California and then realized California is very expensive. But they’re ashamed and they’re embarrassed to sort of pivot or go back to where they came from because they wonder what other people are going to think of them, which is such a sad reason to kind of put your life on hold and to stay somewhere, whether it’s a job or location that you’re not happy. And honestly, most people just aren’t thinking about you that much, so you should go ahead and do it anyway. I think that I changed my mind is a very powerful sentence.
Brett McKay: I think so. I definitely succumb to the social pressure and shame. I made this decision and I have to stick with it because I’ll look like an idiot if I turn back.
Nell Wolfhart: Very common.
Brett McKay: But my wife’s, she’s a great example of this. After she graduated college, she got into a master’s program in political science. And she thought she would like it. And then she went to the first, like, the orientation week. And she’s like, oh my gosh, it’s not what I thought it was going to be. And so she dropped out that week. And then she ended up applying for a master’s program in religion instead. And she ended up loving it. It was the thing. And it was funny because I remember I went to, we went to the same college. And I would go in the building where the political science department was. And I would see her name still on the bulletin board of, like, oh, here are new master’s students. They’re all semester. It’s like, hey, your name’s still there, even though you’re not there. But she didn’t care. I mean, it was kind of embarrassing to drop out right before the semester started. But she knew it just wasn’t for her. So she decided to get out right away and do something else.
Nell Wolfhart:I mean, there’s also the possibility of getting out much later. I had a client recently who, you know, when you’re studying to be a doctor, it takes like 12 or 13 years. And she was in year 12. Like, she had done, residency, fellowships, med school, everything like that. She had one more year to go before she would be a fully qualified practicing doctor. And we decided that she should quit.
Brett McKay: How did she do that? That’s a lot of sunk cost fallacy to get through.
Nell Wolfhart: It’s a lot of sunk cost. I mean, it’s a lot of time. But basically, she had become disillusioned with the American health care system, as so many of us are. And she had just realized that, like, it wasn’t for her. And there was absolutely no point in her investing another year of her life and taking out more money in student loans just to do something that we already knew she was not going to practice, like, as a doctor. Like, she had become very clear about that. So what was the point in doing that extra year, you know? It was hard for her to tell people she was dropping out, but she had really good reasons. And we came up with some ideas for what she could do next. And I think it was the right choice.
Brett McKay: You know, I think I did that. So I went to law school all three years, but I ended up not practicing law. I didn’t take the bar exam. And I remember when I made that decision, people were like, what? That was a lot of money. That was a lot of time. But the thing that did it for me was I did some internships. Here’s some testing out. I tested out the career in law. I did some internships, in the summer at a big law firm. And I did not enjoy it. Like, I got my first case of heartburn while being an intern at a firm. I was like, I can’t see myself doing this for the rest of my life. So I was like, no, I’ll just do something else.
Nell Wolfhart: I mean, that heartburn thing is probably more common than you think. But that’s where people get their first case of heartburn. But I think that’s great. And the only thing I would have suggested is that you try to do some kind of internship at a law firm before you went to law school. But I know that’s hard to do.
Brett McKay: I tell people that who are considering, like, young people considering law school. Because I think a lot of people, they go to law school because they’ve got nothing else planned. They’re having a hard time finding a job. It’s like, well, I guess I’ll go to law school. Like, I went to law school because I decided in high school that’s what I wanted to do. And I had some teacher tell me, like, I think you’d be a good lawyer. It’s like, oh, yeah. But I had no experience with the law. There was no one in my family that were lawyers. I didn’t see what law.. My only experience of law was, like, watching, Matlock and Law & Order. And I was like, that looks awesome. But then you actually, when I started practicing law, I was like, oh, it’s basically just sitting at a desk all day writing memos and going through discovery. It’s like, this is not for me.
Nell Wolfhart: Right. You know, I am, like, maybe not famous for this, but I talk about it all the time, about grad school as just, like, the most expensive, elaborate procrastination technique ever. And that so many people use going to grad school just as a way to, like, postpone having to make a decision about, in quotation marks, what they’re going to do with their lives. Like, really, really, really common. And I have to talk people out of it all the time.
Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk through that scenario because I’m sure there’s a lot of listeners who are young and they’re thinking about grad school. Or maybe they hate their job and they’re like, well, I’ll just quit my job and go into grad school. How do you know if grad school is the right decision for you?
Nell Wolfhart: Okay. I have a few long-established rules on this. One is if you’re independently wealthy and it just seems like fun and you’re not going to have, like, a lot of loans afterwards and you’re just like, oh, I really want to learn about, 18th century literature and I think it would be really great to do that for two years. Go ahead. Have fun. Wonderful. If you’re not that person, and most of us are not, then I would only recommend going to grad school if you know exactly what you’re going to do with that degree afterwards. As in, you have identified a job. You have ideally done an internship at that kind of job or shadowed somebody doing that job to make sure that you actually want to do that job and that this degree is, like, absolutely necessary for you to get that job. That there’s no other way for you to get that job except by having this particular degree. Also, that you have asked that university how many people with this degree go on to work in this field that I want to work in. Press them for real numbers. They will be reluctant to give them to you, but press them for real numbers because so many grad programs talk about their graduates who go on to do this and that and the other thing. But, like, what are the statistics on that? What are the percentages? What are the real numbers? If it turns out that, only 5% of people with this particular degree go on to work in this field that you want to work in, your odds are not good and you’d probably be better off spending that time doing something else.
Brett McKay: Okay, I like that. Let’s talk about regret. How often do people experience regret after making a big decision, like whether to take a job, move, et cetera?
Nell Wolfhart: Some people experience regret like after choosing the wrong kind of bagel for breakfast. Some people experience regret after every tiny decision. But yeah, it’s a really hard emotion and that’s again what keeps people stuck and stops them from making any decision at all. I mean, regret is one of the most powerful feelings. I would just try to remember that regret exists. You’re allowed to grieve the choice you didn’t make. And in a lot of ways it makes sense, especially if you’re making a really big decision. Like there’s going to be grief no matter what. There’s going to be sadness and regret no matter what path you take. That’s just, it comes with the territory. So it can be helpful to remember that there was going to be regret either way.
Brett McKay: Yeah, going back to Kierkegaard, this is a famous Kierkegaard quote. He’s been kind of glib because he was kind of glib sometimes. He was talking about whether you should get married or not. He’s like, marry or don’t marry, you’ll regret both.
Nell Wolfhart: Well, right. I mean, exactly. And I think a lot of people feel that way with, I mean, I think that’s actually true for a lot of decisions, especially the ones that people have taken like a year to make. Like if it’s been so hard to make and there’s such good things on both sides or such bad things on both sides, like there’s going to be regret either way, 100%. And I know that sounds kind of dispiriting, but I am trying to reframe it as liberating. If you know you’re going to have to experience some uncomfortable feelings either way, maybe it frees you up to do the thing that like feels bold and exciting and is the thing you really want to do because there’s going to be bad feelings no matter what. So you might as well go for what you really want.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think also too, not only you might end up regretting both decisions or decision no matter how it turns out, but like in my experience, maybe this is going back to the even if heuristic you have there. Like when you make a decision, like it ends up being the right decision. Like you find like somehow we were able to figure out in our head like, oh, this is actually this is the right thing to do. And if you did the other thing, you probably would have thought, oh, yeah, this is the right thing to do. I mean, we kind of I guess we acclimate to the decisions we make and we learn how to continue to live even no matter what decision we take.
Nell Wolfhart: I mean, I always try and tell people that you can make almost any decision a success if you work hard enough at it and that the thing that really helps with making a decision feel like the right one is to just lean really hard into the reasons that you made the decision. Like if you’re moving to New York because you just love, you know, museums and theater and culture, like you better do three of those things a week. And then because you are living the reasons that you made the decision, you feel like, oh, this decision was the right one. I’m doing exactly what I wanted to do. You’re literally making a success yourself. You’re making it the right decision. So whatever decision you make, if you can just lean as hard as possible into the reasons you made the decision, you’re much more likely to feel less regret and to feel like, right, I made a good choice.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so you put up with the noise outside your apartment window if you’re going to all the museums.
Nell Wolfhart: Right, exactly.
Brett McKay: So something you’ve said is that the decision-making business is the regret minimization business. And we can minimize regret by doing the things we’ve talked about. So, you know, making sure your decisions are aligned with your values, making sure your decisions connect you to your desired future, talking with just a few people whose opinions and advice you respect. But some regret is going to be inevitable and normal, even when you’ve made the right choice. But what do you do when you feel regret because it does seem like you actually did make the wrong choice? Any advice for dealing with that regret?
Nell Wolfhart: So a way to minimize regret that I’ve found to be pretty useful is for people to remember that when you make a decision, you don’t have a crystal ball. You can’t predict the future. Even I can’t predict the future. And that when you make a choice, you’re making the best choice you can with the information that you have at the time. That decision is within your control. The outcome of that decision, like let’s say you decide to take a job offer and it turns out that the boss is like a terrible micromanager or the person in the cube next to you like sings all day. You could not know those things in advance and you cannot control them. So in this case, the outcome is very different from the decision and you had no control over the outcome. But our problem is a lot of people will blame themselves. They take a new job and then something goes wrong that was beyond their control and they’re like, oh no, I made such a huge mistake. I made a bad decision. I’m such a bad person. I’m such a loser. And they beat themselves up and it’s awful and it’s not fair, you could not have known those things. So I would love it if everyone could just sort of separate in their brain a little bit the decision from the outcome and remember that they really can only control one of those things. So if the outcome doesn’t work out the way you expected, like most of the time that was not your fault and it doesn’t mean the decision was bad.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that’s a useful thing to do. Separate the decision from the outcome. We had Annie Duke on the podcast. She talked about that. This is called resulting in poker where you decide I’m going to play this hand and the decision was good, but then the outcome wasn’t good because of just random chance. You can’t beat yourself up over that.
Nell Wolfhart: Exactly. It was out of your control.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that’s really important. You make the best decision you can with the information you have at the time. You can’t know everything in advance. So you can make a good decision, but have a bad outcome. And you don’t need to beat yourself up about it. So what’s one last piece of advice you would offer people who are currently feeling stuck about making a hard decision?
Nell Wolfhart: Can I say just make it right now, like before the podcast ends and take action on it and that will be better than continuing to sit on it?
Brett McKay: I love it. I think that’s great advice.
Nell Wolfhart: It makes people really nervous, which I understand, but I honestly think taking action, even if it feels too fast, is probably going to make your life so much better than continuing to analyze and wonder and stress.
Brett McKay: All right, so maybe there’s someone right now, they’re putting in the two weeks notice, they’re sending that email they’ve been having in a draft for weeks, they’re going to do it right now.
Nell Wolfhart: Yes. Sometimes I do that with people on the phone. We have a call and they’re making a choice, but they feel sort of nervous about it. I’ll wait on the phone while they send that email.
Brett McKay: I love the pressure. Well, Nell, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?
Nell Wolfhart: You can find me @decisioncoach.com. I have a newsletter. You can sign up for it there. And you can listen to the Decision Coach podcast anywhere you get podcasts.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Nell Wolfhart, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Nell Wolfhart: Thanks so much, Brett. This was really fun.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Nell Wolfhart. She is a decision coach, and you can learn more information about her work at her website, decisioncoach.com. Also check out our show notes @awim.is/decide, where you can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AWIM podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a review of a podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think could get something out of it. As always, thanks for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
