The Before AND After of a Messy, Hard Decision

A retrospective look back, filled with all our lessons learned. It's been almost 18 months and I'm still feeling the effects.

Feb 14, 2024

Join me as I take you on a before and after journey of a hard decision I had to make. My hope is that it will offer you insight into the entire decision-making experience — including the struggle to make it and the aftermath that came later.

The “Before - October 2022” section was written in October, over here on LinkedIn. I later added the “After - April 2023” section. And it was brought back to mind today in 2024, as a friend navigates something almost identically. I thought this retrospective might be helpful if you’re bumping up on a hard decision.

[BEFORE — written in October 2022]

Making a hard decision is such an emotionally exhausting thing.

A few weeks ago, a group of us finally came to a decision we’d been agonizing over for weeks.

We had meetings, Zoom calls, in person chats and text exchanges trying to sort out what to do. We spun around in circles, debated the pros and cons, and argued with each other. We were all in agreement that something needed to change, but we weren’t entirely on the same page as to what that should look like.

Finally, the deadline came and we had to make the call.

We did — one unified decision — and I was the one to deliver the hard news. I sent it and then burst into tears.

It was awful, and I’m still feeling the hangover and sadness from it today and suspect I will for a while.

Because my tendency is to defer more to my heart than my head when decisions involving people are at stake, I had to engage a few different strategies and tools to help me get to a more balanced decision.

Here are a few of the questions I asked myself and the group:

❓ Were we making a decision from emotion or logic, or both? Feeling frustrated at the current situation wasn’t enough for me to uproot everything in favour of a new one. So I had to check in as to how much was about my feelings and how much was about the facts. Both were important to consider, but they needed to be balanced.

❓ Was I succumbing to Status Quo Bias? This is the tendency to stick with what’s known and comfortable vs try something new and different.

❓ What did I want to be true vs what was actually true? Asking this highlighted what was known vs what was an assumption. And offered insight into the challenges inherent in the known, and where we might need to ask for more information.

❓ Was this a forever decision? Reminding myself that while it would be a royal pain in the a** to change again if the new path didn’t work, it WAS an available option.

❓ How could I maintain a relationship with the person most impacted, and what could that look like? This was the hardest question for me given how much I care about one key person who was affected. But realizing I could maintain a relationship with them helped (slightly).

❓ What was in our long-term interest vs short-term? The decision could have gone a different way if we stayed focused purely on what might work now. But zooming out six + months offered a new perspective about what was best in the long run.

❓ What else was important to consider? This included people and relationships, time, energy, money and more.

Eventually we got to a decision point that we feel good(ish) about. It’s not how I hoped it would go at the beginning of the process, but it’s where we needed to end up.

That’s the hard reality about making hard decisions: they’re really damn hard.

I’m still a bit devastated about the outcome (while being excited about the future) but I do feel good knowing we explored all avenues and lines of thinking to get us to our end answer.

⬇️

[AFTER — written in April 2023]

Post Decision Reflections

Six months1 or so have passed since we made that hard call. As I re-read the section above, I’m struck with how much it all feels like just yesterday and also like it happened eons ago. Two things can be true at the same time.

And now we're here, months later, looking back to evaluate whether we made the ‘right’ decision.

In my estimation, the answer is a resounding “Yes...but it’s complicated.”

After we made the hard call, things swung into action. We set up new structures, connected with new people and adjusted to an entirely different way of being together. We had to navigate different systems, preferences and politics. All to say, there was an awkward adjustment period.

Overall, I think most would say it was the right decision for us at the time we made it.

Our options were limited back in October, and we believed this choice offered us the most opportunity for growth. And thankfully, that has turned out to be very true. We’ve had a productive six months with a lot of new friendships, skills and experiences.

And…

It’s had its ups and downs too.

By nature of the change, some things were shaken up that wouldn’t have been had we stayed where we were. Some of these shake ups were positive, others not as much.

It’s not be perfect, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that we’d all asked ourselves at times, “Did we make the right call? Was it worth it?”

We keep coming back to yes, but I want to normalize our human brain's propensity to second-guess. While we no longer dwell in the 'what if we chose X instead of Y?' it has crossed our minds on occasion.

And the person we were all most concerned about losing we are fortunately still in contact with, though much more sporadically. Six months later and I still miss her, as do the rest, though that sadness isn’t raw the way it once was. That human connection impact didn’t go away just because the logistics work better now, I remind myself.

Six months later, here are the key learnings I’ve had:

🧐 Decision-making is such a tricky thing: it’s nuanced, personal and often confusing.

We worry that we’ll make the wrong decision, or upset people, or regret our decisions. We can see pros and cons with each option, making the ‘right’ answer feel muddy and unclear. Caring, compassionate and curious people often struggle with decisions because of the possible impact to others.

🧐 The awful, pit in your stomach feeling that often accompanies a hard decision won’t stay forever.

With time, the heaviness lifts and you start to feel more like yourself again, while also gaining new perspective on the situation and what’s ahead for you.

🧐 No decision is perfect, but not making one is less perfect.

With any decision, comes the aftermath of that decision. Dealing with that can be hard too, but staying in indecision is much harder. Making the decision means you can move forward; waiting to make a decision means you’re…well…waiting.

Had we not made the decision we did back in October 2022, we’d still be sitting here trying to figure out what to do. And that’s not an empowering or productive place to hang out for long.

🧐 There’s simply NO way to have all the information you need to make a decision.

Life isn’t like that. There will inevitably be unknowns, assumptions and other variables that you will simply not be able to see before you make the call. Instead, I’ve learned that you can do the best job possible to get information and insights ahead of time, and then handle the unexpected when it arrives. This essentially means that you have to trust yourself, knowing that you will be able to deal with things you can’t yet know.

🧐 We are a resilient species.

While every decision has its corresponding outcomes, most of the time, despite how agonizing a decision might seem in the moment, with time we find our bearings, adapt to the new way forward and do the best we can with what we have. Or put another way — most of the time, it all works out in the end. (Yes, I know that’s not always true - as nothing is - but I’m speaking in generalities here).

Bottom line for us: the decision was hard to make, the outcome wasn't perfect, but I'm grateful we had the courage to make it. We couldn't have known what was possible otherwise. And now we're in a pretty good place.

One of the most common things I coach clients around is decision-making (because leaders at all levels make a LOT of them each day). Rarely are these decisions easy to make, and most leaders require time to consider the options and outcomes.

So please know that if you’ve been hemming and hawing around a decision, that doesn’t make you flaky or weak — it speaks to your character and thoughtfulness around evaluating the full scope of impact. But, staying in indecision for too long is a decision in-and-of-itself — and great leaders decide.

Like everything we talk about here, it’s a practice. The more you flex those decision-making muscles, the easier it will be to do it the next time and the time after that. Just hold those expectations loosely.

I hope this is helpful if you’re weighing a hard decision. Feel free to jump into the comments and share your own strategies for making hard decisions.