Sounds Like She Needed Decision Cards...

Someone asked advice columnist Carolyn Hax if a recent decision to turn down the offer of a "high voltage" job was a sign of depression.

Hax's reply wasn't bad, and amounted to this was a difficult, multifactorial decision and coming to such a conclusion about one's mental health requires weighing many things, including why you made that decision about the job offer.

Hax will sometimes also promote intelligent comments from people who follow her column, and one of those seemed particularly astute:

It's okay to have other priorities than living up to fevered steorotypes. (Image by Alejandro Ortiz, via Unsplash, license.)

What would you do with the extra life the FINE job frees up? Valuing that could reframe defeat into an accomplishment.

Rewarding work for more money can be a good life, too, so I'm not pulling for either side. Just honesty about what we value, and the true costs and benefits of each path.

Some decisions are wrenching not because one path is wrong, but because both meet different standards of "right." That could ease the pressure a bit.

That comment, valuable as it is for hindsight, reminded me of a decision-making tactic I learned from Jean Moroney's Thinking Directions called decision cards.

I think the technique bears mention because it can be hard even to know what the "true costs and benefits" are, or how to weigh them no matter how dilligent one is trying to be.

That technique might have made the choice easier for the writer, and given her peace of mind with her choice.

That technique is designed specifically to tackle such difficult, consequential decisions. Indeed, the example Moroney used in a course to teach the technique was ... evaluating competing job offers.

Here is a brief description:

Roughly speaking, you create a card for each option, putting positives on one side, negatives on the other. Then you systematically examine all of the negatives to translate them into equivalent positives for the other options. There's a bit more to it than that, but the effect is that you reconceive the decision entirely in terms of values, and then you can choose your direction while "holding all of the values with care."

This technique takes into account our two basic motivational systems -- motivation by love and motivation by fear -- and provides a way to resolve any conflicts between them, while also framing the choice in a way that lends itself to maximizing long-term values -- which may or may not be financial, depending on an individual's priorities.

-- CAV