Disclaimer: I found this works great for me. Both in my personal dilemmas, and whenever people asked for my opinion (that was their first mistake 😊).
I believe it will work well for you too. No guarantees.
(While I have been using this intuitively for many many years, I first heard the formalization of it in a TEDx talk by Prof. Yossi Yassour, with roots in Behavioral Economics. Link below).
It works best for two-or-more options, yes/no dilemmas, and requires little effort.
Questions such as:
Should I buy this property? Or should I continue looking?
Should I sell this property? Or hold on to it?
Should I accept this job offer? Or the other job offer?
Should I leave my current position?
Should I cancel accept the invite to the event? Or reject it?
(If you have another dilemma you'd like to try, and you're not sure how to apply – please – contact me and let's give it a try.)
And here it is – in a nutshell, and to use Prof. Yassour terminology, you should use Passive Decision Making instead of Active Decision Making.
Let's take the case of the two jobs offers.
Suppose you're fortunate enough to have two job offers on the table, and you're not sure which one to take. Both have certain advantages - and other disadvantages. Not trivial to compare. You like both. But you need to make up your mind.
What you should do is the following...
Imagine you just got a phone call from company A, regarding job offer A, telling you they are really sorry - but the job offer is no longer relevant. So effectively, you must take job offer B. Are you relieved? Or do you feel you've missed the opportunity of you life?
Now, flip the situation. Imagine you just got a phone call from company B, regarding job offer B, telling you they are really sorry - but the job offer is no longer relevant. So effectively, you must take job offer A. Are you relieved? Or do you feel you've missed the opportunity of you life?
I dare say, in most case, you'll have clear "feeling", intuition, of which of these phone calls you prefer to get. If you prefer the phone call from company A... then you probably prefer the job offer from company B, and vice versa.
That's it. Use Passive Decision Making (a "what if someone made the decision for me" approach) - would you be relieved?
(Link to TEDx talk, in Hebrew, with English subtitles. Slightly more than 16 minutes, but listen in x2, it still makes sense)
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