To the Protege: On Fences

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…

~ Robert Frost, American poet

In his simply rendered description of the healthy boundaries between friends and neighbors, Frost taps the part of our human psyche, which runs at barriers, differences, and otherness. And many of us agree that we want the walls down. This is true—unless the wall is a fence.

It's hard to underestimate the human capacity for indecision. At any given moment, each of us is torn between choices. The older we get, the less it seems everything can be reduced to Either/Or… Black/White… In/Out.

A young leader sat in my office exploring upcoming career decisions with me. The civil, emotionless, fact-based set of choices at the beginning of the conversation slowly dissolved into nervous confessions of confusion, questions of confidence, and discomfort with ambiguity. I offered to that young leader insights I have offered to hundreds of leaders before him. Here are a few of those insights that might be useful should you find yourself "loving a fence."

1. Start the "No List" Now. Remember the last time you saw a toddler, one of those "terrible twos," telling a full-grown adult NO!" I have seen young parents check the birth certificate at certain points, asking: "I don't know where she gets her defiance from?!" Well, it probably feels like defiance to a parent who's trying to load a minivan with both arms filled with groceries, backpacks, and a collapsible stroller, but it's more likely that the child is engaging in a very healthy process…self-differentiation. When a child says "no," there sometime saying "yes" to what they enjoy, who they are becoming, how they will do it one day. Each day we live, we have choices to make and practicing no is one way we clarify what is important to us and who we are becoming. I encourage adults to identify appointments, memberships, habits, people, etc., which no longer suit who they are and who they are becoming. While we cannot cancel every commitment today, we can begin the process of saying no and never signing up again.

2. Check the Weather Ahead, Pack Accordingly. None of us knows the future. People who say they can predict the future have something to sell, and the gullible want to buy it. However, each of us knows a lot about what comes next. For all the hype about how everything is changing so fast in the world because of technology or globalization or the Internet, the fact is: most of us are pretty stable and we don't change all that much. For the most part our name remains the same, birthday remains the same, winter is followed by spring, and you still do not like cilantro in your salsa. Guess what? Spring will follow winter 40 years from now, and it's likely you still will not enjoy cilantro on your cheese sandwich. These are known conditions. Through some reflection, you can name the known conditions in your future and increasingly weed out those things you do not expect to have in your future. It's like travel, we check the weather if we're going to a tropical climate and we pack our swimming clothes. If are going to a cold climate, you pack winter clothes. In the same way, by doing a future forecast of the known conditions, we might lighten the load we are carrying into the future accordingly. This thinking can be especially useful as we think about career, relationship, and investment decisions. I call this life forecasting.

3. Reduce Your Decisions to Two. It is common for us to think the jumbles of choices we feel we are being overwhelmed by are many. Often, it is a choice of this or that, but on rare occasion, a person will meet with me and describe a situation where they have three job opportunities. They may agonize between all three of these as if they are standing in the middle of a triangle. During such times, I make it my job to see if we can move them to one corner of the triangle while they consider the other two options, reducing the matter to a decision between two alternatives. The word "decide" simply means to cut in two, and while it is trendy to say "they're only both/and" decisions, I get quite a bit of distance down the road by forcing choices down to two alternatives.

4. Negotiate the Trial Period. Making big purchases can be nerve-racking. Buying a house or a car can be agonizing. The smarter car dealers, and even some mortgage companies, have offered trial periods as a way to help people through the paralyzing fear of high price tag decision-making. They say things like: "If you're unsatisfied in anyway, you have seven days to return the vehicle. No questions asked. Full refund." What if you offered yourself a trial period for your major decisions? What if you were able to say "I will try it out for 30 days?" I call this the "window shopping" approach to decision-making. You can try out the new idea without being responsible for the bill until later.

5. Decide and Decide Again. Sometimes, when there appears to be multiple decisions, the best starting place is to begin with a process of elimination. Reducing options to two begins by eliminating the least likely options, or by sequencing the choices in terms of first, second, and third priorities. This is the McDonald's approach, which could be called: "make your problem stand in line." At a McDonald's restaurant, although there are 20 people in line and persons 15 through 20 are very aggravated at the long wait, it would be unusual for a McDonald's employee to deal with angry customer number 20 while ignoring a customer just before them. We can take a lesson from this and make our choices stand in line also.

Not every decision will afford us the opportunity to enjoy this "advanced decision-making framework," however the more we engage decision-making in a self-conscious way, the more deliberate a person we become. As one friend said: "the world gets out of the way of the woman or the man who knows where they are going." Perhaps you don't know where you're going for the next 10 years, but if you can walk deliberately towards next Thursday, it's possible the world may jump out of your way.

#protege #forecasting