One of the most fascinating things about the power of a decision is how many channels it opens for us to take action. Quite frankly, that’s how I know I’ve truly decided about something. The way forward stops being about the decision. That isn’t a variable any longer. It’s the foundation.

In situations where the decision keeps coming up as an option, I know I still have work to do to get clear.

That’s not always as easy as we may think for a number of reasons. But one of the most challenging is when we don’t understand the decision we are making.

In several conversations this past week, working with people within the Decision Brief tool I’m developing, this became really clear.

Before any decision can be internalized in a way that is sustainable, it must first be fully understood.

What does that mean? This is where walls come into the conversation. Yes, I know, it’s an odd pairing, but bear with me because this insight is important and will prove helpful.

What do walls have to do with decisions? Let’s take a look.
 
What walls and decisions have in common
 
In the simplest terms, it’s about their function.

Decisions are what keep us functioning, focused, and safe. Isn’t that also what walls do?

Before you build a wall, you need to know its purpose. And the purpose of the wall is going to give you all of the specifications you need in order to build it in a way that ensures its success.
 
It is the same with decisions. The purpose of the decision is what ultimately defines it.

What’s protecting the foundation?
 
If you’ve ever done a home remodel or watched one of the many shows about them, you’ve experienced the dreaded discovery that the wall you want to take down due to our modern-day obsession with open concept living is, in fact, a load-bearing wall.
 
What does that mean? It means you cannot just remove it. You must take on the work of that wall another way before it can be removed. That can be with overhead framing or in other ways, but that wall distributes the weight of the entire structure across the foundation so the house can stand.
 
Load-bearing walls are more than just a wall. They do serious work, and they are the visible evidence that the structure has a foundation. What does that bring to mind? You might think of values—but it goes deeper. Your beliefs are part of the structure, too. They’re what keep the weight distributed and the whole system standing.
 
What’s protecting how you function?
 
But what about the other walls? When a structure is framed out, those other walls are doing just that. They are creating a frame. They are about what will happen within the structure. These are not as permanent, but they are as specific. You wouldn’t frame a kitchen in the same way you would frame a bathroom, a bedroom, or a carport. Once again, the wall’s purpose gives you the specification for it.
 
It’s the same with many of our decisions. They aren’t fully permanent, but they are meant to be defining. We have to understand what the decision is meant to allow us to do before we can fully understand it.
 
This is where binary thinking often becomes our nemesis. We think we are deciding between two options, but the real decision is about what the options are meant to make possible.
 
This applies to both our businesses and our lives.
 
What’s protecting how you stay the course?
 
The last type of wall is my current focus: temporary walls, or scaffolding. Sometimes, the decision we need to make is temporary from the onset. It is needed because of specific circumstances or conditions. When we approach those decisions with that level of understanding, it can be much easier to figure out which temporary measure will get the job done for us and allow us to reverse out of it when the time comes with ease.
 
What I find interesting with this type of wall is that we often carry guilt about them, as if temporary means uncommitted or weak. We need to leverage a bit of a pun here and reframe temporary decisions as purposeful and self-eliminating by design.
 
If you’re still reading and with me on this, thank you. I know this is not as straightforward as just giving you a five-step plan or a set of prompts to help you make a decision. But this is at the heart of the work I’m doing, and it is growing clearer to me every day that, before we can start, we need to get better at understanding just what it is we are deciding.
 
The question we’re really asking each time we are faced with a choice is this:
 
Do you know which kind of decision you’re making?
 
Because most people don’t. They treat load-bearing decisions like scaffolding and wonder why things collapse. Or they treat scaffolding like load-bearing walls and can’t let go when the job is done.

Reflection

One of my favorite insights from Andy Andrews is right on point this week.
 
“One way to define wisdom is the ability to see, into the future, the consequences of your choices in the present. That ability can give you a completely different perspective on what the future might look like.”
 
Decision models are important. Just as architectural models show us how things will function, they allow us to make critical changes before they become problematic. They give us that glimpse into the future consequences of our choices.
 
Here’s what I’d like to invite you to consider:
 
Choose one area of your life or work to examine what your walls (decisions) look like now.
 
That can be your work, your finances, your health, your relationships, your creative endeavors, your spiritual life – choose one aspect of the building that is your life.
 
Now look at what foundational decisions you have in place. Where is your load-bearing wall? How are you ensuring that the weight of what you carry is always coming back to the foundation?
 
Staying with that same segment of “YOU” – let’s look at your framing of it. How are you supporting it? This can be your processes, your habits, your daily practices – anything that is about your “how” for that particular “what.”
 
Finally, check whether you have any temporary walls or scaffolding in place for it. If yes, is it doing the job? Is it effective? Do you have any that it may be time to let go of? If you don’t have any, is there a place here where that would be helpful? This could be finding a mentor, a spiritual advisor, a health professional – any number of things can apply here.
 
Once you’ve examined that part of your life or work, step back and determine how any of the walls you have found might also be supporting other parts of you, and move there next.
 
Become the inspector of your own life by looking at the basic decisions you have already made before determining what the next ones need to be.  
 
Because until you do, you will keep building the wrong kind of walls for the life you are trying to live.

The post What walls can teach us about decisions appeared first on Kathi Laughman.