ONE PERCENT BETTER

Sharing small mental health & performance coaching insights to help you win each week -- all in 3 mins or less.

Why not start the week with some generosity?

A simple gesture to let someone you know that you're thinking of them can go a long way in staying connected and feeling grateful.

I've made it simple for you, copy & paste the below to a friend or family member:

"Hey – hope you had a great weekend and all's well – just wanted to let you know I was thinking about you. Saw this and thought you might enjoy reading it: https://one-percent-better.kit.com/count-me-in."

Ok...onto this week's OPB...

Better Decisions, Rubber Balls and Two Way Doors.

“Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and spirit — and you’re keeping all of them in the air. Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls — family, health, friends, and spirit — are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered.”

Brian Dyson, CEO of Coca-Cola (1991 commencement speech).

Dyson has teed us up for a great way to think about not just life, but decisions, and in this week's OPB we’ll be blending this concept with a tool for decision making popularized by Jeff Bezos.

Both metaphors offer frames for how to evaluate decisions and can help you overcome decision fatigue, anxiety, or indecisiveness.

When Choosing from Several Options

Rubber vs Glass Balls

Many of my clients are making important executive decisions or have major life decisions to make. Thinking about which decisions you can bounce back from, and which ones you can’t, can help you get clear on what can happen next, and pull you out of paralysis analysis.

For example, many parents that I work with talk about how their son or daughter isn’t hitting their potential. They reach this conclusion by conflating how academic grades are a marker of that potential. Kid gets C’s but has the potential to be getting A’s…so, he’s not meeting his potential. They fear that if this goes on for too long, their kid won’t get into college, and when you boil it down, they’re just scared of what that may mean for him and his future, and what that says about their parenting.

But grades are rubber balls.

If your kid isn’t doing great his freshman year of high school, all is not lost. Do you remember what grade you received in your freshman year history course? No – of course not, because it doesn’t matter compared to larger, more consequential, decisions you made.

Say you feel the need to change jobs, roles or career paths. These would all probably be rubber ball decisions, but they feel like glass balls. If you take a role you don’t like, or leave a role you like for the prospect of a role you’re not sure about, each of those decisions can be reversed or changed – rubber ball – you can bounce back.

Pro Tip: if you play out this exercise on decision making, you’ll probably arrive at the same conclusion I have – everything is pretty much a rubber ball – but the consequences of certain decisions feel greater than others. Those decisions, the heavier, more consequential decisions, can feel like glass balls. Here’s a trick to test out just how rubber the decision you're about to make is: play out the worst case scenario…but importantly, do it sequentially. If you can’t or won’t be able to tolerate the second, third, or fourth level of consequences, it’s looking more like a glass ball.

Framing things as rubber vs glass balls can help you put things in perspective more quickly and ease whatever tension you may be feeling in deciding between “this” or “that”. Best heed Dyson’s advice, and invest in the things that you simply won’t have a chance of redoing or getting back – like being with your family or regretting not prioritizing your health.

When Making Single Decisions

One Way & Two Way Doors

For making single decisions, it might be helpful to onboard Jeff Bezos’s framing for “one way versus two way doors”. For decisions that likely carry little consequence, or from which iteration can lead to accelerated learning and achievement, think about these decisions as two way doors – doors that allow you to come back and forth between spaces.

Good examples of two way doors might be hiring, launching a new service, raising your prices/rates, asking for a raise from your boss, choosing your next vacation, opening up a new line of credit, or going to college (yes, college is a two way door).

For the decisions that carry more consequence, will be harder to pull off, and even harder to reverse course when decided upon, view these as one way doors – once you enter, there’s no turning back.

Good examples of one way doors might be hiring a c-suite executive, taking out a mortgage or refinancing, having a baby, getting married, committing (or getting caught for committing) a crime, having surgery, deciding to open a lawsuit, or moving to a new country. All of these decisions have lots of moving pieces to them, all with second and third order consequences that are hard to predict, and difficult to manage. They can be walked back in some cases, but often will be far harder to walk back then to just consider if it’s a decision worth making in the first place – ask yourself – is this a door you want to be opening?

To-Dos

Take a moment this week to think about that one choice you’ve been mulling over for a long time. The one that you can’t seem to stop thinking about. Was it that fight you had with your kid? Spouse? Was it that mistake you made that you can’t seem to get over?

Now – with the benefit of these frames – run through them in your mind and decide: