How To Use a Coin Flip to Make Genuinely Good Decisions

Paralysis through analysis is a real problem for many of us. We get stuck in our heads, weighing up the pros and cons, trying to nail the Right Choice.

‘Trust your gut’, they say – and believe me, I’d love to take that advice. But my mind can get so wound up and create so much physical tension around a decision that I genuinely can’t tune into what my gut is telling me.

Of course, sometimes there isn’t a Right Choice. Sometimes, you just need to make a decision and tossing a coin seems as good a way to decide as any. Movie A, or Movie B? It doesn’t matter, so toss a coin.

But there’s another way to use the coin flip to make decisions which actually matter a lot. This method is less well known, but since discovering it, it’s become my go-to life hack when I need to cut through all the chatter in my mind and find out what I actually think and feel.

It goes like this: Label your choices Heads or Tails, then flip the coin as normal. See what the result is. And if your first reaction is, ‘Hmm, flip again?’, then you know damn well what you actually want. If you’re happy with the result, then you know equally as clearly what you should do next. In that precise moment, your true feelings about the decision break through the monkey-chatter in your head and you know what you really wanted all along.

Using this method has saved me from committing to jobs I didn’t really want but thought I ‘should’ accept; it’s taken me out on brilliant dates when I was getting nervous about them; and it’s helped me break through my own resistance to admitting when I need to ask for help in life.

It’s the Swiss Army knife of decision-making.

This trick isn’t going to guarantee you success with your stock options, but it is going to help you know your own mind — and your own gut — better in countless other scenarios when what you feel is actually what matters.

Give it a whirl — all you’re going to learn is your own mind.