Reasoning
Sometimes, people do not know what they want, but they always know what they don’t want.
I consider myself a very cerebral person. I don’t leave much safe for belief, gut, or intuition. However, intuition is a way of taking all the life experience and turn it into a “feeling”. Therefore, intuition is an act of unconscious reasoning if you like. For example, when you need to bet on the result of a soccer game, you are not using really gut. You think about all the information you have about previous games, which are the players that will play, etc. and reason about what is the best outcome possible for those variables.
Obviously, there are different types of decisions, I don’t reason on them all in the same way. Additionally, some choices are recurrent, so you already have the answer for them. On the contrary, hard decisions are the ones that will have a medium/ significant impact in your life. These are the ones that may make you feel sorrow for taking the wrong decision.
Usually, when I’ve to take some hard decision, I genuinely think about the pros and cons. If the choice is binary, I try to think about the two outcome paths. Then, I try to see which of them looks more suitable for me (or to solve the problem, it could be worst for me but solve a familiar problem, for example). The more you exercise this, the more it becomes automated, almost unconscious. Sometimes people see this spontaneity as confidence, and it is not.
Sometimes, people do not know what they want, but they always know what they don’t want. This works well as a last resort solution for making decisions.
People tend to say that I am cold for try to think about everything logically. But in fact, I am not. On the contrary, I try to maximize the benefit for the involved in the problem. The only problem I can see in “thinking” is if you overthink in such a way that you postpone or become afraid of making decisions.
April 12 | 365 Days of Writing Prompts | Decisions, decisions: How are you more likely to make an important decision — by reasoning through it, or by going with your gut?
