Choices and Consequences

It's been a weird old week this week.

There are often times when we're faced with making difficult decisions in our professional and personal life. This got me thinking about the subconscious processes that we go through before we embark on a difficult decision. I've been encouraging my students this week to consider difficult decisions they may have to make in the course of their college career and looking at formalising those subconscious processes before they make their decision. It has been a fascinating experiment.

It was kind of similar to what we did with the survival exercise - give your immediate response and then go through again listing all of the potential choices you believe you had and all of the consequences that could arise from the choices you make, perhaps even working it through with somebody else. The funny thing is, that unlike the survival exercise, even when we go to the trouble of listing the choices and the consequences we nearly always overide the outcomes based on our 'intuituion' about the situation. We always believe that our first reaction here is right when in matters of life and death (like the survival exercise) we're far more receptive to the opinions of other people.

I've relied on my intuition many times - but if I haven't made a conscious effort to consider all potential outcomes then how do I know I'm right? Perhaps we're far more adept at quickly considering all outcomes than we give ourselves credit for. I guess the real test with decision making is to leave the decision for a while and then return to it asking yourself 'Would I have made the same decision again? What might I have done differently?' And this brings me, rather neatly I feel, to the purpose of reflective journals. They provide the forum for you to have those internal dialogues out loud but still in a faceless environment where, if you wish, you can retain your anonymity.

I really hope that you will see the relevance of this exercise. Sometimes it can be very supportive to take the baggage about work and college that you carry around in your head and off-load it somewhere else.

I look forward to reading your blogs.

Thanks
Kerry