Note: This is the third in a series of blogs related to a book project I’ve been writing for some months. The book is called, The Slightly Older Person’s Guide to Graceful Aging.
Let’s say you have what feels like a big decision in front of you. Where do you start? Most of us will probably start by attempting to think our way through the decision. That’s completely understandable, but it’s probably not where the best decisions you’ve made have come from.
When people describe decisions they’ve made, especially those that worked out well, how are they likely to describe what happened? How often do you hear someone talk about a recent decision and say, “I thought it was the best thing to do”?
How often do you hear them say, “It just felt like the right thing to do”? In my experience of both listening to others refer to their decisions, and my own experience in making them, the response about how it felt carries infinitely more weight.
This may be because when you use your felt response as an indicator, you’re going on a physical sensation of relief, one that we’re all familiar with.
That felt sensation is your own innate wisdom passing you a physical signal we all value: you can relax now. You did the right thing, and your job’s done.
That’s the strange thing about decisions that are felt rather than thought. There’s no inclination to revisit and re-hash them because there’s no need to second-guess yourself. They just feel right.
Of course it makes sense to bring the thought process into a decision, but it’s neither the right place to start, not the right place to end up. Starting or ending your decision process with thinking isn’t the best way to go because it can be so easy to get too wrapped up in thought, lost in thought, and then confused by too much of your own thinking.
If you were deciding to marry someone, how useful would it be to focus completely on thinking? If you were to think through a list of all the reasons you should or shouldn’t marry this person, would that be enough? At some point, if you wanted to make the right decision, you would have to depend more heavily on feeling than on thinking. It’s a good example of a decision that has to be felt through.
Here’s a good way to bring this to life. Let’s say you’re driving in your car and you have two GPS systems. One can only tell the truth, and the other tells the truth some of the time. Which system are you going to depend on if you really want to get to your destination?
It makes a lot more sense to depend on the system that can only tell the truth. The fact is, you do have two GPS systems that are built into you. The system that runs on thinking tells the truth some of the time. The system that runs on the felt sensation you receive from you body always tells the truth, because that’s all it can do.
It can take a little while to develop trust in the system that runs on feeling. Be patient with yourself. In the meantime, try to recall good decisions you’ve made in the past. Did they give you a sense of relief after you’d made them? The only decisions that can give you that relief are felt decisions.
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