The Decision Making Process: Gain CLARITY During UNCERTAINTY

In such uncertain times, a parents’ decision making process around school, masks, and playdates can feel overwhelming. What is the right thing to do during a pandemic? Is there even a right thing to do?

As a second wave sweeps through the world, there’s so much anxiety in the air. A lot of tension, a lot of fear, and a wide range of frustrations. 

The Decision-Making Process When There Are No “Right” Choices

The decision-making process is the same, whether you’re the parent who feels:

• upset because people around you aren’t honoring social distancing guidelines,
• afraid because the people around you aren’t wearing masks,
• frustrated because the people around you are wearing masks, or
• angry that your freedoms and liberties are being taken away

I want to share 3 mindset shifts to help you deal with these feelings of anxiety and overwhelm, especially in situations where tensions are high and opinions are at odds. 

Watch: The Decision Making Process for Parents

In this video, I uncover a decision making process to help parents make choices with confidence and clarity.

FREE WEBINAR: TO SCHOOL OR HOMESCHOOL THIS YEAR?

What Are the Right Choices?

So like me, you might be feeling that there are a lot of tensions in the air around what the “right choices” are.  It seems as if there are really big judgments no matter what you do – masks, no masks, school, homeschool, social distance, gather…

I have no opinion on what I think you should do. It’s, it’s deeply personal and complex.

I actually just want to zoom out a little bit and help us to realize why we may be receiving pretty severe judgments or even threats from people around these topics, and how we can view these differing opinions through a more compassionate and helpful lens.

We All Want to Make the Right Choice

Whether we’re talking COVID related stuff, social justice issues, or educational questions, we all want to make the right choice. There are layers to the truth. Different prisms of truth. Different approaches to different truths.

And what I’m suggesting is not that there isn’t an objective truth. It’s that there are many objective truths,  depending on which angle you look at that reality.

The objective truth is dependent on who you are, what your temperament is, what your belief system is, and all the things that make you an individual.

Everyone sees the truth through different lenses. 

So given these layering of truths, I want to offer 3 strong mindsets that perhaps you might want to adopt and embrace during this time of a lot of decision making and all of the uncertainty.

Use the 3 B’s to Make Decisions with Ease

These mindsets that help parents make decisions are mindsets that I wish we could spread out in the world. So that situations that are rife with tensions and disagreements could be diffused and brought down to a place that’s much more human, compassionate, and kind.

Mindset Shift #1 – Benefit Of the Doubt

The first shift in mindset to make is to offer the benefit of the doubt. I think this is such a crucial mindset that everybody has to develop. And for some reason it has gotten terribly lost.

Something has shifted in our culture that went from assuming the best, assuming innocent until proven guilty, assuming that people generally are good and generally mean well, assuming that situations will generally turn out okay…

To the assumption that people are selfish, crazy, and irresponsible. To a world where we rush to judge and assume the worst. 

I think the world would be a so much friendlier place if we all assumed that everybody is doing the best they can with what they’ve got.

Mindset Shift #2 – Believe in Yourself

Whatever decision you're making, the torture of conflict, doubting, questioning, and anxiety around it is actually much worse than making the decision and then working out the consequences of that decision. via @ParentingJunkieTweet This Our second B for the day, is to believe in yourself. And the reason I say this is because it is so easy to doubt ourselves.

If we’re going to offer everybody else the benefit of the doubt, we need to ensure we aren’t doubting our choices as well.  “Am I doing the right thing? Am I harming my children? Am I making a bad decision? Am I not being responsible? Am I being too anxious and too activated? Or over-protective?”

Take this opportunity to bolster your belief in yourself, your own intuition, wisdom, and capacity to think critically and make good decisions for your family with the awareness that

• you’re a unique individual
• as are your kids
• so is your partner
• so is everybody else

and so everybody’s going to make the best decisions they can.  And that includes you. 

Mindset Shift #3 – Be The You That You Want to Be

And our final B is to be the you that you want to be. What do I mean by this?

When there’s a lot of uncertainty and decisions to be made (like school, vaccinations, masks, and going out (or whatever decisions you’re facing,) it can be easy to get overwhelmed by all of the minutia. The small details.

I want to encourage you to tip the scales a little bit back towards focusing on who you are, focusing on your character, on what brings meaning to your life, on what identity you want to continuously create within yourself, on what energy you put out into the world.

Bring the focus back to developing our character, developing our own ability to show up to the challenging stuff, to the tough conversations, to the confusing information, to the research, to the planning, to the relationships from a place of high vibration – as the highest form of you.

The choices that we make on the outside often matter a lot less than the energy with which we make them.

Let’s be the people that we want to be in the face of whatever challenges and adversity we are facing.

How to Make the Right Choice About School

Now, one of those challenges that you might be facing is how to make the right choice about school versus homeschool.

This coming Wednesday, the 29th of July, I’m holding a free webinar to help you make a decision and get off that uncomfortable fence around the schooling options that you have for the year to come. 

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

See The Decision Making Process in Action

Instead of spending the next few weeks in confusion,  why don’t you spend one hour with me? It’s free and I will help you make that decision from a place of clarity, from a place of confidence, and you can really release all of those fears and move forward with a clear decision that you’re making for your family, whatever that decision might be.

Applying this decision making process to future challenges will help you to move from uncertainty to a place of clarity, compassion, and confidence.