Seven Ways To Conquer Indecision

Ever feel that gnawing pain in your stomach because you…just…can’t…decide?

Don’t feel bad: Even the greatest leaders suffer from indecision. What distinguishes the best from the rest is the ability to get at the fundamental cause of their mental roadblock—and then set dynamite to it.

Take my former client, whom I’ll call JC. This guy built a $400-million enterprise in less than a decade. Along the way, he never suffered indecision. He wasn’t rash or foolhardy, and on most days, he knew his mind and had the confidence to act on it.

That changed radically, however, after his company was profitable for seven consecutive quarters and his big backers urged him to kick growth into high gear. Although JC anticipated this directive, given how well his company was performing, it caused him to start second-guessing himself, and eventually brought on serious distress.

Plenty of executives I have coached had the same reaction JC did. It is so prevalent that I gave it a name so I could more readily help folks except it as non-career-threatening: I call it “Executive Yips,” like the kind a golfer suffers when sweating over a three-foot, straight-uphill put.

When golfers get the yips, they experience shaky hands, an inability to focus, or unsteady posture. Executives Yips grip business leaders with dread. After setting a course of action and narrowing the strategy to a few choices, they simply freeze up. Typically, in this dilemma, they’ll turn to various advisors and ask, “What should I do?” This never works since Executive Yips are never about making the correct choice but, rather, about being blocked from action.

To help JC, I had him consider what he would have to do before he could expand his business. The harsh reality: He had to replace his founding executive team—which included a bunch of JC’s college fraternity brothers, a group that was not up to the task. After JC finally dealt with the pain of telling those he truly loved that he would have to let them go, his Executive Yips vanished as suddenly as they appeared.

JC (and I) got lucky on that one. In most cases, folks who struggle with indecision have it bad. Because indecision is ultimately an action issue (rather than a cognitive one), the person gripped by it can look contemplative when, in fact, he is immobilized by fear.

Before I began working with JC, none of his colleagues knew that he was suffering Executive Yips; he always looked before he leaped, so they assumed he was just being judicious in setting a grander course for the business. No one guessed that he was paralyzed by concern for his fraternity brothers. Because indecision has no overt symptoms that reliably distinguish it from deep thought, JC could have languished in that state until his stakeholders roused him with an annoyed, “What’s up?”

Chronic indecisiveness can be one of the toughest psychological demons to banish. Here are seven ways to help you pull the trigger when a big part of you would rather do anything but.

Forget About Always Appearing Smart

Plenty of talented people, even those who have made a killing, go to exhaustive lengths not to appear dumb. (For proof, read Paul Allen’s recent autobiography: The man has billions but still craves respect.)
Actually, the smarter you are, the more likely your indecision is born of this anxiety. A kid building a startup can be wrong, fail, and feel no shame: “I’m a kid… what do you expect?” Not so for someone with an established reputation to protect. This fear of shame is pernicious, mainly because it’s useless. Let it go.

Trust Your Gut (It’s Savvier Than You Think)

As Malcolm Gladwell hammers home in Blink, mistrusting emotion-driven decisions can be dangerous. What you refer to as “your gut” is actually a wealth of knowledge marbled with empirically validated facts that you aren’t in touch with at critical crossroads.

Better yet, recall the breezy mantra: “If you don’t make the right decision, you can make the decision right.” If that sounds like cold comfort, set up a straw man—your gut—to absorb criticism if you end up making a poor choice. By making your gut the scapegoat, you protect your analytic self (your cortex) from blame, and prime it for triage, if necessary.

Beware The Paradox Of Choice

Really smart folks often fare poorly on multiple-choice tests if they view all the possible answers to a question rather than answer the question and then see if their answer is one of the choices. That’s because the better the test, the more similar “wrong” choices are to the correct one.

Similarly, getting outside perspective is wise only to a point. Shopping for advice does only one thing: It lengthens your list of possibilities, and that can grind you to a halt—or even make the choice you eventually do make less satisfying.

Prioritize Your Demands (And Fears)

People suffering indecision often get hamstrung by blurred boundaries. That’s precisely what happened to JC: He knew what to do—as CEO—to boost sales, but the need to protect his friends got in the way. Once he realized he had to be a CEO first and friend second, he pulled the trigger.

Sociopaths aside (and after 30 years in psychiatry I’ve met a few), people generally know what the “right” choice is. Yet they allow themselves, if only for a second, to ponder a lesser, lower path—and that slope gets slick and steep in a hurry.

If you want to snuff indecision in its tracks, repeat after General Churchill: “The only guide to man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.”

Accept The Limits Of Analysis

The road to hell, we’re told, is paved with good intentions, judicious decisions and exhaustively analyzed strategies. Wars have been lost owing to unexpected weather conditions; data-wielding sports scouts draft college players who fail in the pros.

Bottom line: Avoid paralysis by analysis. Act, examine your results, make adjustments, and move on. (This approach, by the way, is gaining serious traction in the world of technology startups. )

Flip A Coin

“When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.” The eminent psychologist/philosopher William James said this, and he was dead-on. If you feel like a hung jury that’s taken 18 successive votes and is still deadlocked, use a coin to break your psychic logjam.

Remember: Indecision is all about avoiding 1) the choice between two negative alternatives, one of which has to be adopted, or 2) the choice between two fairly equal courses of action. In both cases, the solution may well be heads or tails.

I am an executive coach and management consultant who, for over 25 years, was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry. During that time I maintained a private psychotherapy practice in Boston where I used techniques of behavioral and psychodynamic psychiatry to treat patients who were professionally successful yet self-defeating. I use the same skill sets today to design interventions that foster the success of entrepreneurs and C-level executives, particularly those at risk for career burnout or engaging in self-defeating behaviors. My interest in entrepreneurs dates back to 1986 when I realized that their spirit is the only naturally occurring inoculation against the disorders that cause successful people to self-destruct. I began writing about entrepreneurs in Inc. Magazine, and have taught courses on The Psychology of the Entrepreneurial Spirit at USC’s Marshall School of Business and UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. I welcome questions and suggestions.

The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.