Moving at Your Decision-Making Pace
This essay was like a lightbulb for me, and you can replace workplace clockspeed with any influencing clockspeed. Your family has a clockspeed. Your partnership has a clockspeed. Whatever you allow to influence you has a clockspeed.
So if you have been working for a company that moves at X pace, and you’ve been laid off, your brain tells you that you need to have everything figured out within X pace. Even if you could figure it out at a different pace. Your brain has been wired to think that you need to move faster or slower than you technically need to move. Part of your job, once that job is done, is to uncouple your brain from that job and remember your pace.
The same goes for marriage or any breakup. You don’t have to figure out your next move at the relationship’s speed. You need to move at your own speed. If you’ve been making family-building decisions quickly to be ready for the next cycle, when you take a step back, you also need to take a step back from that decision-making pace.
3 comments
Oh, the phrase “tunneling” really got me. I felt that bigtime with IVF and then adoption. GO! GO! GO! There is no alternative path I can think about if I don’t give myself any time to do anything else! I also like the phrasing of decisions gaining urgency they didn’t earn. They say you shouldn’t make big decisions when there’s been a big upheaval, this meshes with that!
I will admit that I’ve kind of scoffed when people have told me not to make big decisions for a year. But this paragraph in the article changed my mind. “Fast clockspeed plus a taxed brain is not a recipe for good judgement. It is a recipe for a rushed choice you then have to live with.”
I am definitely finding that limiting the decisions I need to make has been right for me this last month. I’m going to remember that if someone tries to rush me into anything. I also like the idea of writing down all the decisions, and dividing future decisions up to daily, 90 day, and one year. And that making as many small decisions in a day still gives me the semblance of control. That article came at just the right time. Thank you, Mel.
Ever since I learned that the only reward for hard work was…more work, I started operating at my own speed. I could rush if I felt it necessary, but usually there was no reason to do so. It irritated my husband that I only had a sense of urgency when it came to being places on time…which he definitely did not care about in the slightest.