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.....................Be your Own Worst Enemy: Taking Decisions Alone
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I consider that a lot can be gained from involving other people in your decision making, if they are involved on the right terms. There are some decisions, however, which you may make entirely alone. Perhaps they are so personal you do not wish to discuss them with anyone. Perhaps they need to be kept an absolute secret. Perhaps you feel it is time to make a decision completely alone, to reinforce your own feelings of responsibility and control.
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Reasons For Taking Decisions Alone
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There are good reasons and bad reasons for taking decisions alone. Some examples will help to clarify the difference.
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A decision taken alone for a good reason-establishing independence:
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Jenny had recently made a major change in career direction. She had been teaching and assessing disturbed children, but with the birth of her first child and the break up of her marriage soon afterwards, she felt she needed a complete change. She wanted to work with adults rather than children, since much of her emotional energy was now needed for her own daughter. For a long time she had wanted to study medicine, and she applied for a place at the medical school in her home town. She was accepted, and began the course in September following her application. Her daughter was two by then.
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Within a few weeks, it became clear to Jenny that studying medicine was even more demanding than she had thought it would be. In the past, she had always been a conscientious student, preferring to do more work than was expected rather than less. Now she found she had to miss lectures and rush through assignments without fully mastering their content. This preyed on her mind. She found she could not relax: either her daughter needed her or she felt she should be studying. Not only this, but she saw little prospect of the relentless pressure ending. She began to appreciate the extent to which it was assumed that a doctor's first commitment was to his work, not to his family. She saw years stretching ahead in which her daughter would have to take second place to her career.
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She did not want that for her daughter. She did not want it for herself. Subtly, she became aware that she was studying medicine largely in order to put meaning and purpose into her life. She faced the fact that she should be looking for that meaning in herself and in her relationship with her daughter, not in the relentless pressure of external demands.
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Jenny knew by Christmas that she was reaching a crisis point. She could not continue with medicine unless she was firmly committed to it. She had to decide once and for all whether she could, and should, make that commitment.
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Jenny made that decision on her own. She decided, in fact, to give up medicine, and pursue a less impressive but still interesting career in industry, one which would enable her to put daughter first in the evenings and at weekends, one which did not hold out any false promises of giving meaning to her life.
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There are two main reasons why Jenny took that decision alone. The first was that she had recently relied a great deal on other people's advice. This decision was just the latest in a whole series of difficult choices she had had to make. Because of her temperament and the suddenness with which some of the decisions had been forced upon her, she had depended heavily on a particular group of close friends. These friends had talked things over with her until the early hourse, had let her ring them up late at night, had been a constant source of good sense and support. Jenny felt that she owed it to them and to herself to show that she was now beginning to stand on her own two feet again.
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The second reason why Jenny took this decision alone was that she knew it would be very painful and could be a source of regret. She wanted to be absolutely sure she took full responsibility for it, that looking back she would never be able to blame anyone else or claim they had influenced her at a time of stress. She would have to live with the decision for the rest of her life and she had to be extra careful that she was making up her own mind.
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A decision taken alone for a bad reason__seeing other people's views as irrelevant:
Nick was about to take up a two-year residential place in business studies at a university some eighty miles from where he currently lived. He owned his own house, and needed to decide whether to sell it or let it. He had enough money saved to cover his living costs over the next two years, so he did not have to sell his house. Renting it out would just about cover the mortgage repayments.
Nick didn't be believe in asking for other people's advice. He consider his affiars to be his own business, and his alone, and did not think other people could tell him anything useful. It never crossed his mind to discuss whether he could sell his house with any of his friends, family or colleagues. In this, he was following a well-established pattern. Within the previous few months alone he had decided to apply for the place in business studies, to sell his car, to resign from his job, all decisions made without consulting anyone else.
It was not that Nick found the decision whether to sell or rent his house easy. He recognized the numerous considerations, such as the possible nuisance value of still being responsible for a property investment, the likelihood of being able to sell his house easily against the problem of where to store his possessions if he did so. It was simply that Nick could not conceive of its having anything to do with anyone else.___CSR
