A friend was stressing about which car to buy. A client was worrying about her son who was trying to decide what he should do with his life. As well as worrying about her son, she was also stressing about what decision he should make. Another was experiencing a lot of stress trying to choose when was the right time to retire. These are just a few examples. None of these situations are uncommon but they all have two things ‘in common’ – they all involve a level of stress and each involves a decision or choice. One of the most important aspects of finding your way through stressful times is being able to make decisions and choices that are right for you while creating as little stress as possible in the process.

People tend to use the terms decision and choice interchangeably and this means that the same amount of time and energy can be spent on decisions or choices that are not equivalent in importance. It is useful to differentiate between deciding and choosing for a number of reasons.

Firstly, this helps to create some sort of hierarchy of importance with respect to the amount of time and energy, and therefore stress, you allocate. When there appears to be a fork in the road and it feels like this is an important decision to be made, but you feel really stressed trying to make it, then chances are, there is a more important, higher level decision that you must make first. So, for the friend who was stressing about the choice of a car, there were bigger, more important decisions she needed to address first and this helped her see it was, after all, just a choice.

Secondly, it makes life easier if there are guiding principles for making the choices that life throws our way. One way of looking at this is to allocate decisions as involving the bigger, more important and profound aspects of life and see them as the foundation on which choices are made. Let me give you some examples. A fundamental decision that guides all the choices you make is the answer to this question “What is most important to you?” Or, to put it another way, “What do you value most in life?” Because this is at the high end of decision-making, these are not questions you can take lightly – yet many of us do, if we bother to consider them at all. There is a process for getting really clear on what you value in life and it takes time and needs to engage different types of thinking. But it also helps to identify how, and often why, you are creating your stress and suffering. It usually takes some guidance to follow the process and understand how to put the decisions to practical use. However, ultimately, it leads you to truly understand what gives your life meaning, in a way that is not just you making up your mind but the whole of you – body,mind and soul – is clear and engaged. This was the decision that both my client and her son needed to make first. Another important decision for her, was “What sort of relationships do you want in your life?” This is relevant because that decision impacts on any choices she made in trying to help her son – or really more accurately – supporting her son.

When I made the choice to study for my MBA, I did it without understanding or working on the more important decisions in my life so I used the rational thinking part of my brain and analysed the decision and the implications, finally making the choice. But, then, three quarters of the way through, I began to realise that what I thought I wanted to do with it wasn’t right for me. It became really hard work and only determination got it finished – only to feel in the end like it just didn’t feel as good as I thought it would! There is a quote from Albert Einstein that I discovered later on and it gives an important tip about making high end decisions.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

So the third reason for differentiating between decisions and choices, is for more effective goal setting. You do the process and decide what you truly value in life (not what you think  is important or what you should value) and then you choose your goals, based on those decisions. I rarely find people do it this way round. If not, like me, people often say that finally achieving a goal that they have worked towards somehow lacks meaning and they can even feel dissatisfied, or they loose the motivation or drive to keep going and it becomes really hard work or is never achieved. This is because the goal is either not aligned with what is important to them or, at some level, does not give meaning to their life – they only thought it would. The thing is, of course, you might still make a choice that ends up not feeling right for you, but it’s just a choice, and with your decisions and your understanding of yourself firmly in place, you can recognise it early and you have a guide on how to shift your direction.

The final reason, is that by creating in your own mind an understanding that life decisions are the high-end, guiding principles on which life’s choices can be made helps to easily sort out the more important choices from the less important. Barry Schwarz wrote a book called “The Paradox of Choice”, in which he brings together current research in the social sciences and shows how too much choice has been detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. He makes a counter-intuitive argument that eliminating or limiting choices can greatly reduce the stress, anxiety and busyness of life. Knowing when to put time and energy into choosing is a valuable thing. This means, from the decisions you have made, you understand which choices matter, and therefore need reference to those guiding principles, as well as some time and energy. You also understand which choices matter less and therefore are allocated to “does it really matter, do I need to stress, will either way be okay in the the end?”

So what about the man who was stressing about when to retire? Well, his decision appeared to be not when he should retire but – if he wasn’t a farmer and creating wealth for his family then who was he? What use was he? Really, there is a more fundamental and profound decision that needed to be made first – “what gives purpose and meaning to his life?” That is the most important decision any of us can make about our lives. And it is never too late!