How to Make TOUGH Creative Decisions
If you’re working on any kind of creative project you will undoubtedly need to make a series of choices. In fact, this is an interesting way to view any and all creative processes: as merely a series of decisions. If you’re painting you need to choose the canvas, the subject matter, the colors, the brushes, etc. If you’re an entrepreneur you need to choose the services and products, the branding, the target audience, etc. If you’re bringing anything new into the world, whether it's creative problem solving or creative expression, you’ll need to make decisions.
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This decision making process becomes even more important when you scale your view of the creative process from individual projects up to your life as a whole. If you think about your day-to-day life as your primary creative project then these decisions are literally creating who you are. At this scale every decision you make is a creative decision. Some choices help you get deeper into a sense of flow within specific activities. Other choices will help align your entire lifestyle with a sense of flow across a variety of activities.
No matter what scale you choose, creative decisions will be an important part of the process. If you’re struggling to make decisions then you are likely struggling to feel engaged with your work. You may feel blocked from continuing your projects. You may even lose much of the motivation you had to start your project in the first place. In this article we’ll break down the processes involved in creative decision making so that you can pinpoint your problem areas. By the end you’ll know how creative decisions are made and you’ll know how to make them for yourself more effectively.
Preparing For The Choice
If you’re struggling to make a creative choice then you may need to step back and look at your preparation before the choice-making process has even fully begun. If you bring yourself to a creative choice feeling frazzled, overwhelmed, unsure, and physically unwell, then you will almost certainly have a hard time making creative choices.
On the most fundamental level, making creative choices requires brain power. Lots of research has shown that your brain uses glucose and other nutrients to make important decisions. If you’re feeling sick, or even if you’re exhausted or overworked, you’ll have a much harder time making decisions. Getting adequate rest and eating a nutritious diet is a surefire way to set yourself up for success with any decision making process. Things like depression and anxiety can also sap vital mental resources. Taking strides toward better physical and mental health will always move you toward more effective decision making.
When you start to see mental energy as a resource for decision-making then you can more easily see another important factor known as decision fatigue. This is when you have already made a long series of decisions which have exhausted much of the mental energy you need to continue.
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To avoid decision fatigue you can save your most important decisions for times when you know you’re feeling fresh and fully rested. If that isn’t an available option then taking a short but restful break can also help restore some of the energy you need to make effective decisions. Take a walk, meditate, sit in nature, or grab a snack.
Steve Jobs and other creative visionaries famously wear the same outfit everyday. Avoiding the decision of what to wear reduces the load on their mental energy. This allows them to direct that energy toward more important decisions. You too can reduce decision fatigue by reducing the amount of decisions you need to make each day. This can be done by using templates or making decisions all at once early in the week or the quarter. You can also delegate certain types of decisions to other people so that your energy is only spent on the decisions you want to prioritize.
Whether these precautions are taken or not you may still feel extremely overwhelmed by the decision you’re trying to make. This feeling of intense anxiety around a creative choice is a powerful suggestion that you may need to step back and reframe the choice you’re trying to make. Creative decision making will only flow effortlessly when your skills and your challenges are in alignment. If your choice is too challenging then you’ll feel stressed and anxious instead of engaged.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by a creative choice see if you can break the choice down into smaller more manageable choices. If you need to choose between 10 options, try pitting just three of them against each other and make a choice from there. If you need to choose a color scheme for a massive product launch, try choosing the color scheme for a smaller prototype first. Anything you can do to change the scale of the choice you're making will have a direct impact on how you feel when you attempt to make that choice.
Making The Choice
The simplest path toward making a confident creative choice is to know what you want. When you know your desired outcome, intended direction, or ideal situation, then the right choice will usually become much more obvious. Often what makes a creative decision difficult is not the decision itself, but rather the lack of clarity around the implications of each option.
If you really aren’t sure what you want out of a creative decision then you likely need more experience. You need to figure out which things you don’t want in your life, and which you want more of in your life. The only way to gain more insight into this is to have diverse experiences and then reflect on those experiences afterward. No one will ever have a perfect vision of the exact life they want to live. But the more you reflect on important and diverse experiences the more clarity you’ll gain on what that ideal life might be. Let’s explore a few pathways toward building up that personal insight.
There are three major pathways you can look toward to gain more clarity making creative decisions. The first is toward your own physical body. How does each option make you feel? When you really check in with your body it will almost always have some form of information to offer. You can generally break down all of your physical feelings and emotions into two distinct camps: positive and negative. Psychologists call this spectrum “Valence” and it refers to how pleasant any given experience is.
Check in with your muscles, your face, your chest, or your stomach. You can start to notice that considering different options will elicit subtle changes in how your body feels. These sensations arise from a mixture of neurotransmitters, hormones, and a host of other chemical reactions that are constantly taking place within you. These internal systems have evolved over millennia to help you make choices that enhance your survival and reproductive success.
Although not all creative decisions will directly overlap with the goals of biological evolution, its wisdom can still be extremely valuable. Checking in with your body is how people come to make intuitive decisions. It just feels right. Whenever you’re making a creative decision, do your best to get a sense of how your body feels about each option.
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You can pair these intuitive physiological insights with your cognitive logical reasoning. This is usually the main way people think about decision making. Logically weigh the pros and cons of each option using thoughts and mental projection. Our brains are uniquely tailored for creating speculative stories about the future. We can then judge the likelihood and the pleasantness of these imagined futures based on our potential options.
Put simply: What do you think is the right choice? This process requires an active imagination with real effort. It can genuinely be exhausting to reason your way through creative decisions and this is because logical reasoning uses up glucose and other resources in your body. Our intuitive bodily reactions happen in an instant—usually against our conscious will. By contrast, logical reasoning is incredibly slow. Your mind needs time to conceptualize each option, speculate the consequences of each choice, and compare these possible outcomes to one another.
Finally, you can check in with what other people think you should choose. This is distinct from what you think other people want. That would fall back into the logical reasoning territory. Instead, you can actually ask other people for their opinions. You can also look at how other people have made similar choices, or even how other people have judged similar choices. This social input is also incredibly tied to our human evolution. We are keenly aware of our own status and social standing. Humans are essentially a hive species, so the opinions of others can weigh a great deal when making important decisions.
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On their own each of these paths toward clarity can be effective. But when united you can have a much more powerful decision making process. Look toward how your body feels about each choice you have before you. Spend time fully thinking about the potential outcomes of each option. Consider the social wisdom of the people around you. If you can do all of these relatively quickly without too much stress over the “perfect” decision then you may excel at what is known as Satisficing. This is when you make choices that are “good enough”. You’ll be satisfied with the outcome because “it’ll do”. Research shows that this Satisficing approach often leads to more well being and satisfaction with the outcome of your choices.
Unfortunately, some decisions come with so much weight that satisficing isn’t the most helpful option. When that happens you may need to employ Maximizing instead. This is when you need to fully weigh each option to its fullest so that you can make the most ideal choice possible.
Accepting The Choice
When making creative choices it’s important to keep in mind that it is virtually impossible to know anything with 100% certainty. You’ll need to flirt with the unknown when making the choice, and you’ll need to accept that the outcome will always be a new experience. You can never step into the same river twice. Keeping this uncertainty in mind can make it easier for you to be compassionate with yourself if your decision results in an unfavorable outcome.
Most choices can simply be undone. Ctrl-Z is by far my most used shortcut. Part of accepting a creative choice may involve accepting that the choice must be redone. Even when trying again isn’t an option it is important to understand that nothing is permanent. Eventually there will be an opportunity for new creative choices. At some point the outcome of your creative choices will fade to make room for new situations, new experiences, and new creative decisions.
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Practices
Motivational Interviewing is essentially a better pros/cons list. This is best done with the help of a qualified coach or therapist, but you can absolutely go through this process on your own if need be. In this exercise you make a pros/cons list for choosing a particular option. This is when you list out the benefits of choosing it and the drawbacks of choosing it.
Next, you outline the pros/cons of not choosing a particular option. This second portion will help you gain even more understanding around the implications of a particular choice. This will lead you to have four quadrants to weigh for each option.
Make a visual representation of each pathway toward clarity. List out how your body feels for each choice, what your thoughts are for each choice, and what others suggest for each choice. This will help you visualize the terrain of your creative choice much more easily. If you’d like to get quantitative with it you can even assign a score to each choice to more easily compare and contrast between them.
Introduce an element of chance. This is best done if you truly cannot identify an edge toward any of your options, even after extensively examining each of your pathways toward clarity. If you’re fully ambivalent toward a particular decision then you can simply flip a coin. If you have more than two options then you can have multiple rounds of coin flips, or you could even assign numbers to each option and roll some dice.
Importantly though, when you’re mid flip or mid die-roll pay attention to what you hope it lands on. This may give you just enough insight to know what choice you actually want. If you still feel nothing while the coin is spinning or the die is tumbling, then go ahead and choose whatever they suggest.
You can accomplish everything within this concept map on your own, but the support of a qualified and enthusiastic coach can ensure that you accomplish them with the right amount of support at a pace that works for you.
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