Drawing lines is easy. Knowing where and when to draw them is hard.

From time to time, work and life present us with difficult decisions that leave us feeling uncertain about where, exactly, a line should be drawn.

• When do you find a new job?
• When do you change majors? Or careers?
• When do you pull the plug on a stalled project?
• When do you end a relationship?
• When do you let go of a dream?

These decisions are hard because all available options involve significant unknowns and risks.

Rarely is it obvious that there is zero hope of success for that troublesome project. Seldom is the current job 100 percent bad, and the new opportunity guaranteed to be 100 percent good.

If that were the case, these decisions wouldn’t be hard, but in the real world they are, so how can we make them with more confidence?

One: Stop Throwing Out Half the Data

We are taught to take feelings and emotions out of the equation. This is a mistake.

Feelings and sensations in our bodies are data. Emotions cannot be filtered out as if they were pollutants muddying the clear water of reason. The mind doesn’t work that way. Real-world decisions are holistic. If anything, emotion plays a dominant role, whether we recognize it or not.

If you pay attention to how you feel, you can access a different, but essential dataset: the nonverbal knowing of our right hemisphere and peripheral nervous system. You can read this vital data by “trying on” the various options while being very attentive to what happens in your body.

Yes, it sounds mushy, but you have to learn to feel.

What To Look For

You might feel tension or a sensation of stress or resistance. Or, you might feel a sense of settling. You might feel your body relax, almost like the anxious energy is draining out of you. 

You might notice your pulse quicken with hopeful excitement when considering a move that seems simultaneously scary yet also full of possibility.

You might feel tears welling up when you imagine letting go of something cherished that just isn’t what it once was. That feeling is grief. It is the sorrow of longing to hold on, coupled with the knowing that you can’t.

This is not magic or woo. It is a way of incorporating the wisdom held in the part of our mind that cannot speak. It is a way of accessing information that you collected unconsciously, information that cannot be expressed in words or numbers.

Two: Calibrate Your Instruments

With this new data in hand, you will have taken a crucial step toward a more complete way of making decisions, but you are only halfway there.

Can you trust your measurements?

None of us can be confident that the information we have collected is reliable without understanding how our mental and emotional instruments are calibrated.

Deviations from Truth

If you put a fifty-pound weight on your bathroom scale and it reads fifty-five, and then swap it out for a hundred-pound weight and find that it reads 110, that’s bias (a ten percent bias, to be specific).

A bias is a predictable deviation from truth.

(I’m pretty sure that's what is happening with the scale currently on my bathroom floor).

Good News / Bad News

The bad news is that human brains are riddled with biases. The good news is that, like our bathroom scale, we can correct for biases once we become aware of their presence.

Since much of this new data comes in the form of emotions, one way to calibrate is to better understand our own emotional intelligence.

For example, in the EQ-i 2.0® model of emotional intelligence, I have very high Empathy. Absent any context, this is neither good nor bad, but knowing helps me calibrate my emotional experience in different situations.

Using EQ to Calibrate

In situations that involve disagreement or conflict, I know that if the other person’s feelings and perspective have a true value of 100 decision-weighting points (a unit of measure I just made up), it will register 115 on my empathy scale.

I tend to consistently overweight the other’s perspective. My EQ-i results predict it, and real-world experience bears it out.

A person with lower empathy has to make extra effort to consider the feelings and perspectives of others. I have to make extra effort to honor my own.

Accept Some Uncertainty

A fundamental principle of measurement systems is that we are always left with some level of uncertainty. The same is true with our most important decisions.

We are all calibrated a little differently. No gauge is perfect, and no one is free from bias. But with a little self-awareness and self-understanding, we can get better at accessing and calibrating the continuous flow of data from our feelings and emotions, balancing them with facts, data, logic, and reason, and making more effective decisions.

If you’d like to learn more about how emotions work, what they really are, and how to develop and use your emotional intelligence, check out our online course, Emotional Intelligence Essentials.

Until next time,
Greg