The Life-Altering Decision-Making Technique I Learned This Week
By: Shaunta Grimes
Tags: Life Lessons, Self, Productivity, Goals, Life

On an absolute wild whim, I set up a call with a blogger I’ve been following when I realized I was going to be in her city last week. She’s a color analyst. I had my colors done.

I’ll write more about that later. Count on it. It was a lot of fun.

But there was something about the process that struck me and that’s what I want to talk about today.

Getting your colors done involves sitting in a chair with controlled lights pointed at you, in front of a gray wall, wearing a gray smock. The analyst drapes pieces of fabric over your shoulders, under your chin, and the two of you look at your face and decide how your skin reacts to the color.

What was the most interesting to me was that she didn’t just go color-by-color through the rainbow. She used colors that were very close to each other and compared them to each other. Is a cool, icy blue better on me, or a warm, peacock blue?

Sometimes the colors were so close to each other that it was difficult to tell them apart. Cool white or warm white? But when she put them against my face, there was a subtle, but obvious, winner.

She told me that it was all about perspective and that the human eye isn’t calibrated to see perspective very well. It needs something to compare.

Later, I thought, what a great lesson.

Life is all about perception. And perception is nearly impossible to see with the naked eye. You need something to compare it to. We all need something to compare everything with, if we ever want to make good decisions.

Cool, icy blue was okay on me until two seconds later when I saw that peacock blue literally made me look ten years younger.

When you’re trying to figure your life out, you can use the same technique.

When you have a decision to make, put it next to a couple of other choices. And then hold them up to your life and see what happens.

Let’s try it with my life.

I’ve been on the freak out lately about buying a house. I want to. I don’t want to. I’m scared to. I don’t want to be trapped. The housing market, though! But I love this house so much. I want to be able to paint walls and relax into a home without worrying about the rent going up or the owner selling it out from under us.

Looking at buying a house by itself, in isolation, just has me going around in circles. I could do this forever. Eventually, I’ll make a decision, but I might never feel good about it.

But what if I use the technique that the color analyst used on me?

What if I compare buying a house with renting one? Hold them both up to my life. My actual life, the way it is now — against a gray wall, in a gray smock, as it were. So no guessing. No idolizing or wishing. My actual, current life. Wrinkles, bags-under-the-eyes, perimenopause, and all.

What I see is that each option offers a subtle difference.

We’re likely to want to at least have the option to move to a city in four or five years, after Ruby (our youngest daughter) graduates from high school and is off to college. But we’re committed in the meantime to staying in our current town for four or five years.

Financially, we’re in a good position to buy the kind of house we want right now, because we live in this tiny town where the cost of housing is almost ridiculously low. If we lived in a city now, where houses were more expensive, that would be different, because I’m self-employed and I have large student loans, which complicate the mortgage process.

We have a large, complicated family and for at least the next few years having a big house with a lot of space is essential. It’s difficult to find an appropriate house to rent and almost constantly on my mind that if something happens with our current rental situation, we might not be able to find another house big enough.

If stability and the ability to pick up and move at the drop of a hat are a balance, right now I think my husband and I are slightly favoring the stability side. (We haven’t always.)

If I imagine buying and renting as drapes I hold up to the face of my life — I can see that neither is terrible, but one lights things up a little more. It feels a semi dangerous, which might just be because it’s new and not my status quo.

You (and I) can do the same thing with any decision.

Just choose a second option. What would you do if you didn’t do the thing you’re considering? If you don’t go back to school or you don’t move across the country or you don’t say yes or you don’t say no or . . . whatever. What’s the alternative?

Or an alternative. Because you can do this over and over. I could pull out another drape, right? I could compare buying a house in my current little town with pulling up stakes and moving to a city now. Or moving back west this summer. And on and on, if I feel the need.

So find your alternative.

Then put get honest about your life the way it is right now. The color analyst put me in front of a gray wall and in a gray smock so that she could control as many factors of the process as possible. Put your life in the same controlled atmosphere. No sugar coating. It is what it is, right now in this moment. No judgement. No shame.

Hold your choices up. See what happens.

If you go one way — what does that do to your life? How about the other way?

When the analyst held a color that had any orange in it up to me, my skin turned gray. It was the weirdest thing. I don’t want gray skin! Orange is not my color. I literally had no idea. I don’t actually wear orange much, so instinctively, I must have figured it out. But it was startling to see the response my skin had to the color.

If I held ‘buy a house’ up to my life and saw that it would almost certainly cause financial panic and be a massive burden that would lead to anxiety and stress and possible (or probable) bankruptcy — that would be the equivalent of gray skin.

If you hold your decision up to your life and get some kind of ‘gray skin’ response — well the choice will still be up to you. I can wear an orange dress if I want to. You can do what you want to. But at least you’ll go in with your eyes open.

But first, hold your other choices up.

When the analyst put that peacock blue color against my face, it was like someone had turned on the lights. My skin brightened. It highlighted the green in my eyes in an interesting way. It even made my cheeks rosy.

If I held ‘keep renting’ up to my life and it just showed me a path toward getting out of debt and building the kind of life I want — that’s the equivalent of a ‘light up’ response.

At the very least, before you make a ‘gray skin’ choice, you want to know if one of your other options is going to light you life up, right?

So, one more time:

Find at least one alternative to the decision you’re trying to make. So you have something to compare your choice with, for perspective’s sake. If you don’t do what you’re considering, what would you do instead? (Even if that something is nothing.)

Be honest about your life — put it against a gray wall, in a gray smock.

Hold your choice up to your life. What happens? Again — honesty matters here. If you have a friend or partner you trust to talk this out with, that might help.

Now hold the alternative up to your life. What happens?

Compare the two.

Do the same with any other alternatives.

Does one choice light up your life and the other give it gray skin? Or is one just a little bit brighter, a little bit more, than the other? The difference can be subtle.

Once you have the information, you can make an informed decision. And that’s the best kind, don’t you think?