Many times in Executive coaching the person I’m working with is facing a difficult choice. Do I take job A or B? Should I spend more time at work or with my family? How can I work with a difficult colleague?
I am a fan of decision science, but more often than not, this does not actually help the person to decide. That’s because they are wrestling with what Ruth Chang calls ‘hard choices’ – there is no right or wrong answer. However this is usually not what people want to hear. They want certainty… and an answer!
How then should we choose?
The thing about hard choices, Chang argues, is that yes, they are hard; but that is what makes them so liberating. After all, if there were only ever choices between the ‘right’ choice and the ‘wrong’ choice, then life would be very dull. In fact, there would be no real choice at all.
This is where the ACT distinction between choices and decisions is so useful:
Decisions can be “explained, justified and…supported by reasons”, whereas a choice
” is a selection among alternatives that may be made with reasons but not for reasons….”
In ACT, choices are where values can guide us. Values are freely chosen; free in the sense of there being no coercion, no ‘having to’ or reason-giving driving the choice. Therefore choices (or what Chang calls ‘hard choices’) are precious because unlike decisions, they are our chance to author our lives and to take a stand for something that we feel matters.
Instead of saying ‘A was better than B so I went with A’, we get to say ‘this is me, this is the choice I made and this is what I stand for’.
Working with ACT 
Nicely summarised Rob!
And it’ s got me pondering how some of those hard choices may become a little less hard once we’ve established what we’ll stand for, and do our best to keep that front of mind.