Stuck on One Big Decision: How a Clarity Session Works — an article by Carl Argent

The short answer

A decision that will not settle is rarely stuck for lack of information. You probably know the facts by now. It tends to be stuck because two things you care about are pulling in opposite directions, because the possible loss feels larger than the possible gain, and because the thinking has quietly turned into a loop that circles without moving. Each time you go round, the decision feels heavier and you feel less able to make it.

What tends to shift it is not another opinion. It is being able to say the decision in one clear sentence, to hear your own thinking spoken aloud in front of someone with no stake in the outcome, and to notice which parts of the pull come from what you want and which come from what you fear. That is what a Clarity Session is built to do: one decision, a short preparation call, and ninety minutes of focused attention. The rest of this article is about why the loop happens and what tends to loosen it.

What being stuck actually feels like

It is usually one thing. Not a list of choices, but a single question that has been with you for weeks or months. Do I stay in this relationship or accept that it has run its course. Do I take the job or keep the life I have built around the current one. Do I say what I really think, or keep the peace. Do I move, or stop talking about moving.

You will have noticed the shape of it. The question arrives at odd times: in the car, in the shower, at three in the morning. You run through the same arguments and arrive at the same place, which is nowhere. Some days one option seems obviously right and you feel a small lift, and then by the evening the other option has reasserted itself and the lift is gone.

Meanwhile life goes on around the decision as though it were furniture. You are present at work and at home, but part of you is always in the other room, turning the question over. You may have begun to say hard things about yourself, that you are indecisive, weak, or wasting everyone’s time. It may help to know that this experience has an understandable structure, and that the harsh reading of it does not fit.

Why one decision keeps going round

People who feel stuck often assume they need more facts, more advice, or more willpower. More often, three things are happening at once, and none of them responds to those.

Two things you want are pulling against each other

Most decisions that refuse to settle are not a choice between a good option and a bad one. They are a choice between two things you value, where taking one means giving something up on the other. Security against adventure. Loyalty against honesty. The life you have against the life you can almost see. If the decision were only about what you want, it would probably have been made. It is stuck because you want both, and because each option carries a real loss.

The possible loss looms larger than the possible gain

There is a well-established tendency in how people weigh choices: a loss of a given size tends to feel considerably heavier than a gain of the same size (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979). When one option means giving up something you already have, that option will feel riskier than the numbers alone suggest, simply because you are holding the loss in your hands and the gain only in your imagination. This is not a flaw in you. It is how most people are built, and knowing it lets you ask a fairer question: not “which option feels safer?” but “which loss could I live with, and which gain would I regret never trying for?” Over the longer run, people tend to regret the things they did not do more than the things they did (Gilovich and Medvec, 1995), which is worth holding alongside the pull towards safety.

Thinking has turned into rumination

Thinking is supposed to move something. Rumination is thinking that has lost its forward gear. You go over the same ground, in the same words, with the same feelings, and each pass leaves you a little lower and a little less confident in your own judgement. Repetitive, circling thought of this kind tends to make problems feel less solvable rather than more, and to drain the energy that acting would need (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco and Lyubomirsky, 2008). It also gives a false sense of doing something. In truth you are avoiding the moment of choosing, and the avoidance brings a small relief each time, which is part of why the loop keeps running.

The people you talk to have a stake

You have probably talked about it. To a partner, a friend, a parent, a colleague. And perhaps you have noticed that it did not help as much as it should have.

There are understandable reasons. The people closest to you will live with your decision, and so they cannot help having a view about it, even when they are trying hard not to. A partner who wants you to stay hears the case for leaving differently. A friend who left their own job last year may be quietly hoping you will join them. A parent may want, above all, for you to be safe. None of this is a fault in them. It simply means that what comes back to you is filtered through their hopes and fears as well as your own.

You filter too. With people you love, you may soften the parts that would worry them, or leave out the parts that would make you look foolish, or argue the side you think they want to hear so as not to have the argument. By the time the conversation ends, you may have said a great deal and still not said the thing.

What is missing is not advice. It is a listener with no stake in the outcome, who is not going to flinch, reassure, or hurry you, and in front of whom you can say the whole of it. Being heard in that way, without judgement and without someone steering you, tends to be a condition for people finding their own way forward rather than a pleasant extra (Rogers, 1957).

What tends to move a stuck decision

There are plenty of methods, and you have probably tried the list of pros and cons. What follows is not a method so much as three shifts that tend to happen when a stuck decision finally moves.

Saying the decision in one sentence

A decision that has been circling for months has usually gathered a great deal around it. The question about the job has become a question about your marriage, your parents, your age, your sense of whether you have wasted the last decade. No wonder it will not settle. There is no single decision left to make. One of the quietest and most useful things that can happen is to reduce it back to a single sentence, one that you would recognise as the actual question. Getting to that sentence is harder than it sounds and often takes someone else asking, more than once, “and what is the decision, exactly?”

Hearing yourself from a step back

When you think about a hard decision from the inside, you are in it, and the feelings run the argument. When you are able to look at the same situation from a slight distance, as though at a friend’s dilemma or your own from a year away, the feelings tend to settle and the picture tends to widen. This is not detachment; you still care, but you can see the whole board. People who are able to take this kind of step back tend to reason about their own difficulties more clearly and to feel less overwhelmed by them (Kross and Ayduk, 2017). Putting a feeling into words, simply naming that this is dread or grief or plain longing, also tends to take some of the heat out of it (Lieberman et al., 2007). Saying it aloud to someone does both at once.

Choosing towards something rather than away from something

Underneath many stuck decisions is a quiet fight between two kinds of motivation. One part of you is scanning for threat and wants to hold on to what is safe. Another part is drawn towards something: interest, growth, a life that feels more like yours. Both are legitimate and neither is going anywhere. But decisions made mostly to avoid a fear tend to leave people flatter afterwards than decisions made mostly towards something they want (Elliot, 2006), even when the outward choice is the same. When you can hear both pulls and give each its say, you tend to make a better choice, and a choice you can stand behind later. Your own values and strengths are the instruments here. The Strengths Across Life Profile is one way of seeing what you already have to bring to whichever path you take.

How a Clarity Session works

A Clarity Session is a one-off conversation for exactly this situation: one decision, dilemma or question that will not settle, given proper attention. It is not a course of coaching and it is not therapy. It is built to be enough, on its own, for one thing.

It starts with a short preparation call of about twenty minutes. This is where the sentence gets found. You describe what you are carrying, and together we reduce it to a problem statement that you would recognise as the real question. That call also tells us whether this format is the right fit, or whether something else would serve you better. If it would, I will say so.

The session itself lasts ninety minutes, in person in Southend-on-Sea or online. It is not an interview and it is not a decision-making tool with boxes to fill. It is a focused, listening conversation in which my job is to keep you with the actual question rather than the twenty questions that have gathered around it, to reflect back what you are saying so that you can hear it, and to ask the questions that the people with a stake in your life cannot. I will not tell you what to do. That is the point, not modesty. You are the person who knows what matters most to you, and the work is to make that audible.

Many people arrive expecting to weigh options and leave having discovered that the weighing was never the problem. What was is different for everyone, which is why this is a conversation and not a worksheet.

What you leave with, and what you do not

You do not leave with a guarantee. Nobody honest can promise that a single conversation will settle a decision. What most people describe is quieter and more durable: understanding the problem more clearly than when they came in, hearing their own thinking more fully, and feeling better placed to do what is right for them.

Often there is also a small next step. Not the whole decision, but the one move that would give you information you do not yet have, or the one conversation you have been avoiding, framed as an if-then plan so that it survives contact with a busy week. Specific plans of this kind, where you decide in advance what you will do when a particular moment arrives, tend to be carried out far more reliably than good intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999). A first step that goes as planned also tends to restore something that months of circling wear down: the sense that there is a way through and that you are capable of walking it (Snyder, 2002).

And it may be worth saying that you can be kind to yourself about how long this has taken. Treating your own indecision with some understanding, rather than contempt, is not indulgence. People who can do that tend to recover from setbacks more readily and to take the next step more willingly (Neff, 2003). The loop has not been a waste. It has been telling you that the decision matters and that both sides of it are real. That is a good place to begin a conversation from.

Try it this week

Take a sheet of paper and write the decision as one sentence, in the form “Do I … or do I …?” If you cannot get it into one sentence, that is useful information: it may be more than one decision. Then, beneath it, write two short lines. The first begins “If I choose the first, what I would be protecting is …” and the second “If I choose the second, what I would be moving towards is …”. Read both lines aloud, once, to nobody. Notice which line was harder to write. You do not need to decide anything. You have only made the question smaller and more honest, and that is where a real decision usually begins.

Quick answers

If you want to take this further

Working together adds what an article cannot: your actual decision rather than a typical one, a listener with no stake in what you choose, and ninety minutes in which the question is kept in view until you can hear what you think. You can read more about the Clarity Session, and a free initial conversation is the usual first step. Where what sits behind the decision seems to run deeper, counselling is also available.

Sources and further reading

Elliot, A. J. (2006). The hierarchical model of approach-avoidance motivation. Motivation and Emotion, 30(2), 111–116.

Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (1995). The experience of regret: what, when, and why. Psychological Review, 102(2), 379–395.

Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: an analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291.

Kross, E., & Ayduk, O. (2017). Self-distancing: theory, research, and current directions. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 55, 81–136.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.

Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: an alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101.

Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Wisco, B. E., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). Rethinking rumination. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(5), 400–424.

Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95–103.

Snyder, C. R. (2002). Hope theory: rainbows in the mind. Psychological Inquiry, 13(4), 249–275.

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Becoming Yourself: When Your Life No Longer Feels Like Yours

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