Making Difficult Decisions

How to Make Difficult Decisions Copyright © 2009 By Ogbo Awoke Ogbo [email protected] Tel. +234 (803) 488 0518

Human Nature and Difficult Decisions My wife grew up in Auchi in mid-western Nigeria in the seventies. She recalls her childhood memories with great pleasures. The cold and windy harmattans of those days, the abundant cashew fruits, the exciting Ramadan festivities, the specially flavored Auchi Pidgin English, and the troublesome neighbor nicknamed J. J. Trouble that took his four daughters to fight anyone that messed with his affairs. However, none of those stories makes me double over as much as the one about the little girl in their primary school. Each time I recall the story, I just hold my ribs in preparation for another fit of laughter. During the day break, or while the pupils trekked home after school, they told stories on any subject of interest, or something that had happened to them within the week. This very day, one little girl, Bintu, who had a hard time eating the tough tendon of beef in her soup told the group, “My Mama give me rubber I chop. E no gree me chew; e no gree me swallow.” Translated from Auchi Pidgin, she said, “My mother gave me rubber in the name of meat. I couldn’t chew it and I could not swallow it.” Please hang on for a second; I am rolling in the aisle. Now, if you have ever tried eating that inelastic, white fibrous tissue in beef, you would readily understand Bintu’s dilemma. You keep chewing and chewing, hoping that it would become tender enough to swallow. At the same time, it is not getting any softer. You have a canine predicament: should you continue to chew or should you just close your eyes and swallow the meat, hoping that the stomach would decide what best to do with it? You are not sure. There is that sneaky greed in human nature at play here. Greed to let go of the unyielding meat. There is also fear. Fear that you would be missing something if you yield. There is also anger that an ordinary piece of meat should prove too stubborn for your dental abilities. People have spent thirty minutes chewing beef tendons out of indecision about what to do with it. Others have even spent hours, chewing beef tendons from lunch hour to close of work. I do not know the current Guinness Book of Records win for chewing beef tendons.

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The Bintu Meat Syndrome All the same, have you ever encountered a problem in your life that smacked of Bintu’s meat? You found it very difficult to make a decision. Either side of the decision had fearful consequences. Therefore, you became paralyzed. You could not swallow the problem. You could not chew it, either. I met a sixty-year old Nigerian-American woman in a conference in San Antonio, Texas. She had emigrated to the US decades before this time. Her strongest desire is to go back home to Nigeria because her passion for forty years had been to mentor younger Nigeria girls. Years have gone by but her pesky is that she is in huge debt of more than $300,000. Part of that debt, she said, was the education loan she took for her son’s medical college. Now, she has to pay back. She also has to confront the regrets of a life she never lived, a passion she never achieved. Tough decision. Titi is also suffering the Bintu’s meat syndrome (BMS). She is single, thirty-seven and a very committed church member. She wants to get married but the man to marry is not in sight. At the same time, she is worried that she is becoming old and losing her feminine attraction. Being a very successful and rich executive does not seem to help matters. She is beginning to think that maybe it is true that men are being intimidated by the success symbols around her. She owns a house with a private gym in Lagos, has a driver and cook. Titi’s friend, Lola, comes back from a trip to Canada and tells her of a potential suitor, Larry, a Bini man who has been living in Canada forever but wants to settle with a Nigerian wife. Lola said the man became seriously interested in Titi after she showed him her picture. Titi is in dilemma. Should she chew or swallow this opportunity? If she pursues the relationship, she would have to abandon everything she has achieved and relocate abroad. Besides, she is scared that she does not really know this man. The arrangee marriages to foreign-based Nigerians have had much bad press. What would she do?

What’s Your Most Difficult Decision? In the middle of this piece, I went downstairs for lunch. During the family’s after lunch chat, I asked everyone to share the most difficult decisions they had had to make. My seven-year old son spoke first, “It was the day I was told to choose between popcorn and shawama

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during a party.” I marveled that everyone has had his or her difficult decisions. My daughter said that it is not so much the difficulty in the decision as in accepting the outcome. Very insightful. She said she usually knows the answer to her issues but that she struggles to accept. My most difficult decision would naturally have been the decision to resign my job Shell, regarded as the best employer in Nigeria, to start my own consulting firm and coaching practice. It was a tough decision for me to resign from Shell the first time for another job in Chevron. And a difficult decision to leave Chevron back to Shell! Though I would share lessons from my multiple career transitions, I discovered those were not my most challenging decisions. The two most severe decisions in my life were similar. The first was returning the money I stole from my father when I was in Secondary school. I had lied to Dad that the school asked us to pay that money, only to corner it into my pocket. My spirit convicted me instantly. For months, my conscience tortured me to near insanity. It is difficult to hide anything with horns in a sack. The money became Bintu’s meat to me. Mustering the courage to tell my father, who trusted me so much, that I lied to him, was more than I could bear. I promised God that I would never steal again if he helped me go through it. Well, since repentance that remains in the belly means nothing, I exercised courage, confessed and returned the money to Dad. And I have kept my promise to God. The second time was when some researchers from Smithsonian Institute in the US came to research the chimpanzee populations in the Niger Delta. During a meeting with the team, I blurted out, somewhat like Peter during the Transfiguration, that I had seen chimpanzees swimming across the creeks in Twon Brass. Up until today, I do not know what made me tell that lie. Though I had been to Brass several times, I had never seen any chimpanzee swimming across creeks neither did any chimpanzee see me swimming across the creeks. My friend in Brass had told me that he did and I should have said so. The researchers believed me but doubted all the same. That night I could not sleep. Shame is truly heavier than a bag of salt! I confessed my grief to my wife. She simply shrugged and said, “Well, you know the right thing to do. Do it tomorrow.” Ouch! The next day, deflated and crest-fallen, I apologized to the researchers and told them that I did not see anything. It was a grueling decision but I recovered my honor. No married man ever feels sorry for having been circumcised at birth.

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Many difficult decisions occur in the areas of love and marriage, sibling control, relationships, career transitions, family inheritance, spirituality, and money. Making difficult decisions requires much wisdom and balance.

Ten Insights for Making Difficult Decisions Here are 10 insights for making difficult decisions. 1.

Choose your problems carefully. The shoe is made for the foot that will wear it. Moreover, the alcohol James drank should not intoxicate John. Is this situation really your business? The frog does not eat chilies for the lizard to sweat. You cannot help most people because they are unwilling to help themselves. If you put a cord around your neck, the universe will supply someone to pull it.

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Gather as much information as possible concerning the BMS but do not become lost in information. The goal is to make a decision, not just to gather information.

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Weigh the pros and cons carefully. Before I resigned from Shell to go into self-employment, I took my journal and wrote all the pros and cons. It helped me see the options very clearly. From the chart before me, I concluded that to remain in Shell was a risk; to resign from Shell was also a risk. Therefore, it made no difference which I chose but I saw that it was a greater risk to remain in Shell because I would end up trading my dreams for job security. Job security was not enough motivation for a purposeful life as great as mine is.

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What are the long-term consequences of each of your options? In ten years’ time, what would your life be if you decided for the MBA rather than take up the job waiting for you?

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How did others handle similar situations? Are there books, inspirational stories or someone you could talk to about it? There is no challenge of yours that someone else has not dealt with before. A lady wanted to choose between two suitors, Ladi and Charles. She reduced her analysis this way: Ladi had lots of money but no brain; Charles had brain but no money.

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What would you do in this situation? That was what she did. She went for the brain because brain could make money but money can never make brain. Difficult decisions could be so simplified. 6.

Is there some trusted person you can talk to today? One finger does not kill a louse. That is the beauty of having a coach. Do you have a coach? My coach has helped m resolve so many knotty issues. When I take a situation to him, his keen insights reveal certain angles to my situation that I had never even considered. If you surround yourself with empowering friends, you will likely make good decisions.

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Courage and action. Every difficult decision calls for nerve. Most times, the simple solution to a difficult decision lies in the audacity for action. Are you daring and brave? Cowards suffer seriously because of indecision. You take a man to your parents. They say you could only marry the man over their dead bodies. If you are sure about what you are doing (because parents are often right about their feelings concerning your intended partner), you simply need courage to take your stand. You also need the guts to live with the consequences of your decision, especially if it turns out worse that you expected. “Just do it!” says Nike.

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Retreat. When I am faced with difficult decisions, I escape the city for a quiet resort somewhere. Time out alone works like magic. Your greatest asset during crisis is a calm mind. A calm mind would take excellent decisions. When you board a plane, or during office emergency drills, the cardinal instruction is “In the event of emergency, don’t panic!” The probability of making a wrong decision multiplies when you panic.

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Trust your intuition. Your intuition hardly goes wrong. Listen to that quiet inner voice. My friend’s intuition told him to pull out his money from one of the “Wonder Banks”. He did not. Two weeks after that, SEC struck, and he has not seen his money two years after.

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Avoid making major decisions when you are emotionally down. Your down emotions could overwhelm your reason. When you are bereaved, recently divorced, failed a professional exam, just had a broken

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relationship, denied visa, lost your job to office politics or stymied in battle with court cases, do not make major decisions. I almost drowned in beer the day my second-to-the-last fiancée and I broke off. It took me another two years to attain the clarity of mind I needed to acquire the last fiancée whom I later upgraded to wife.

Today’s Exercise Find a quiet place where you could be alone for one hour. Take out your journal. Remember, there is magic in writing your thoughts down. Write on top of the page, “Today I am going to make the decision about …. (Complete what it is you must decide on). Write out the options open to you. Draw a table with three columns and several rows depending on the number of options you want to evaluate. In the first column heading, write “Option” in the second, “Pros” and the third column heading “Cons”. Arrange each of the options in the rows against the headings. For each option, fill in the pros and cons, bearing in mind short-term as well as long-term implications of choosing that option. Weigh the facts on your table. Which option would you choose? At the bottom of your journal, write: “I now decide to ….(fill in your decision). Finally, write down the action steps with deadline (e.g. phone call, letter or email, apology, medical check-up, a trip, etc.) you would take starting from this moment to act on your decision.

About the Author: Ogbo Awoke Ogbo is an author, international conference speaker and success coach. He writes with the African mind in mind and has regular television and radio programs in Nigeria. He has recently written a book, Financial Freedom for Every Youth, for the empowerment of African youth. He can be contacted on [email protected].

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