Making Changes in Your Decision Making
Making Changes in Your Decision Making
Wednesday 15th March 2017, 5:30pm – 7:30pm
©David Garlovsky, March, 2017
On 15th March 2017 I convened a two hour evening session at the Sheffield Central Library entitled: Making Changes in Your Decision Making. Twenty two people were in attendance. In the session the groundwork was laid for participants to experience skills for ‘experiential decision making’.
Participants were introduced to key skills in how to make affective decisions in one’s personal and professional life, while considering their consequences. To understand how our emotions can influence the decisions we make, much as the outcome of our decisions can influence the emotions we experience.
One of the basic skills introduced was ‘active listening’. Listening that is more than just saying back the words of the other person, but rather to let form and be attentive to a whole felt experience/sense – not just a literal reflection.
The main principle of ‘experiential decision making’, to paraphrase a quote from Eugene Gendlin1, “to have the decision be of the kind that would make the interaction with the other person better. We seek to be in interaction that makes us and each other better.”
‘Experiential decision making’ can be done alone or with another. It is a subtle way to be touch with oneself in how change can take place in one’s decision process. The decision can be a freshly made unique living.
Yet, after the decision has been made, when nothing more can be done about it, one may be anxious. The decision doesn’t sit right. The other alternative wouldn’t have been better. Yet, perhaps… it would have been. This can be called post-decisional dissonance.
The procedure was introduced with specific teachable steps, which enables one to sense directly, in a bodily way, the whole of a decision/situation of the sense of it “doesn’t sit right” which allows itself to open up to experience a next step in the one’s decision making process.
The participants had smiles on their faces and went away with something to think about as they left. There was a vibrant buzz around the room during the breakout sessions and it was obvious that people were enjoying talking and listening to each other.
A second session will be held in the September 2017. Contact for details and to register.
1 FOCUSING AND DECISION-MAKING – Eugene T.Gandlin, PH.D. University of Chicago. 1970