What do I write about today? What t-shirt do I put on? Large or small, when I have more than one thing to choose between, decisions need to be made, and sometimes that can be baffling. Using a childhood decision-making tool can be the very thing, but with a slight twist.
For example, figuring out which t-shirt to put on can go something like this:
I have three t-shirts I’m choosing between. I don’t know if I want to wear my green one, a peach one or a grey one. If I use eenie-meanie-minie-moe (E-M-M-M), I can figure out which one to wear. If I say E-M-M-M, and it lands on the peach one, and I have nothing more to say about it–that is, I feel that it’s fine to spend the day in the peach one, I’m done. But, what if E-M-M-M lands on the peach t-shirt, and I feel myself go, “Eww, I would really rather wear the green one or the grey one instead”? Then, I put the peach shirt aside and start over, because I know that I have decided (remember, this is a decision-making tool), I don’t like the peach that much after all. It just wasn’t clear to me to begin with.
This time, when I do E-M-M-M, it ends up on the grey shirt. I then go through the same process that I went through with the peach t-shirt, except that if I object to the grey t-shirt, then I just know I was meant to spend the day in my green t-shirt.
What starts out as a fuzzy line–“I don’t know which t-shirt I prefer to wear today”–gets narrowed down and determined through a simple finger-pointing game.
BTW, if you start to figure out where your finger is going to land, because you use E-M-M-M so often, try mixing it up when you’re pointing. Do double-time pointing for a little bit, so that you don’t know where you’re going to land when you stop. Can you tell that I use this decision-making method a lot? I just wish it would have been okay to do it this way when I was a kid. Having the hard and fast rule of where you land is where you stay sometimes wasn’t much fun!
Barb's Blog--Pockets of Wisdom 