Fast decisions often stem from fear, which narrows perspective and limits the quality of long-term outcomes.

Slowing down helps surface values, tensions, and unseen factors before making critical choices.

A “self-clearness” process uses reflection and honest questions to reveal deeper interests.

Holding the “tragic gap” builds courage to delay certainty in the service of more-aligned decisions.

Under the pressure to decide, our human tendency is to speed up the process and allow what seem to be highly informed and well-meaning internal thoughts take over our internal dialogue. The internal voices are often coming from a reactive place in our psyche, focused on fear, control, and power. The reactive voices usually narrow our perspective.

Author, economist, and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman showed us how quickly we default to reactive-driven thinking in his ground-breaking best-seller Thinking, Fast and Slow. He describes a shrinking of our perspective at precisely the moment we most need to expand it. It is as if we walk around with blinders to anything other than our tightly held point of view,. With such restriction, it’s easy for us to miss the mark.

There is, however, another way, very different from our usual approach to decision-making, and it can be transformative. Let me explain this approach.

Author Parker Palmer (A Hidden Wholeness, the Journey........

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