What Makes a Good Decision?

(Reader Q&A, Part 2)

Photo by Marcus Urbenz on Unsplash

Reader Question:

How do you regain self-trust if your discernment has frequently led you to decisions that had bad outcomes?

This is the second part of an answer to this reader question. In Part 1, I shared some practical ways to regain trust in yourself after making decisions that frequently led to bad outcomes. This week, I want to talk about a watershed realization I had, which led me to grow in confidence much more quickly. It has to do with what makes a decision good - it’s not what I used to think. At the end, I’ve included more practical exercises you can do to start re-building self-trust. Next week, we’ll talk a more about making decisions well - aka, not in a stressed-out way! If this interests you, you might want to join as a paid subscriber - only £5/month right now.

Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been through some hard things in life, things that I would not have chosen, were it up to me. And sometimes it has felt like those things were my fault somehow - that if I had only made different choices, different things would have happened. Of course in some sense that’s always true - when we alter our actions, the outcome is altered. But sometimes it isn’t true. 

Years ago, I found myself bemoaning a situation to my husband, upset at what I thought was my fault. “But you still made the right decision,” he said. His response startled me. How could that be true? If I had made the right decision, bad things wouldn’t have happened. 

Only, that’s not entirely true. My husband pointed out that given the information I had, I made a good decision. If I were in the same situation today with the same information available, I’d make the same decision again, because the outcome wasn’t knowable. 

This was a new idea for me. Did I need to re-think a lifetime of beating myself up over what I thought were bad decisions? Did this mean maybe I actually could trust myself and my ability to make good decisions?

The Good Is in the Choice

What does it mean to “make a good decision”? When we use that phrase, we usually think that a good decision means good things happen. A good decision means there’s a good outcome. But is it possible to make a good decision and end up with a bad outcome? I think the answer is yes.

Let’s put on our grammar nerd hats for a moment.

When someone says, “I made a good decision,” what is the adjective good referring to? It’s describing the decision, the choice. The choice was a good choice. And what makes one choice good, and another choice bad? Usually, it’s the object of the decision: the thing that is chosen.¹ 

So when someone says, “I made a good decision,” that means, “I chose something good.”

It does not actually mean, “something good happened as a result of my choice.” That may or may not also be true, but it’s a distinct thing.

Here’s an example:

• I chose to share my apple with a friend. (Did I make a good decision? Yes. I chose sharing.)

• We both got food poisoning. (Did something good happen as a result? No. We both got ill.)

Here’s another example:

• I chose to make dinner for friends. (Did I make a good decision? Yes. I chose generosity.)

• We had a lovely time together. (Did something good happen as a result? Yes. We had fun.)

In both cases, I chose to do something good: I made a good decision. But in each case, there were different results: some good, some bad. Those results aren’t unrelated, but they are distinguishable. 

When we talk about whether or not we’ve made a good decision, it’s important to name what we’re calling good. Is it the actual thing chosen, or the outcome of our choice?