Decisions Through Confusion

There have been a lot of thoughts crowding my head lately, and I've been trying to figure out the best thing to do regarding a particular current situation in my life. My head and heart seem to tell me one thing, but a few people whom I repsect and trust are leading me to do another. What to do what to do...

Then I remembered an article I read a little while ago from the Harvard Business Review. It says that when there's confusion about a matter where we need to make a decision, the more we think and brood on it with our conscious minds, the more we assemble irrelevant information and get further away from the right solution. The author of this article refers to Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Blink', which proposes that even before we verbalise a decision, it's already been made in our subconsciousness. The verbalisation process simply confirms what we've already decided and finds the rationalisation for our decision. This is the power of our intuition.

So, says the author, the implication is to use your conscious mind to collect data regarding the problem/confusion, but don't consciously think about it to find a solution. Allow your unconscious mind to digest the information and then follow your gut feeling.

So I guess for me, it means to sit on this problem. Assemble information that relates to the issue but don't make a decision. Sleep on it and allow the decision to come to me. Okay, I'm going to try that now.