Fun on the Web June 14, 2010 Simple Yes No Tool

This is something Sheila used to tell me to do (along with the get out a giant clipboard and list the pros and cons) but I never could have put it into words as concise yet explanatory as this article.

Amazingly Simple yet Accurate Tool for Making Yes or No Decisions

By Kathryn Goetzke

A gift from my brother I have always loved.

I’m now embarrassed for my earlier post with my ‘decision matrix’ that many of you e-mailed me to check out. While I think it is still a valuable tool, and maybe can be done in conjunction with this new one, I think this new one alone is a pretty valid way to figure out what will make you happiest. It is so simple, yet incredibly accurate.

I learned it from a course I took this weekend with Alan Cohen, called The Coin of Destiny. If you haven’t checked out his work, I suggest you do, as he has profound insights in a number of ways. OK, so here is the new process to try out for making a decision:

Find a coin, and make heads=yes and tails=no or customize a coin using the tip at the end of this post.

1. Think hard about a decision you need to make.
2. Make that decision into a yes/ no question.
3. Think / feel that flipping the coin is the absolute answer to the question. Really take a moment to feel it.
4. Flip the coin and see where it lands.
5. BEFORE you go in to your head, feel your feelings when you see where it lands (i.e. if it lands on tails / no – how does that make you feel?).
6. If it makes you feel GOOD and POSITIVE, your answer ‘no’ to your question is correct.
7. If it makes you feel BAD and NEGATIVE, your answer ‘no’ to the question is INCORRECT.
8. Make the decision accordingly.

Point number seven is incredibly important. It is how you feel when you see how the coin falls, not how the coin falls. The heads or tails is not the answer, it is the feeling about the answer. This is so simple, yet after trying it you will see profound.

See, we get up in our head to make decisions when usually our heart and gut already knows. It is just very, very difficult to get to our gut as we have learned so many ways to ignore it, get into our head and analyze the situation. You can really use it in any situation. The key is to trust yourself and your own feelings, not those of others or what your head barges in and interrupts with analysis.

We did this live and it was a profound experiment. There were five people that had a question they shared live. We all flipped the coin and answered a decision internally, while the five got up and shared their answer. 80% of these people had the most difficult time even doing it without continually going to their head and debating it with Allen in front of the group. Yet when we got past all of it, 100% of the people finally acknowledged that the answer they felt in their gut was the right one and it made them feel good. It was very, very hard to get there.

Once you make that decision, things standing in the way can easily disappear when you put the energy you used in making the decision to solving the obstacles. Miracles will come from where you least expect it. Simply open your eyes.

Please try it and share your results. Compare it to other techniques. Let us know what you think.

Tip: You can also take a poker chip and write things that resonate more with you and give you the answer right away – HECK NO! and Without a doubt YES! Get creative and make it fun!