Finding Your Marbles
A Mental Health Survival Guide

For me, one of the worst aspects of depression was how much it affected my ability to make decisions. I’m a “take charge” kind of guy, and I felt absolutely helpless when I was so paralyzed by my depression that I couldn’t even make simple decisions. And tough decisions? Forget it!

Last summer I was reading “What Color is Your Parachute” by Richard Bolles, and I found a great decision making tool. With a bit of tinkering, I have come up with my own version of the tool, and now I use it all the time to help me make tough decisions. I wish I had it 5 years ago when I was still depressed.

Decisions, Decisions

Decision making is a hard subject for people with depression. Put together a distorted sense of reality with an almost total lack of energy, and you don’t have a great mix for bold decision making. I usually avoided decisions until I absolutely had to act on them, and then I would just decide on the course of action that seemed to be easiest. It’s not a great way to run your life and I was always moving from crisis to crisis. That created more stress, which made me more depressed, which made it even harder to make decisions, and, well, you can see where this is going.

The thing that I like about the decision tool from Mr. Bolles’ book is that it takes most of the hard work out of decision making by helping you understand the elements behind the decision. Once you understand the implications of your decision, and what elements of the decision are important to you, it makes it a lot easier to make those tough calls.

The Decision Making Tool

The decision making tool from “What Color is Your Parachute” is something called a prioritization grid. It sounds very technical, but it is actually very simple. It’s not a new idea; people have been making decisions by ranking their priorities for years. However, the magic behind Mr. Bolles’ version of the grid is its simplicity.

What You Will Need

1. A Pen
2. A Prioritization Grid, which you can get here and print out. (If you don’t have a printer, it only takes a couple of minutes to draw the grid out by hand)

How It Works

This trick can take a couple of hours, depending on the difficulty of the decision you are making.

The prioritization grid helps you make a decision by getting you to pick out all the different issues and elements of the decision, and then it helps you rank those elements in order of importance to you.

So lets use an example. Say you want to decide whether you should go out for dinner with friends tonight, or if you should eat in. Never an easy decision. But, lets apply the prioritization grid to this problem and see what happens.

The first thing to do is grab a piece of paper, and write down any short thoughts that come to mind when you think about this decision. Try to get 10 independent thoughts. For example, I could be worried about my budget, so one thought would be “budget.” Then, I might think that I have not seen my friends in a while, so I’d write down “I miss my friends.” Try to keep the thoughts as simple and as clear as possible.

Next, once you have your thoughts written down, put them in a list and number them from 1 to 10. Then, write each thought on the diagonal lines on the top of the prioritization grid, next to its appropriate number. (so if thought #1 was “budget” write “budget” on the first diagonal line.)

Here comes the fun part. Now that you have all your thoughts written down, go to the top-left corner of the grid, to the square containing “1 2.” This is where the trick comes in. Look at thought #1, and then look at thought #2, and decide which one is more important to you. Don’t worry about the other thoughts, you are only concerned about #1 and #2. Circle the number of the thought that is the more important of the two.

Then, move down to the square marked “1 3″ and do the same thing for thoughts #1 and #3. Continue through the whole grid, making sure to concentrate only on two thoughts at a time.

When you are done, you will have a bunch of circled numbers. Now, go down the grid, and count up all the times you have circled #1, and write that number next to thought #1. Then, count up all the times you circled #2, then #3, and so on. When you finish, you will have values for all 10 thoughts.

Next, go to the 5 numbered horizontal lines below the grid, and on line 1, write down the thought that has the largest number of circles. Underneath it, on line 2, write the thought that has the second largest number of circles, and so on for the 3rd, 4th and 5th thoughts.

Now you have a list of the top 5 elements of your decision, ranked by how important they are to you. I usually reduce this list to the top 3 elements if I can (it really depends on how strongly you feel about the decision), and then go through them one-by-one and try to see how they influence my decision.

So, for example, if your most important thought was “I miss my friends” then you really want to go out for dinner, and it is important that you do so. However, if your second thought is “budget” you might be concerned whether or not you can afford to go out. Here’s where the decision comes in. If you will get a lot of value from seeing your friends, see if there is something you can do about your budget. Maybe you can order a cheaper meal, or use some money that you were going to spend on something else. Or maybe your budget won’t allow you to go to dinner, but you can invite your friends over.

First Things First

The most important thing to keep in mind while using this tool is to always keep your #1 thought as your main concern for whatever decision you are making. It is this thought that is most important to you, so focus on it first. For example, in the dinner scenario, say you really wanted to see your friends, but you allowed a lower-priority thought to convince you to cancel your plans. This will only make you frustrated, because your main priority is to see your friends. I’ll say it again because it is so important; always concentrate on your highest priority thought first, then deal with the other ones afterwards. That way, even if you make a decision that does not satisfy your number 1 thought, at least you will be comfortable that you know why you made the decision. It’s all about understanding your choices and being comfortable with them.

Stick With It

Finally, once you have made your decision, stick with it, unless there are circumstances beyond your control and you need to change your plans. Try not to go back on your decisions; that will only frustrate you down the road. If you use this tool properly, and you make sure that you keep your focus on the factors that are most important to you, then the first decision that you make will usually be the right one.

Depression Life Living Personal Growth

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Depression, Life, Living, Personal Growth. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment or trackback from your site.

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