Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:

Many of us treat how we feel about a choice as evidence of whether we made the right one. But our feelings can come and go while we continue to act according to what we have already decided.

---

Tomorrow morning, you probably won’t feel like engaging in your practice. And if so, probably not the next day either. But once you decide you are an _____, then you do what _____ does. You no longer have to decide, ‘Do I want to do _____ today?’ But rather, since I’m _____, I will do this.” – Seth Godin

For decades, I thought I had no passion.

Whatever I was doing at the time, there would eventually come a point when I did not feel like doing it. Sometimes the enthusiasm disappeared. Sometimes something else became more interesting. Sometimes the work became difficult, repetitive or simply ordinary, and I would begin to wonder whether I had made the wrong choice.

Perhaps this was not what I really wanted. Perhaps there was something else I was supposed to be doing. Perhaps people who had genuinely found their thing felt differently about it.

I spent years trying to make sense of this.

At some point I encountered Steven Pressfield and his idea of Resistance. Pressfield is an author and screenwriter whose books The War of Art and Do the Work examine the internal forces that stop us from doing work that matters to us. He calls that force Resistance, with a capital R. It can show up as fear, procrastination, self-doubt, distraction, perfectionism and other forms of self-sabotage. In Do the Work, he describes Resistance as something we can expect to encounter throughout the process of doing meaningful work, and argues that the answer is to recognise it and keep working.

I understood the idea and even recognised myself in it, but somehow I still didn’t quite get it.

I think the problem was that I continued to give my feelings too much diagnostic authority.

If I resisted something, I wondered what the resistance was telling me about the choice. If I was bored, perhaps I was doing the wrong work. If I dreaded beginning, perhaps I lacked passion. If I wanted to do something else, perhaps I had taken a wrong turn.

Only yesterday, I came across the Seth Godin quote above and it all finally made sense.

The decision and the feeling are two different things.

I could feel whatever I felt.

I could be tired. I could be bored. I could be enthusiastic one day and decidedly unenthusiastic the next. I could question myself. I could want to procrastinate. None of those feelings automatically required me to reopen the decision.

That was the part I had been missing.

Once I had decided, the question did not have to return every morning…

• Do I feel like writing today?
• Do I feel like exercising today?
• Do I feel like eating this way today?
• Do I feel like showing up in this relationship the way I said I would?
• Do I feel like doing the work required by the business I said I wanted to build?

There are decisions in life that certainly need to be reconsidered.

New information matters….circumstances change and sometimes experience reveals that a choice genuinely was wrong. But constantly renegotiating a decision because today’s feelings are different from yesterday’s conviction is something else entirely.

The word decide makes this even more interesting.

It comes through Old French from the Latin decidere, meaning “to decide” or “determine,” and literally “to cut off.” It combines de, meaning off, with caedere, to cut. The original sense carries the idea of resolving something by cutting through the alternatives.

To decide, then, is not merely to prefer one possibility….there is a cutting away involved.

That does not mean every decision becomes permanent or immune from examination. It means that a decision has to settle the question, at least for now, if it is going to guide what we actually do. Otherwise we have not really decided. We have selected an option that remains permanently open for negotiation.

I can see now how often I did that.

• I would decide and continue auditioning the alternatives.
• I would choose and continue asking myself whether I felt sufficiently enthusiastic about the choice.
• I would begin and interpret the inevitable difficulty of continuing as new evidence about whether I should have begun.

No wonder everything felt uncertain. Godin’s quote helped me see another possibility. Decide – then do what follows from the decision.

If I decide how I want to eat, every meal does not need to become a referendum on that decision.

If I decide that exercise matters to me, I do not need to manufacture enthusiasm before moving my body.

If I decide how I want to behave in a relationship, my irritation on a particular Tuesday does not have to determine how I show up.

And if I decide that I am a writer, the absence of inspiration does not revoke the decision.

I now understand Pressfield differently…

Resistance does not necessarily mean stop. Sometimes it means I have reached the place where the decision has to do some work.

There is something liberating about that because it releases us from the expectation that our feelings must continually cooperate with our intentions.

They won’t.

Motivation fluctuates…desire fluctuates…confidence fluctuates and energy fluctuates. A decision gives us something more stable to return to.

Perhaps that is also why Godin frames his idea around identity: once you decide you are an _____, you do what _____ does.

I don’t think the blank has to become another label we imprison ourselves inside. I think it can simply describe the person we have decided to be in a particular part of our lives.

• I am someone who writes.
• I am someone who takes care of my body.
• I am someone who keeps my word.
• I am someone who behaves this way when things become difficult.

We get to decide and that decision relieves us of the burden of having to make the same decision again tomorrow.

Strategic Reflection

What have you already decided that you keep putting back on the table every time your feelings change and what would it look like to act in accordance with the decision already made?

About Giselle

Most costly decisions begin with an inaccurate understanding of the situation.

I’m Giselle Hudson – writer and Pre-Decision Diagnostic Advisor. Most advisors offer solutions before carefully diagnosing the situation. I diagnose first — looking for what isn’t completely visible yet. Once we identify that, everything else becomes clearer, and confident, right action can follow.

Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, and the patterns that shape organizations, helping leaders make sense of complexity before committing significant time, money, or resources.

What’s the one thing about your business that frustrates you most — the thing that, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to resolve?