After the Decision . . .

Decision made, now what?

Maybe you sat down, pulled out a sheet of paper or opened a Word doc, created two columns and made the proverbial list of pluses and minuses. You might have talked with a level-headed friend who offers sound advice. Or just gone with your gut.

Somehow, you arrived at a decision. Whew, that felt good. For about ten seconds. Until the very next thought arrived: Now what?

The average adult makes about 35,000 decisions every day, many subconscious but still thousands that involve intentional thought. Scientists at Cornell University estimate we make more than 200 decisions each day around food alone. Am I feeling oatmeal and blackberries this morning, or is this the day for peanut butter toast? Dare I walk down the street to Voodoo Doughnut?

Most of those choices don't require much follow-through. You either make the oatmeal or you don't. Buy the Maple Bacon Bar or not. Other decisions carry far weightier implications and require strategy, resources and stamina to bring to life.

There's often a gap—and sometimes a chasm—between the thing that's been decided and the reality of carrying it out. Navigating that space requires different skills than those needed to make the decision in the first place. Without some plan for the doing part, it's surprisingly easy to end up with a decision that remains mostly theoretical.

Back to school

This became newly obvious to me when I finally got serious about turning the novel that had been living in my head for years into actual pages.

The decision itself involved a sober assessment of whether I had the time, talent and resources to make my idea for a novel into an actual novel. I weighed my freelance workload against the time fiction writing might require. I considered whether I had the discipline to sustain an unfamiliar creative project over a long stretch of time. And I tried to evaluate honestly whether the kind of writing I had spent years doing would translate at all to fiction.

That process led to another decision—enrolling in an online Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing through UT El Paso. The last time I had been in graduate school was 1990, when I earned an MBA. This time, I'd rely on the faculty at UTEP to help me relearn how to be a student, expand my fiction-writing skills and create accountability through the graduation requirement of a book-length manuscript.

Imagining vs. doing

Founder and president of Living on Full, a coaching and advisory firm that helps people navigate complex career choices, Jennifer Jackson often sees this distinction between vision and execution among her clients.

"Seeing the opportunity for a pivot in your life and imagining what might be possible, that's a very creative and visionary space," she says. "Being able to execute against it is a far more diagnostic and process-oriented space."

The two modes require different muscles. I enrolled in grad school partly because I suspected I couldn't do this alone. Most significant decisions eventually require other people. If you relocate, you may need a realtor. To divorce, likely a lawyer. To improve your parenting, perhaps a therapist or trusted friend. Even deeply personal choices rarely unfold entirely in isolation.

It's a process

Decisions themselves can feel cinematic—a light bulb flicking on overhead, clarity arriving all at once. Even if we've been inching toward them for months or years, the moment of deciding often feels definitive. But the emotional arc afterward is usually less glamorous.

Excitement gives way to uncertainty. Then logistics. Then repetition. Closely following the thrill of "I'm doing this" is often the less exhilarating question of how, exactly, this thing is supposed to happen.

Jennifer describes three elements involved in translating a decision from theory into reality: emotional reckoning, action-taking and checking back in.

"What I see in coaching is that people underestimate the weight of the emotional shift," she says.

Even decisions we believe are rational can destabilize us a little. They move us into unfamiliar territory where we feel less expert, less certain and less in control. Can I really write a novel? Can I change careers in midlife? Have another child? Every significant decision eventually asks us to reconsider who we believe ourselves to be.

Then comes the doing.

That's where structure matters. Do I already possess the skills required for this thing, or do I need to develop them? Who will help when the momentum fades? What systems or routines might keep the effort moving forward?

The part of Jennifer's framework I find most useful is the idea of checking back in.

She references an idea from Adam Grant, author of Think Again, about approaching our ideas and beliefs more like a scientist conducting experiments than someone executing a flawless master plan.

Every experience becomes data. You let go of the fantasy of a perfectly linear path from decision to outcome and instead pay attention to what's actually happening. What's working? What isn't? Where is the energy? Now that I'm doing this thing, do I want to keep doing it?

That mindset became particularly useful during the MFA program while juggling classes alongside work and the rest of life. Some classes energized me and sharpened my thinking. Others felt largely disconnected from the practical goal of writing a novel and existed mainly as hurdles to clear.

There was also self-doubt. Many of the other students had spent years writing fiction or poetry. Some were published. Some had won awards. I had spent much of my career writing copy for Coke, features for a daily city newspaper and marketing brochures for universities and hospitals.

Why even try?

Somewhere in the long middle of implementation is where the "why" starts to matter.

After the adrenaline of making a big decision fades, what remains is often repetition: showing up, continuing, tolerating uncertainty, doing the work anyway.

Part of my motivation for writing a novel, if I'm honest, may simply be that I dislike unfinished things. I write even tiny tasks on a daily to-do list for the pleasure of crossing them off later. I said I would write a novel, and I wanted the satisfaction of completion.

But another part was growth. At 60, it felt strangely invigorating to be back in graduate school, moving toward something unfamiliar. Now, with my first novel due out in a few months—and increasingly suspecting there may be a second one in me—I find myself curious about what happens next.

There can be a lot of ground between decision made and implications realized. Most decisions probably never arrive at some neat point of completion anyway. They evolve, stall, redirect and intersect with other choices we make later on.

Perhaps that's the point. Each decision becomes part of a longer thread, connecting us to different experiences, different people and eventually different versions of ourselves.

Decisions offer the temporary relief of clarity. Carrying them out tends to reintroduce ambiguity. Increasingly, I'm trying to appreciate both.