Couple of days ago I was listening to an old interview with “the world’s most feared negotiator”, Jim Camp.

Jim’s the guy the FBI called in to overhaul their negotiation protocols when a hostage situation in the Philippines went belly up and the FBI ended up losing two people.

The interview is full of stories, tips and tricks on everything from Jim’s high-stakes hostage situations, to brokering billion dollar business deals, to his negotiations with his ex-wife.  

It's jim-pressive stuff.

One part of the interview made my ears prick up:

All of our decisions are emotionally driven.

And anything we do to raise the fire of emotion, for example expectation of winning or expectation of losing, the fire starts to go up and decision making starts to falter, it starts to fall away.

And you can see it in people in panic mode absolutely make the wrong decision almost every time because they are absolutely panicked.  They have no place to go.

I agree with Jim that our decisions are emotionally driven.  Even the decisions I think I'm making logically are dripping with emotion behind the scenes.

Perhaps this rings true for you too.

If so, it pays to keep your eye out for a sneaky trap contained within this "fire of emotion".

To shed light on this trap, here’s a couple of lines from Oliver Burkeman's book The Antidote:

Consider any significant decision you've ever taken that you subsequently came to regret.

You felt the gut-knotting ache of uncertainty.

Afterwards, having made a decision, did those feelings subside?

If so, this points to the troubling possibility that your primary motivation in taking the decision wasn't any rational consideration of its rightness for you, but simply the urgent need to get rid of your feelings of uncertainty.

You could replace “uncertainty” in that passage with 1,001 other fires of emotion like worry, doubt, anxiety, stress, envy, frustration, impatience or grumpiness.

The point still holds true:

We often make decisions simply to feel better.

And therein lies the trap.  Making a decision in order to get on-the-spot peace of mind is clearly not the way to make sound, long-term decisions.  

Perhaps this sounds gloomy.  

But actually, it's good news.  There’s a simple way to inoculate yourself from this trap and make sure you're making decisions for all the right reasons.

It’s one of the principles I’ll be sharing in my upcoming Zoom webinar, Decisions on Demand.

During the webinar I'll also be sharing some of what I learnt during my 7 month certification training from the American "supercoach" Michael Neill and why a lot of my own decisions have turned from murky, heavy & all-consuming into simple & stress-free.

The webinar takes place Wednesday 19^th June at 10am PST/1pm EST/6pm UK Time.  

Whether you're in Helsinki or Hawaii, that's 21 hours from now.

The webinar will be free and it will last about an hour.

If you’d like to join, hit reply and I’ll send the Zoom details straight over.

And if you’ve got any questions, feel free to hit reply too.

That’s all for today.

 - Tom