The Way You Approach That Dilemma Is All Wrong — Here’s How to Fix It

Aga Bajer
7 min readJan 17, 2020
Photo by Burst on Unsplash

You have a dilemma. It keeps you awake at night. You can’t decide which of the two options is best. You weight the pros and cons and obsess about how things might turn out if you make the wrong choice.

What you don’t realise is that your starting point is off and that you are asking yourself the wrong questions. None of it is your fault. Here’s why.

Mental shortcuts

It’s true what they say: human beings are complex creatures. Our perceptions and behaviours are determined by a multitude of factors. Anything can play a role, from our DNA to our education. Based on this premise, it wouldn’t be surprising if we all had our unique way of approaching dilemmas. And yet, experience and science show that we don’t.

As the Nobel Prize Winner, Daniel Kahneman laid out in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, when trying to make sense of the world, we tend to take similar and predictable mental shortcuts.

Here’s a common one:

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Aga Bajer

I write about how to unlock the power of your company culture. Founder of CultureBrained™️+ The CultureLab Podcast Host — agabajer.com/podcast