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Jayne Dawson: Decision time
I don't know about you, but I'm terrible with decisions. The way I do it is this. I make up my mind instantly, in a nano-second, faster than the speed of light. Faster than my own brain. I am super decision-maker.
I do this entirely on instinct, but instinct, as we all know is not to be sniffed at. What we call instinct is actually informed decision-making based on years of experience, frustration, fury, tears and wrong, wrong, wrong turns.
So I do this, and this is all good, or it would be if I stopped right there, but I don't. Super decision-making is actually only stage one of the complete decision-making process.
After this comes stage two, which is when I ignore the fact that I know full well I have already made my decision and go into Agonising mode.
Agonising mode can lasts minutes, hours, days, years. There are decisions I tried to make back in the 1980s and I still haven't worked through the Agonising stage yet.
Overthinking
These need not, let me be clear, be big, life-changing decisions. Though I accept that what constitutes a life-changing decision can be an interesting philosophical debate. I, for one, could easily be persuaded that life can turn on a cardigan choice, for instance.
But it can be an exhausting process, being locked in combat with my own brain, doing the "Shall I, Shan't I ?" thing in an endless loop. I believe it's what's known as "overthinking"
It happened to me only at the weekend, though I stress it wasn't any fault of mine. Who in their right mind offers shoes in two different heel heights?
Anyway, there they were: two different colours, two different heel heights, four possible permutations. I felt ill.
Of course, I had known instantly that the answer was black in the lower heel height. Isn't the answer, in real life, always black in the lower heel height?
But at one point, deep into the Agonising stage, the answer became to buy all four pairs. For a moment there, it seemed worth the ten-year addition to the credit card bill just to break out of the cycle of indecision and despair.
What did I do? Well, they were 140 each so I went to New Look and bought some in brown for 16.99 instead.
They're okay, not the best thing I ever spent 16.99 on – I think that was probably that set of 1950s beads from the jewellery fair that time – but I'd rather be standing in them than Nick Clegg's shoes right now. Wouldn't you?
Poor Nick. To go from the purity of powerlessness to the man who is facing the equivalent of the four shoe permutation. It's a tough one.
I pity him I really do because, cards on the table, the one thing you can expect when you decide that your soul belongs to the Liberal Democrats is not to end up in government making actual decisions that count, isn't it?
At least until such time as the voting system changes, Lib-Dems are pretty much the pub talkers of the political world, aren't they? Always ready with the answer in the certain knowledge that no-one is ever going to ask them to actually solve anything. Always ready to roll their eyes at the silly bickering of the other two "old parties".
Tough
But all that's changed now and Nick will have had lots of advice this past week on how to deal with this cruel new world in which he finds himself. There will have been those urging him to be tough, not to enter the negotiating room in his suit and leave it in just his underpants, so to speak.
People have been examining his body language, picking over his choice of words, wondering if Charles Kennedy wouldn't have made a better fist of it, and never mind the drink thing.
Psychology has been invoked. I came across a good one at the weekend – are you an Asker or a Guesser?
Askers just go for it, fully expecting told be told to please go away. Guessers never ask for anything unless they are pretty sure they are going to get the answer they want. I wonder how that has been playing out round the negotiating table?
And no doubt there has been advice from wife Miriam, who I like to imagine telling Nick that she is fully occupied with her full time job as a high flying lawyer, looking after three boys and cooking top quality paella, so could he please just take his For and Against lists off the dining table and make up his mind. Please.
But it's pretty clear Nick has gone into Agonising mode and is very much in danger of overthinking the problem. His first instinct clearly told him that blue and yellow were a great combination for government, but he has hesitated, which could be his undoing – and ours.
If government was a shoe shop in Leeds, Nick would definitely be standing in the middle of the store right now asking random shoppers: "Does this suit me?"
I feel for him, I really do. I know the agony of accepting the decision you have made, I know what it's like when it goes wrong. I can't get those shoes out of my mind.
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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