How to make a difficult decision?

Some decisions keep you up for weeks: close or keep going, stay or leave, accept or refuse. Your head goes round in circles and gets nowhere. Deciding doesn't get easy, but it gets clearer when you take the decision out of your head and put it on paper.

What to do now

1. Write down the real options. There are almost always more than two. Between "close everything" and "carry on as is," there may be "scale down," "pause," "change partners," "sell part of it." List them all.
2. For each option, write the real cost. In money, time, health, relationships. And write down what happens in the best, the worst and the most likely scenario.
3. Go back to your values. What is non-negotiable for you? Family, honesty, health, faith, freedom? The option that violates a core value usually charges a high price later, even if it looks advantageous now.
4. Listen to two or three of the right people. Someone who knows the subject, someone who loves you and someone who disagrees with you. Then decide on your own. Advice is input, not a verdict.
5. Set a deadline. A decision without a deadline becomes endless anguish. Pick a date. Until then, gather information. On that date, decide with what you have.
6. Don't decide on your worst day. Fatigue, anger and despair distort everything. If you can, sleep on it, take a walk, wait for the peak of emotion to pass.
7. Once you decide, stand by it. Reassess on scheduled dates, not with every doubt. Revisiting the decision every day eats up the energy needed to carry it out.

Remember: not deciding is also a decision, and often the most expensive one.

When it happened to Bairo

What Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez admires in Ayrton Senna, above all, is a decision: the decision to be the best. Before any victory, he says, there was a decision, and after it came courage and persistence. For Bairo, these became personal values.

The hardest decisions of his life came in moments of loss. When he decided to leave the company that brought him to Brazil, knowing it had a cost. And, above all, when the business he had invested in did not hold, with many people depending on him. There was the obvious decision: complain and retreat. He made the unlikely one: to do something he didn't know how to do and build again.

Not every decision of his worked out. But he says each one left a lesson for the next.

The path

In a sentence from 1989, which the magazine Veja reproduced, Senna said: "Every driver has his limit. Mine is a little above everyone else's." Before the limit comes the decision to test it. Deciding is choosing which cost you accept to pay. Make the choice with your eyes open, honor your values and stand by the path. Courage comes after the decision, not before.

A simple tool: imagine yourself five years from now looking back at this decision. Which choice would you be proud of having made, even if it had gone wrong? That question shifts the focus from immediate fear to the kind of person you want to be. Often, the right decision is the one you could calmly explain to the person you respect most.

Read also

• What does Ayrton Senna inspire in Bairo Gonzalez?
• Give up or keep going: how do you know?
• Fifty-five years later