No need for (internal) alignment
I listened to a podcast recently where the guest was talking about the purpose of meetings in a corporate environment.
A lot of people believe that the point of a meeting is to gain “alignment” on what to do about some issue. But she argues that this is actually an unrealistic goal. If you put ten people in a room, she says, they will never all agree on what to do, and if your goal is alignment, the meeting will become coercive, with people arguing and trying to convince each other about what direction to take.
Instead, she prefers a “single decision-maker” approach, where one person guides the meeting and is ultimately responsible for the final decision. That person should go around the meeting, asking each participant their opinion and repeating it back to them to confirm that it was heard and understood. Once all participants have spoken, the decision-maker simply picks what they think the best option is, and then everyone has to accept that, even if they don’t agree. Ideally, everyone ends up feeling like their opinion was heard and respected, and there’s no need for a combative environment.
After hearing this, I realized that it was applicable to my own internal decision making as well. Oftentimes when making a decision, there is a conflict between two (or more) parts of myself. One part wants one thing, and the other part wants the other thing.
For most of my life, I have felt the need to “come to alignment” within myself about what to do, leading me to argue with myself ad nauseam in an often stressful process, until I come to some conclusion or end up repressing one of the parts in order to forcefully move forward.
I had already stopped doing this as often before hearing the podcast, but this “single-decision maker” idea became a helpful formulation for how to relate to myself when making decisions. Instead of arguing with myself, I can acknowledge the different parts in turn, and then make a decision, without having to repress any of the parts.
To give a silly example, one day after listening to the podcast I was making plans to go to a friend’s house and he offered to get me a bagel in the morning. When I got his message, I was really craving a bagel. But I’ve been on a diet for a few months now that would prevent me from eating bagels. So essentially I had this internal dilemma, where I had a strong physical craving in favor of the bagel, a logical reasoning process that said I should not have the bagel because it wasn’t on my diet, and, in addition, another logical reasoning process that said that it might be rude of me to refuse the bagel.
In most cases in the past I would have spent a little while thinking about what to do, and would have either forcefully repressed the physical desire for a bagel (the mental equivalent of “No, bad Matthew!”) and said no, but felt bad about it, or would have given in and gotten a bagel and broken my diet, and then felt bad for breaking my diet. Instead, I was able to say, “You know what, I do really want a bagel. That’s okay. But I’m also on a diet. So I’m going to tell my friend not to get me one.” And I continued feeling for a few moments that I really wanted the bagel, since I didn’t suppress this feeling, but then it went away, and I moved on.
This way of relating to myself felt much more peaceful. There is no way I was going to convince the part of me that wanted a bagel to not want a bagel. And there’s no argument to be made that a bagel was healthy enough to be on my diet. By accepting both parts of me and simply making a decision, I allowed myself to experience two contradictory ideas while feeling a minimal amount of internal conflict.
Since then, for both major and minor decisions, I’ve really felt the ability to allow all parts of me to exist without feeling the need to resolve conflicts between them. I contain plenty of contradictions, and that’s just fine with me.