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The "Crunch Time Continuum"

In your quest to understand and master decision-making, it is important that you picture in your mind's eye the three times when you most often make your decisions. These times are reflected in The Crunch Time Continuum.

Throughout the rest of this book, we will examine decisions and the times at which we make them. Let's define them:

• Crunch Time Decisions: These occur when a situation is presented to you, and within a short period thereafter, you must decide what to do. Some examples are:

  A. The Situation: You are offered a piece of birthday cake at a party.

  The Issue: Do you eat it?

  B. The Situation: Someone says something to you that you interpret as being critical of you.

  The Issue: How do you respond to the criticism?

  C. The Situation: You find that your fourteen-year-old son/daughter has been hiding something from you that greatly disturbs you (he/she has been smoking, skipping class, etc.).

  The Issue: What do you do about it?

• Pre-Crunch Time Decisions: These decisions are made minutes, hours, days, or months before you are presented with the actual stimulus or situation that will trigger your decision. These decisions are reached in anticipation of choices that will or may have to be made at a later time. Some examples of Pre-Crunch Time Decisions are:

  A. When you're offered a piece of birthday cake tonight at the party, no matter how tempted you are, you decide that you won't eat it.

  B. When Sheila/Sam brings up the same complaint that you're not attentive enough to her/him anymore, you're going to tell her/him how you truly feel about her/his demands on your time.

  C. From now on, when your mom/dad/boss/client drives you crazy or pushes one of your buttons, you're not going to react in anger. Instead, you decide that you're going to calmly and coolly step away from the situation, think about it, and choose an appropriate response. It's your New Year's resolution.

• Post-Crunch Time Decisions: These decisions are made moments, hours, days, or months after you have made your original decision. They are decisions that reflect whether you want to (a) continue the behavior that resulted from your prior decision, (b) do the opposite of it, or (c) modify it. Some examples are:

  A. Prior to Thanksgiving, you decided that you would stick to your new diet throughout the holiday season; and indeed, you did it. As a result, you look and feel great! You assess the situation and decide that you're going to continue to practice discipline and intelligent judgment from now on when it comes to eating.

  In this instance, you choose to stay the course.

  B. You decided to give it all up and move to Los Angeles to become an actress/actor. After months of trying to find a reputable agent to represent you, you settled for anyone who will send you out on auditions. During the next six months, you went on three cattle-call auditions and didn't get call-backs for any of them. You feel empty, disoriented, and demoralized by show business and a city that seems to lack roots, a soul, and humanity. You assess your prior decision, and conclude that this lifestyle is unhealthy. You decide: "I've done it. I've had it. I'm going back to my friends, my family, and my advertising job in Chicago."

  In this case, you choose to change the course of your original decision and your behavior.

  C. For the past fifteen years, you've worked six days a week and about sixteen hours a day. You assess this decision and conclude that there must be more to life than just working. You're now a partner in your firm and you're more than comfortable financially, but you're not happy - enough. You decide to adjust your behavior by: working five days a week - and sometimes four; taking all of your vacation time; leaving work at reasonable hours; and making your leisure time and your enjoyment of life higher priorities.

In this instance, you decide to modify your old decision. As we continue our journey, it's important to keep The Crunch Time Continuum and the timing of your decisions in mind.

The Concept of Mastery

An essential element of your emotional health and the fulfillment of your goals and dreams is your development of the mind-set and skill of mastery. That is, the attempted performance of an act, followed by its successful completion. The mastering of an act may require you to perform some or all of the following functions:

1) Identifying a goal that you want to attain;
2) Thinking about the goal and a preferred means of attaining it;
3) Devising a plan of action;
4) Visualizing the overall sequence of events involved in goal attainment;
5) Preparing to effectuate the plan;
6) Effectuating the plan of action;
7) Satisfactorily completing the plan and attaining the goal;
8) Acknowledging and cognitively celebrating the successful completion of the plan of action and goal attainment.

Exploring Mastery

There are few goals that appear unattainable to someone who has had positive mastery experiences. For example, golf phenomenon Tiger Woods made history by winning his third U.S. Junior Amateur golf title. As he reflected upon his victorious final round, which began with him trailing his opponent by five strokes, he was quoted as saying: "I knew what I had to do. I'd done it [come back and won after trailing by many strokes] before."

Conversely, through my experiences, I have found that you never truly know that you can do something until you've actually done it. For instance, I had a friend, years ago, whose parents were extremely wealthy. They gave him everything, and everything was done for him. Nothing was done by him. We were both eighteen at the time, when I noticed that he had no core confidence, as he never truly knew what he could accomplish. He could guess. He could hope. But in his Heart-of-Hearts, he didn't know. He began to stutter. He didn't get along with other kids. He had an inner anger.

My friend was monetarily wealthy - yet he was one of the most deprived and impoverished individuals I had ever met. His parents crippled him by not allowing him to take steps on his own, to occasionally stumble and fall, and to eventually accomplish the goals of walking and running by himself. To this day, he is foundering. He has no core confidence in his ability to meet a challenge. This is because he has never developed the skill of mastering his decisions or his actions.

A similar story was recently told to me. A forty-five-year-old woman had been born into a very wealthy family. She never held a job in her life. Her daughter confided that for years her mother had longed to have some kind of job, just so that she could know and feel that she could actually accomplish something. Then, about three years ago, a restaurateur was visiting the mother's house, and like many others before him, he noted how beautifully she had decorated it. At the end of the afternoon, he inquired as to whether her mother would be interested (for a fee, of course) in decorating his restaurant for its grand opening. She replied that she would be thrilled to do it. They agreed that work would begin three days later.

During the intervening days, the woman, at different times, appeared scared, distraught, and distant. She showed no signs of excitement or anticipation about beginning her first real job.

Ultimately, the woman never showed up to work on the restaurant and never returned any of the restaurateur's calls. According to her daughter, her mother was so deathly afraid to fail that she never attempted to do the job. And to this day, the woman has never worked. She just goes flitting and partying through life.

You may have heard the proverb: "Give me a fish, and I can eat for a day. Teach me to fish, and I can eat for a lifetime." My spin on this proverb is: "If you do tasks for me, or if I passively let fate decide what will happen to me, I will just rely on others and/or other forces to determine my life. But if I learn to proactively master and take control of my decisions and my acts, and I consistently do these things, I become self-reliant. I put myself in the best position to positively determine my own fate. I thus take ownership of my life."

Time and time again, I have seen individuals accomplish their goals and rise above their backgrounds and the pack, because in their Heart-of-Hearts they believe, "If I have any talent in an area, I have the cerebral and emotional mastery strategies to accomplish my goals. Since I've done it before, I know I can do it again."

When individuals know and feel that they have the capability to identify a desired goal, to visualize, implement, and complete a plan of action, and to ultimately attain that goal, the feeling of empowerment is huge. The positive self-esteem that is generated is clearly earned and thus valid. This inner knowledge and feeling are basic and enduring major elements of a rock-solid foundation of great decision-making and high self-esteem.

Copyright © 2005 Ken Lindner

Tags: Career & Money

About the Author

Ken Lindner has represented hundreds of the country's most prominent anchors and reporters, including Matt Lauer, Elizabeth Vargas, Lester Holt, and Paula Zahn. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, he worked as an attorney for the William Morris Agency before founding Ken Lindner & Associates.