How It Started vs. How It Ended
Decisions.Decisions. Decisions
Dear Worthy Woman,
Five years ago, I made a decision. It wasn’t a perfect decision.
I had the idea a couple of days before I would need to start. I had no data, no roadmap, and no guarantee that anyone would care. I just knew something was missing from the public conversation about Black women, and I wanted to try something different. That decision became the #ComplimentABlackWoman Challenge.
This year, for the fifth year, I wanted to evolve the challenge. So once again, I had to make a decision.
We zeroed in on challenge week, publicly announced a challenge goal, and created a campaign around it. Our goal was 100 compliments during challenge week. We landed right around 50. And honestly? I’ll take it.
I learned a long time ago that you don’t need a perfect outcome to prove you made the right choice.
A successful decision is determined by your motivations for your choice and how you keep showing up for it. Five years of showing up for the #ComplimentABlackWoman Challenge built something I couldn’t have designed in advance — a living archive of care, a community, and a practice.
And half a goal in year five beats indecision and no goal every single time.
Which brings me to what I actually want to talk about.
The Exhausting Search for the “Best” Choice
Psychologists call the search for the “best” choice maximizing. A maximizer needs to find the optimal choice before she can commit to anything.
If a maximizer finds the perfect dress at the first store during a shopping outing, she doesn’t purchase it. She puts it on hold and walks to every other store in the mall to make sure. Hours later, she’s either back at the first store or she’s gone home empty-handed and completely depleted.
Conversely, a satisficer does something quite radical first. A satisficer sets criteria for what she needs right now and what would make her decision feel right, given her current life circumstances. Then she goes about getting it.
In shopping terms, it means if she finds a dress that meets her criteria in the first store, she’s done shopping for the day and uses that extra time to treat herself to lunch.
This all seems simple enough when I talk about dress shopping, so why does it often feel so hard to move forward with the big decisions in our lives?
Why You Can’t Decide
I believe that, for women of color, maximizing is often a symptom of internalized oppression.
When you’ve been conditioned to believe you have to be twice as good for half as much, the stakes of every decision feel enormous. It can feel like one wrong move, and your whole world might collapse.
So you research instead of deciding. You gather more opinions instead of trusting your own. You wait for certainty that is never, ever coming. All the while, your indecision feels like prudence when it’s actually paralysis.
Additionally, most decision-making frameworks assume the hard part is the analysis. But for many women of color, the hard part is admitting what they actually want.
We have been so thoroughly trained to want what is respectable, what is safe, what looks successful on the outside, what will not invite scrutiny or confirm someone else’s narrative, that we’ve lost the thread of our own desire.
We confuse the pursuit of the best choice for us with the pursuit of what other people will validate as the best choice. They are not one in the same.
What Indecision Is Really Costing You
The research on indecision is clear. People who search hardest for the best option actually report lower satisfaction with their final choices than people who set their criteria at the outset and choose the first option that meets them.
In other words, more searching = more suffering.
So while you think you are doing your due diligence by researching every possible scenario, what you are really doing is wading in the suffering of indecision for a lot longer than you need to.
Making An Empowered Choice
An empowered decision is one where you admit what you actually want, regardless of what others might say, and get honest about the criteria for making that decision feel right for you. When you can answer that honestly, the decision usually becomes clear.
And once you decide, you have to act. Action makes a decision real. Without it, you’re not deciding. You’re just resting between rounds of the same loop.
I made a decision this year that changed some of the aspects of the challenge. We didn’t hit our goal. I’m still here.
But without making that decision, I wouldn’t have the data to make new choices aligned with my overall vision in the future.
That’s the whole point. What matters is the commitment to self and the vision. Not the outcome.
In power and solidarity,
Toya