How can we know we are making the right decision when we say NO to an opportunity?

“You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.”

attributed to Winston Churchill (see note below)

Making decisions is one of the most challenging things we do as humans in this world. Make a good one, and life unfolds “as it should”. Make a questionable one, and it might all go sideways. Which decision will take us down which path? How to know?

Decision-making is, at least in part, about our tolerance for risk and our sense of trust: How willing are we to take a risk on whatever the circumstances are that the decision will take us into? How much do we trust ourself and any others involved to make good of those circumstances?

These questions are ever present in my mind and were given new life recently when I listened to Tricia Rose Burt’s TEDxPortsmouth Talk “How I redeemed 35 years of regret” — because regret is a close relation to risk and trust. Get the risk and the trust right, and regret doesn’t show up. But get either wrong and, wham, there is REGRET writ large, dragging along behind us as we try to keep moving forward. My piece below tells my own story of risk and regret and, I hate to say it, trust, too — trust (or the lack of it) in myself to make the right decision for me rather than the right decision for someone else…

Barking dogs and life decisions

At a glance, it seems like reasonable advice to not stop and throw stones at every dog that barks, but if you don’t, how can you know which dog you actually should have stopped at because they barked? If not every dog, then which dog?

It is in the rear view window that we see what could have been, might have been — even what should have been. But in the moment of the dog and the barking, it can be more difficult to know.

"In-Between Self"
by Deborah Poynton

The woman in the painting seems to be deep in thought. Her hand against her forehead like that, maybe she is wondering how on earth she could have done at the party what she did. Maybe she kissed someone and is now regretting it. Maybe she had a third martini and wishes she had stopped at her usual two. Or, on the other hand, maybe she regrets not kissing that stunning redhead or wonders why she didn’t down that last shot with the aplomb she perceives herself to have…

We can’t know from merely looking at the woman in the painting. To know more, we would have to stop and ask her. To breach the silence between us. To take the risk of connection.

But she is there, in the painting, and we are here, on this side looking at her from the outside.

That is how life goes: We stop and throw that metaphorical stone. Or we don’t. And then we live with the consequences…

I had a dog once. It did not go well. He did bark. He did chew my favourite yellow rain boots. He did almost get run over by a bus. None of it was his fault, it was all mine. I knew nothing about dogs, having grown up with cats, and I didn’t know how important training was — of him and for me. In the end, I left the relationship in which that dog had seemed like a good idea, leaving the dog, too, and I have stuck with cats ever since. They are untrainable, though I am compliant to their needs...

Moving to Toronto for a job in publishing is something I did not do after completing journalism school followed by a one-month publishing workshop at the Banff Centre. Ever since not stopping for that one (metaphorically speaking) barking dog, I have regretted it. All those years ago — almost 40 — and I still carry regret in my heart and, more challenging, in my head for not doing more than acknowledging the intrigue and the potential in that barking dog. I saw it clearly but walked away from it for the sake of my then partner’s more urgent needs — her career, while mine would have been “just” an entry-level job.

Years later, once I had established myself in a new career (and with a new partner), I kept my ear well tuned to the various dogs barking in different corners of the corporate world, managing them effectively in order to steadily climb the ladder. But one day, those dogs went silent, and my ears perked up, tuning in to their silence. Dogs bark, that’s what they do. So when they go quiet, it means something. And it did. My position was terminated. I walked out that door and into the next chapter of my life.

I had the look of the woman in the painting when I got the news that my job was lost, but I never stopped listening for the next batch of dogs who might lead me to my next opportunities. And, over time, I have learned, time and again, that there are many dogs out there, barking their heads off. Stopping to listen to them does not always pay off, but sometimes stopping to listen can make the difference between heading towards a destination that, actually, is not so great for you and pivoting towards a destination you didn’t realize could suit you so well.

So, with all due respect to Sir Winston Churchill (see caption under photo of two dogs above), I would amend his advice to be, “Throwing stones at every dog that barks may delay your journey, but doing so can give you just enough pause to change direction.”

NOTE: Using Churchill's quote does not mean I condone throwing stones (or anything else) at dogs (or any other sentient beings). It is, in my view, simply a useful metaphor, and should only ever be that.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo of dogs by Alvan Nee on Unsplash