DEBBIE WILLIAMS's Podcast
DEBBIE WILLIAMS's Podcast
A Maze of Decisions
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Some decisions can be life-changing, however dealing with decisions can often feel like a maze particularly if you are trying something completely different to your norm. Today's guest is Ilaria Vilkelis, a maverick coach who draws from her multi-faceted background, her extended training and business experience to help people navigating major transitions. Here she offers valuable advice to all who face big decisions in their lives.
Links: www.ilariavilkelis.com/out-of-the-maze/
debbiewilliamspodcast.com
Title Music: Bouncy-Spongy by Ketsa, licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Welcome to storytelling. This week's guest is a generous, creative, unconventional individual. She is a maverick coach who draws from her multifaceted background her extended training and business experience to help people navigate in major transitions. She has lived and worked in five different countries and originally from Italy. Please welcome Ilaria Vilkelis. Hello, Ilaria, and welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Debbie. It's a great pleasure to be here with you.
SPEAKER_00Ilaria, big decisions. What are big decisions?
SPEAKER_01Big decisions are those decisions that we may have to take in our life that have a pervasive impact on our future. We all live with a body of beliefs that we're not even aware we have. And we operate naturally from the set of beliefs that never get challenged. And what has happened in the past year and a half because of COVID, a lot of these belief have been challenged. Whether it is okay and you can be productive working from home. For a long time, many companies were merely tolerating working from home, was seen as, well, you must be a B player and you must be not that good if you want to work from home. Now we know that not to be the case. We have seen people thinking like, oh, we will be together ever after, and it wouldn't be lovely to be together all day long. Well, when people were then locked into the same room, they quickly discovered how easy it was to get on each other's hair. This is why right now there are so many big decisions happening, because I think as a result of seeing some of your belief system being cracked. And so you start asking, is there a potential other way to live? Before you wouldn't even think of it as a possibility. I need to go to my work, I work in, I don't know, uh in the financial district, and for the rest of my life I'm be taking my uh northern line all the way to the city every day. And all of a sudden you find out that you can be a very effective professional sitting on a beach. And this is why I believe now there is such a big change happening, a big shift. And potentially there is also another thing, and this is just my opinion, what has happened as and it's happening, is giving us even furthermore a sense of how fragile is life. So the people that potentially were saying, Well, I am going to postpone my happiness, I'm going to be happy when I do X or when I get a child or when I retire, when I marry, they're saying, No, I want to be happy now. Potentially, there won't be a tomorrow, or tomorrow may not come in the shape or form that I was expecting. So there is a sense of I want it all and I want it now, to quote Freddie Mercury. And that is why people are making decisions. The potential risk is that they take this decision with a I want it all and I want it now mindset that is a short-term mindset. And if you're single, you have healthy young parents, that's all very good. You can make decisions, you can go move places, travel the world, because what you do affects no one else. But when you start having either older parents or you're married, you have children, then whatever you do is shaking a whole ecosystem. And that is where I think it's important to be mindful of all the consequences, big and small, that your decision is going to affect. So to give you an example, you may decide where to go on holiday, and surely you can choose the right place or the wrong place, but the big decision is instead buying a house. When you return from the holidays, you may be happy, you may be unhappy, but pretty much most likely there is no bearing in the future on the next holidays or on your life or your work where you have been on holiday. Where if you buy the wrong house or if you buy a house in a place that you end up not liking, that affects everything about yourself and your potentially your family. So a big decision could also be a career decision or who you marry or a country you choose to call your own, a country that may be your country of origin or a country where you have elected to live. So big decision are just decisions that are greater in impact when it comes to the future.
SPEAKER_00You mentioned that it's greater in impact. I suppose that's the distinction between a big decision and an everyday decision.
SPEAKER_01Yes, I would say a greater impact that could be uh present, like the cost. So there is a different cost from saying buying a small gift or going to a dinner to buying a house. But it's not only the immediate cost, is all the avalanche of consequences that that brings. I generally use the house because it's something most people can relate to is if you move, where would the children go to school or how will you go to work? How long will be the commute? Or even simply how comfortable will I be in the future with the choice that I've made. I'll give you an example. I have a dear friend who bought a flat in London and she loved it. But one day she realized that because of her work she has always a lot of luggage and she loves to bike, so she also has a bike. And it turns out that bringing the bike up and down on the fourth floor and bringing projectors and books and all the material she uses as a trainer up and down the stairs every day, it's probably more taxing than she would have liked it. But when she visited the place, clearly she was not carrying a bike or carrying a heavy luggage of books. This is just a simple example. But when we go house hunting, sometimes we can just be mesmerized by the place, by the furniture, by the fact that has been prepared to be loved and sold, and dismiss these little elements that then have a long-term consequence.
SPEAKER_00You yourself, you've lived in five different countries and you've experienced these big changes in your life. How did that come about and how did you conquer those major changes?
SPEAKER_01Yes, uh I wonder actually if I conquered that I'm still a student after all these years. I was born in Italy and my life was pretty quiet until I graduated from university with low degree and always lived pretty much in the same house. My parents moved to this house before I can remember, I was about two years old. It's just after that I first moved to Milan to get my MBA, then to Switzerland, then I came to the UK, back to Switzerland, back to Italy, then down to Switzerland and France and then the United States. So indeed at some point my life started spinning. And in this time frame, I think I moved about 27 times. And I noticed that there are things that you learn just by doing. Then choosing where to live had become for me, I would say almost a regular thinking. And instead, for most people, a big decision like a house is happens once or twice in their life. So it's not something they do frequently and they can't rely that much on their intuition because they don't really have enough experience of it. Clearly, I learned by making mistakes. I learned by buying houses that then eventually turned out not to be the right place.
SPEAKER_00How do we translate that experience to other major decisions?
SPEAKER_01The question is very interesting because on one side I think our current society and the social media probably put too much stress on the idea of finding your calling and creating your vision, and the whole idea of self-actualization, as much as is great, can also put pressure on people of feeling like, oh, I have to know what I want to do for the rest of my life. But having a sense of what is it that is important to you, what are your non-negotiables helps you decide what you want to do in your career, what you want to do in your free time. So if you are someone who loves sport, for instance, any non-negotiable that wherever you are, you will be doing sport, you can choose a place to live that gives you that option. Maybe is near a park, is close by to a gym. So my first suggestion is always to look at what are my non-negotiable, what are the things that I really love to do that, and there is a phrase that I use in coaching often is what do you do even when no one is looking? That means that even if people are not paying you for you then to for you to do that, whether you're not required to do that, you would still do it because it's so much you. And and often you unless you are asked a question, you don't even realize that because it's so you that you take for granted. And potentially even ask, oh, isn't that every what everybody does? And then it turns out that you are the only one who loves to do a certain thing. So you make your list of non-negotiable. You also look at where you potentially want to be in a few years in the future. What are the the objectives that you are hoping for yourself? And based on that, then you choose where to go. I also find that the focus should not be on buying a home, but is finding a place whether purchased or rent that allows you to live the lifestyle that you want to live.
SPEAKER_00That's really interesting, Ilaria. But one thing that gets in the way for many people is mindset. What words of advice would you give to someone who may be too scared to actually proceed with a big decision?
SPEAKER_01Well, first of all is that you can only make the decision with information you had at the time and be at peace with yourself that you may get some right and you may get some wrong, and that there is no way to know in advance. You can only connect the dots, as uh Mr. Steve Jobs said, and live with it. At least my recipe for having peace in my later years of life is own my mistakes, own my victories, and just be at peace with what has happened. Do your search, maybe work with me, work with a coach, work with someone who can independently and insightfully ask you questions. Because clearly the people in your life will have their opinion, but it will be in a way a vested opinion. They love you, they they care for you, but they will also have a particular representation of what your life and your happiness should look like. Whereas someone who doesn't know you, someone who is removed from your circles, can be more objective and ask questions that are known in coaching as the dumb question, like why would that be important for you and how will you do that and what would that give you? These are questions that often seem trivial but they're not, because they allow someone to reflect and to realize what is really important to them. And this brings me to an example that I think it's is really enlightening and almost funny. This happened many years ago in a business school at the time I was working in Lausanne and a Dutch executive came to me after a lecture and he said, Oh, I need to talk to you. Can you sit down? Can you give me ten minutes? And I said, Sure, please do. I said, So what can I do for you? He said, Well, I have to make a big decision about the job. And I said, Well, tell me about it. Oh well yeah, my father-in-law find me this position and yeah, it's very well paid, and it's in Amsterdam and it's a long commute and blah blah blah, and you can hear the tone of his voice. On the other hand, I also have this opportunity and it's a great team, is here in Utrecht, and we are going to do this, we're going to do that, and and I was just listening. I was saying absolutely nothing. And at the end, he just looked at me and so, So, tell me which one should I choose? And I just looked at him, and clearly my job is not to tell them what to do. So I just said, Yeah, which one? And he started laughing. And he realized that just by speaking with someone else that had no vested interest, it was not his wife, was not his father-in-law, or the colleagues uh from uh one of the jobs, he could really see and feel the difference between the affect between the job that it clearly was a burden to him and felt like my life is over, as opposed to the job that would give him joys and put a spring in his uh walk and allow him to move forward uh successfully. Sometime even just speaking, whether the other person can ask questions or just just listen and create that space where you can listen to yourself, allows the mind to create different scenarios and see and feel and get a sense of what it would be like to live in a place or another.
SPEAKER_00What would you say are the top three things that we need to consider when making big decisions?
SPEAKER_01I would say the long term impact. By saying the long term impact, I mean the cost. What am I giving up to do this? What is this going to cost, but not only financially, emotionally or physically. The second is be very aware of what Chip and Dan Hees called the villain of decision making that are ways in which we sabotage our own thinking just by not paying attention to some habits that as human we all tend to have. The third is the time frame. What you like now, what suits you now may not be the same thing that will suit you five years down the line. So the time frame, the impact, and the the risk of making decisions with the four villains of decision making.
SPEAKER_00Elara, what are these villains that you refer to?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the four villains are narrow framing, confirmation bias, short-term emotion, and overconfidence. But let me give you an example. In narrow framing is our tendency to say, do I stay or do I go? Whether it is a relationship, whether it's a job, do I want this job or do I go? Instead of creating option, we tend to go into an either or. If ever you find yourself in a position where you're saying either or, do pay attention. Are you locking yourself too soon in too few options? The confirmation bias is a very typical thing we all do, and is once we have an opinion, we unconsciously select every fact, every data that confirms our opinion. So imagine that you decided that where you live, you don't like it any longer. All of a sudden, you catch yourself saying, Yeah, there are too many rubbish bin on the street, or people are rude on the street. Your mind is attracted to confirming to yourself that you don't like the street or you don't like this job or you don't like this colleague. Short-term emotion is the allowing yourself to take long decision with a short-term emotion. So the short-term emotion is what makes you buy things and impulse. Short-term emotion don't work well with long-term decision. And the last one, not least, particularly in our culture, is overconfidence. It's so easy to find information these days. You just go on Google and immediately you have 12 million results. Even if you only cons look at the first five, it's very easy to form an opinion and believe that our opinion is a good one when in fact we have barely scratched the surface.
SPEAKER_00Thank you very much for providing such an insightful way for us to make big decisions. And thank you very much for your time. You're very welcome. It's been a pleasure. If you would like to find out further information on how to navigate making big decisions, then please follow the website ilariawilkelis.com or follow the link in the show notes.