How to Escape Either/Or Thinking and Make Better Choices
5 methods for finding a third option
“If I could get used to the idea of never doing anything important, and never changing the world in a meaningful way? I think I could be happy.”
My husband’s announcement took me by surprise. We were driving home from spending the evening with our friends. I expected him to comment on our doubles pickleball match. I didn’t expect an existential analysis.
Still, it was a step up from where he’d been before we went to see our friends. When we’d left the house, he thought there was no point to his life, and he’d never be happy.
But I wasn’t fond of his proposed hypothesis. It was a classic case of either/or thinking.
The issue, you see, is that for the past few months, he’s been at a loss for how to do what he sees as his life work. For over a year, he’d been moving steadily toward the brilliant future he envisioned. And then everything went off the rails.
The project looked like it was going to founder due to a lack of money and personality conflicts. My husband tried to step up and take on a bigger role, to get things back on track. He was told (politely), no dice. The project leader would rather have the project fail than give up sole direction of it.
The danger of “Either/Or” thinking
My husband has been struggling these past months. Under stress, he tends to fall back on black-and-white, either/or thinking. Either something is black, or it is white. There is no room in this scenario for shades of gray.
The problem with either/or thinking is that it artificially limits your options. You divide the world into two mutually exclusive categories. If you choose one option, you must exclude the other option.
Sometimes decisions really do come down to two choices. For example, when driving somewhere nearby, you can take the highway or stay on local roads the whole way. You cannot both take the highway and stay on local roads for the drive.
The vast majority of the time, though, that’s an oversimplification.
For example, what if you’ll be driving for hours to reach your destination? You could take the highway most of the way. But when you are passing through a particularly scenic area? Or looking for a meal? Then, exit the highway and take local roads.
Limiting your thinking to two possibilities limits your options. You lose the ability to consider blended possibilities. Maybe you can do a little bit of one option, and a little bit of the other. Maybe you can find a way to do something else that incorporates what’s best about the first two options.
Either he was a success or he was a failure
My husband thought that there were only two possibilities:
- Either his project worked and he changed the world
- Or, the project failed and he would never contribute anything meaningful to the world
He’d come to the conclusion that option 1 was not happening. Option 2 was all he had left. If he could be satisfied with that option, maybe he could be happy.
“You could do that,” I answered. “Or, you could decide that you weren’t able to do anything to reach your goal right now. So you’d dedicate yourself to preparing for when the opportunity to reach it did come your way.”
“That’s the same as not doing anything,” he protested.
“No, it’s not. If you think you’ll never contribute anything, when an opportunity to contribute comes, you’ll miss it. You’ll be too busy distracting yourself from how you’re not doing what you really want. But if you increase your contacts, and do your inner work, so that you’re ready to pounce on an opportunity when it comes? You’ll be able to take advantage of it.”
He thought about it for the rest of the drive home. This was a third option he’d never considered before.
Finding your third option
According to executive coach May Busch, there are five methods of finding a third option.
The first method is choosing both. For example, at a barbecue, you might be asked, “Do you want a burger or a hot dog?” You don’t have to choose only the burger or only the hot dog. You can get one of each.
A similar second method is choosing the best of both. This is what I suggested in the above driving example. You get the speed of traveling on the highway for most of your drive. But you get the benefit of memorable experiences when it’s time to eat or do some sightseeing.
For the third method, you can flip the options around. Busch uses an example of trying to buy a house. She and her husband would find a house they both liked, put in an offer, and get outbid. So they flipped the options around. Instead of saying “Either we will get the house or we will not,” they said, “Either they will get us as buyers or they will not.” They put in bids on many houses. And they told the realtors that whoever met their bid first would get them as buyers. The strategy was successful.
The fourth method is to challenge your assumptions. Consider what Tim Ferriss did in The 4-Hour Work Week. The recent boom in creative outsourcing is all about challenging assumptions. Entrepreneurs now question if they need to do all the parts of their jobs themselves.
Finally, the fifth method involves finding a win/win scenario. This is for situations where two people disagree on which is the best option. It might use any of the above four methods to come up with another alternative. Or it can be something completely new. The key is that one person doesn’t win while one loses. Instead, they both have a winning option.
How I chose a third option
I gave my husband a third option by challenging his assumptions. He was assuming that if the project he’d worked so hard on failed, he would fail to reach his goals. He also assumed that if he couldn’t see a way forward at the moment, it meant there was no way forward.
I challenged those assumptions. Wasn’t it possible that he could reach his goals with a different project? Wasn’t it possible that a way forward would appear in the future, as he changed the people and places he worked with?
By the time we got home, he was committed to following through on this third option. Within a few hours, he had already started developing a plan for implementation.
Conclusion
Limiting your thinking to two, mutually exclusive options is usually an artificial limitation. By thinking you must choose one or the other option, you are making a bad choice. A better choice is to find a third option.
The third option can combine both options, combine parts of both options, or be completely new.
There are five methods of discovering your third option. They include flipping things around and challenging assumptions.
If you are able to consider a third option, as well as your first two, you are more likely to make a good decision.
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