Making the Right Decision — What Makes a Choice Hold

To make the right decision, you do not need to weigh things longer than everyone else; you need to perceive more of the situation you are deciding in — and to feel what you are doing while you do it. The quality of a decision shows in its long-term consequences, not in the relief that arrives the moment the question is off the table.

Perhaps one of the big decisions in life is in front of you right now. A job offer in another city. The thought of leaving a secure position. A degree you started that no longer feels right. You have made lists, asked friends, slept on it more than once, and the more carefully you examine it, the further the decision seems to move away. Perhaps there is also the worry that you will make the wrong decision and regret it later. None of this is a sign of weakness. It is a sign that the tools you are using do not fit what you are looking for.

#How do you know you made the right decision?

You know a decision was right by what it carries over time, not by a feeling of certainty in the moment. Good decisions prove themselves in the long run, even when they feel heavy in the short run. In a MANOVA conversation with Elisa Gratias, Gwendolin Kirchhoff opened with an observation that shifts the usual argument about intelligence:

In the same breath she describes what makes a decision poor: someone perceives only a little, perhaps nothing of the wider context; they act out their strong affects and passions immediately and are unaware of the consequences — consequences that can harm them or others (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Die gefährlichste Form von Intelligenz, 1:00). And because things in the larger context also tend, she goes on, to return — along ancestral lines, for instance — to people who are closer to you than you might think, it is unwise to set open loops loose in the world: to open large matters in a way that forces them to come back to you later (cf. ibid., 1:25). The right decision, then, is not the one that feels especially safe. It is the one that sees more.

This gives you a measure you can actually check. “The more I recognise of the whole context, the better my decisions become” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Die gefährlichste Form von Intelligenz, 3:09) — and, she adds, better in the long run. This link between perception and action is exactly what the concept of wisdom names: recognising the larger context and deciding from within it.

The East Asian tradition that Gwendolin Kirchhoff returns to again and again has an ideal for this. In her words it is “the flawless intuitive response, which comes from perceiving the whole context in which I am moving” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “IGing – Buch der Wandlungen”, 16:38). Intuitive does not mean arbitrary here. The response is flawless because it grows out of a thorough perception of the situation, not out of a whim. Anyone who wants to make better decisions and train their judgement therefore trains their seeing first. A sound decision-making process begins not with choosing but with perceiving.

#Why is it so hard to make a decision?

Difficult decisions are hard because every decision leaves something out. That is this essay’s answer, and it starts from a sentence Gwendolin Kirchhoff spoke in a conversation with the numerologist Paramjeet Singh. Singh was assigning the basic arithmetic operations to the numbers; when the conversation reached subtraction, she carried it over to deciding: “all decisions are, of course, bound up first of all with subtracting everything I am not choosing” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Numerologie — Zahlen hören, Sequenzen vollenden”, 1:14:52). Whoever takes the job in the other city says goodbye to the flat, the familiar routes, the people nearby, and the version of their life that would have continued here. A decision is a subtraction. Economists call part of this opportunity cost; the lived experience of it is loss.

The next step in that conversation was taken not by Gwendolin Kirchhoff but by her guest. Paramjeet Singh concluded from the subtraction that this is why people find decisions so hard; whoever brings in one more explanation, one more round of discussion, one more expert is trying to play for time (cf. Singh in conversation with Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Numerologie — Zahlen hören, Sequenzen vollenden”, 1:14:58). That is his reading, drawn from his numerological teaching on the arithmetic operations, not her philosophy. The following paragraphs take up his observation without adopting that teaching.

Singh’s observation explains why the usual tools so often come to nothing. The list of pros and cons, the urge to gather as much information as possible: all of this piles up more material for the decision to rest on. It organises knowledge and helps you make an informed decision, and that has real value, because you cannot weigh a tradeoff whose consequences you do not know. The well-known 10-10-10 rule by the American author Suzy Welch, for example, asks what consequences a decision will have in ten minutes, in ten months and in ten years (cf. Welch, 2009, 10-10-10). The strength of such methods is that they move your attention beyond the moment to the consequences. But where a decision stays hard even though the consequences have long been on the table, they answer a question that is no longer open. What is missing then is not information but the willingness to let something go.

In that situation, further weighing feels like diligence and is in fact a postponement: whoever keeps putting a decision off does not make it more carefully, only later. Every new list extends the time in which everything still seems possible. As long as nothing is decided, nothing has to be mourned. The gathering protects you from the loss that the choice demands — and that is exactly what makes you stay stuck in the situation you want to leave.

This is not a call to act rashly. It is a distinction. Examining what a choice means is part of deciding. Examining it endlessly so as not to have to choose is part of avoiding. Whoever notices this difference in themselves knows more about their situation than any list could show.

#Head or gut feeling: can you trust your intuition?

Neither your head nor your gut should decide alone; both should speak in the right order — feeling first, judgement afterwards. The question “head or heart?” treats thinking and feeling as two parties, one of which has to win: rational calculation on one side, gut feeling on the other. Gwendolin Kirchhoff sees it differently. For her, emotional presence with things is the very source of knowledge — a depth of feeling through which phenomena can speak to a person according to their true nature (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Die gefährlichste Form von Intelligenz, 19:13). Whoever switches off their feelings in order to decide objectively does not lose their bias. They lose their organ of perception. You can trust your feeling as a source of perception without letting it pass the verdict.

So feeling deserves a voice. The only question is which one. In his letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), Friedrich Schiller recorded an observation about his age that goes straight to this question. Nature in us, he writes, is denied where it has its rightful place and rules instead where it does not belong: “The affected decorum of our manners denies it the pardonable first voice, only to grant it, in our materialist ethics, the decisive last” (Schiller, 1795, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fifth Letter; our translation).

Gwendolin Kirchhoff paraphrased this thought at a 2026 panel discussion hosted by NachDenkSeiten — a small piece of wisdom from Schiller, as she put it, with an enormous amount in it — and applied it to diplomacy with Russia. In an aside in the middle of the sentence she let it hold for the creative process too: “If I am emotionally open and can first look at everything that is fluttering around, even all the half-baked thoughts — that applies to the creative process too — we could sit down with the Russians and simply look first at what feelings are actually there, what impressions are there, what thoughts are there.” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Wo wächst das Rettende?”, 37:28). Whereas when people are morally armoured from the outset, she observed, the emotional underworld usually wins out underground (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Wo wächst das Rettende?”, 37:54).

Applied to a personal decision, this means that the fear of moving, the appetite for something new, the resentment towards your old employer, the half-formed thoughts at three in the morning may all speak first, fully and uncensored. Feeling deserves the first voice, not the last. Silence it, and you will hear it again later as the judge. Listen to it first, and you can judge afterwards, because something is now on the table that can be looked at.

#How do you make a hard decision?

You make a hard decision by creating space between impulse and action, a space in which it becomes visible where a path leads. Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes this space as a stage in a person’s development. At the beginning there is desire, intuitive impulse, sometimes compulsion. Then someone notices: this impulse is here. “Then, for example, a gap opens between the action and the impulse” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Die gefährlichste Form von Intelligenz, 2:31). In that gap, she continues, one can sometimes foresee where it leads — and that, at its core, is what wisdom is (cf. ibid.).

The gap is not the same as endless weighing, and it is more than a cooling-off period with a deadline. Weighing fills the space with ever more material. The gap leaves it open so that the context can show itself. This corresponds to what the idea of the organic calls ripening: some things are not ready yet, and pressure would damage them. Others are ripe, and hesitation would miss the moment.

A modest but effective question follows from this distinction. In an interview, Gwendolin Kirchhoff described how people often get stuck in a loop of how-questions and why-questions, and how it is the when-question that leads out: When will you make this decision? It introduces time into a movement that otherwise goes round in circles (cf. interview with Gwendolin Kirchhoff, 2026 (unpublished)). The how-question searches for a path that may not exist yet. The when-question asks about your readiness.

Finally, there is a way of looking that is uncomfortable but rarely deceives. In a conversation about artificial intelligence and the transience of life, Gwendolin Kirchhoff said: “Before the sword of death, and before the gaze upon death, it is decided how we invest our time. It is decided, all at once, what matters and what does not” (Kirchhoff, G., 2025, “Sie BELÜGEN dich über das WAHRE Ziel von KI!”, 29:14). If a hard choice lies ahead of you, you can hold it in this light for a moment. Many reasons that weighed heavily a minute ago lose their weight. A few become clearer: what truly matters to you. For more on this, see the essay Reflecting on Death.

#What if there is no perfect decision?

The perfect option waiting to be found rarely exists — and that is precisely why the right decision does. Every choice is made in a situation you did not set up yourself: in a body, an origin, a time, under conditions that meet you halfway or stand in your way. Whoever waits for the option that contains no loss is waiting for a world without opposites. A decision is therefore not the discovery of the flawless alternative. It is shaping what is given, to the best of your knowledge and conscience.

This is where it becomes clear why certainty is such an unreliable guide. Whoever tells themselves a soothing story until the unease subsides has not decided; they have calmed themselves down (cf. Self-soothing is not healing). The calm lasts until the consequences arrive. A decision that comes from what you have actually perceived, by contrast, does not have to feel good in order to be right. It may hurt, because it leaves something out, and still hold.

What gets decided then is more than a matter. In a conversation with Frank Köstler, Gwendolin Kirchhoff spoke of an original order that underlies all things, and of how a person either aligns with it or is pulled into a whirlpool that carries them away. Her sentence on it is simple:

That is the real edge of every choice, whether it is about a job, a place or a task. Whoever keeps adding arguments is not only postponing a decision. They are postponing who they will be, and in the meantime they let other forces settle it — habit, fear, the expectations of the people around them. Indecision is not a neutral state. It is a decision that nobody made consciously.

The right decision therefore does not begin with the next list. It begins with the question of what you already see once you stop numbing yourself, and when you are ready to let what you see count. Some people find that answer on their own, others in conversation with someone who does not replace their judgement but sharpens it. Either way, it remains yours.

#Sources

Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “IGing – Buch der Wandlungen – Seelengespräch” [Video]. Kings and Queens Tarot, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDRQn-U4NFM, 16:38.

Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Numerologie — Zahlen hören, Sequenzen vollenden. Ein Gespräch mit Paramjeet Singh” [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWORJ3K9olE, 1:14:52, 1:14:58.

Kirchhoff, G. (2025). “Im Gespräch – Vergessene Geister – Der verdrängte Idealismus” [Video]. Frank Köstler, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkN3H7IvWsk, 2:10:20.

Kirchhoff, G. (2025). “Sie BELÜGEN dich über das WAHRE Ziel von KI!” [Video]. Everlast AI, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ktkeUNHeaM, 29:14.

Kirchhoff, G. (2026). Die gefährlichste Form von Intelligenz — MANOVA conversation with Elisa Gratias [Video]. MANOVA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI43E5jdQQw, 1:00, 1:25, 2:31, 3:09, 19:33.

Interview with Gwendolin Kirchhoff, 2026 (unpublished).

Kirchhoff, G. (2026). “Wo wächst das Rettende? – Lösungsansätze für den Ukrainekrieg und die Konflikte im Nahen Osten | NDS” [Video]. NachDenkSeiten, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPqEbPRyIaA, 37:28, 37:54.

Schiller, F. (1795). Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von Briefen [On the Aesthetic Education of Man]. Fifth Letter. Translation of the quoted sentence ours.

Welch, S. (2009). 10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea. Scribner.