A course for one decision you are already carrying. Seven lessons spent telling apart the criterion that is yours from the one that arrived with it, ending in the same sentence written twice.
Most hard decisions are not hard. They are contested, and only one of the two criteria being applied belongs to you.
You know the feeling well enough to distrust it. The decision comes back on a schedule rather than developing, each return brings a fresh argument rather than a fresh feeling, and you can make the case for either side so fluently that nobody listening could tell which one you actually want. The usual explanation is that the options are finely balanced. Rather more often, two different standards are being run over the same option, and one of them arrived from a parent, a first employer, a peer group, or a version of you who needed something you no longer need.
This course takes one live, unresolved decision, the one you are carrying now, and keeps it open for seven lessons. It does not give you a better decision procedure and there is no scoring method at the end. What it teaches is narrower and more durable: how to hear the difference between what fits and what would explain well, inside a sentence you are already saying.
Along the way it looks at the two standards a choice can be held to, the exhaustive one and the sufficient one, and at what each charges after the choice is made. It sets out what happens to a preference once you are required to justify it, which is not what the sheet of paper with two columns promises. It traces a specific standard back to a person or a period rather than up to a value, because a standard with a date on it can be examined and a value cannot. And it separates the commitments you would take on again from the ones you are merely administering.
The course ends where it began, with your own sentence. You write the decision twice: once as it arrived, and once with the word should unavailable to you and no clause addressed to anybody. The difference between the two versions is the whole output, and it is a description rather than a verdict.
What you are left with is quieter than an answer. The decision is still open at the end. It is now written in words nobody else contributed to, which is a quieter result and a considerably more durable one.
Senior operators, founders and consultants carrying a decision that will not settle, who suspect the deadlock is not really about the options.
Mid-career professionals who argue both sides of their own life beautifully and have stopped being able to tell which side is theirs.
Anyone who decides well and quickly about everything except this, and has begun to wonder what makes this one different.
Anyone entirely new to this kind of examination. Nothing here assumes prior work, prior reading, or any vocabulary you do not already have.
Bring one real decision to the first lesson and leave it unresolved until the last. Answer as the sentences actually sound rather than as they would read well, and do not be surprised when the second version comes out blunt. None of it is written for anybody but you.