It comes up often. It even happened to me recently.  I’m having lunch with a friend and he described having trouble making a decision about which of two conflicting film jobs he should take.  Both choices, it seemed, had pluses and minuses.

So I gave him the coin flip trick.

“You flip a coin,” I said.

The idea is this:  Got a decision to make?  Decide that you’re going to flip a coin and abide by the decision.  Set it up that if the coin lands on “heads,” you will agree to go with choice #1 and if lands on “tails,”  you go with the other choice.  Then this:  Flip the coin.  If it comes up heads, be super aware of what your first reaction is.  Often there will be a little pang of something subtle that you experience: You kind of feel badly – really quickly – that you didn’t get the “tails” choice.  This tells you what you may have been really thinking.  And with this knowledge, you override the coin flip thing and just go with the #2 choice.  It works in reverse as well.  Say you get tails. There is  a pang of something – maybe that you’re glad or maybe that you’re disappointed. There’s your answer: act accordingly.