Why I Created Inner Decision Making

I created Inner Decision Making because I became increasingly interested in a question that sounds simple, but really isn’t:

How do we make decisions that are actually ours?

Not decisions that look good on paper.

Not decisions shaped by pressure, fear, expectation, conditioning, urgency, or the desire to get life “right.”

Our own decisions.

That question sits at the center of a lot of the work I’m doing now around human reliability.

I’ve come to think of human reliability as the ability to operate reliably as yourself, especially when conditions are changing, pressure is present, and certainty is unavailable.

Decision making is one of the clearest places where that becomes visible.

Because when life applies pressure, we often discover just how quickly we can abandon ourselves.

We overthink.

We rush.

We ask everyone else what they would do.

We search for more information.

We try to predict every possible outcome.

We make a decision just to make the discomfort of uncertainty go away.

And sometimes we call all of that “being responsible.”

I know that territory well.

Where the course came from

My background has shaped the way I think about this.

Engineering taught me to pay attention to systems, inputs, conditions, tolerances, failure modes, and feedback.

Things do not operate in isolation. Systems behave differently under different loads. A system that works beautifully under ideal conditions may fail when pressure increases.

Human beings are not machines, of course.

But I became fascinated by the fact that we are also operating inside conditions all the time.

We are influenced by our environment, our relationships, our history, expectations, fear, desire, timing, and the stories we have inherited about who we are supposed to be.

And then Human Design gave me another way of looking at the same territory.

One of the things that drew me into Human Design was its emphasis on decision-making.

Not as a mental exercise.

Not as “make the most logical choice.”

Not as a promise that every decision will create the outcome you want.

But as a way of experimenting with what happens when you stop allowing the mind to run every decision.

That changed the question for me.

Instead of:

What is the right decision?

I became more interested in:

How do I recognize a decision that is actually mine?

Those are very different questions.

Why inner decision making matters

We live in a culture with no shortage of advice.

There is always another person telling you what you should do, what the smartest move is, what the five steps are, which habits you need, which strategy you should follow, or what successful people supposedly know that you don’t.

Some of that information can be useful.

But information and decision making are not the same thing.

You can have excellent information and still make a decision that is deeply wrong for you.

You can also make a decision that makes very little sense to the people around you and discover that it was exactly the experience you needed.

That is uncomfortable territory for the mind.

The mind likes certainty.

It likes reasons.

It likes guarantees.

It likes knowing where the road leads before taking the first step.

Life rarely offers that.

The ground moves.

Conditions change.

People change.

We change.

This is part of what I have been exploring recently through ideas like Taoism, the Nahua concept of “slippery earth,” engineering, Human Design, and my own lived experience.

Life is not particularly interested in becoming stable enough for us to finally feel safe making a move.

We have to learn how to navigate while the ground is moving.

That is why decision-making matters so much to me.

It is not really about becoming better at choosing between Option A and Option B.

It is about developing a different relationship with yourself.

What Inner Decision Making is

Inner Decision Making is an introduction to that exploration.

The course uses Human Design as a framework for understanding how different people are designed to experience decisions.

It looks at the mechanics of decision-making, but I did not create it because I wanted people to memorize another system.

I created it because I wanted people to begin observing themselves.

What happens inside you when you feel pressure to decide?

What happens when someone wants an answer immediately?

What happens when your mind is convinced it knows what you should do?

What happens when the people around you disagree with what you sense?

What happens when there is no obvious “right” answer?

Those moments are incredibly revealing.

They show us our conditioning.

They show us where we seek certainty.

They show us where we hand authority over our lives to other people.

And they also give us opportunities to experiment with something different.

The course is not about becoming perfect at making decisions.

Frankly, I don’t think that exists.

It is about becoming more familiar with your own internal mechanics.

Who the course is for

Inner Decision Making is for people who are curious about the possibility that the mind may not be the best authority for every major decision.

It is for people who notice that they can think themselves in circles.

People who understand all the pros and cons and still do not know what to do.

People who have made objectively “good” decisions that somehow felt wrong.

People who are tired of constantly outsourcing decisions to friends, experts, partners, coaches, algorithms, or the internet.

And it is especially for people who are willing to experiment.

Because Human Design makes much more sense to me as an experiment than as a belief system.

You do not have to take someone’s word for it.

You observe.

You try something.

You watch what happens.

You gather feedback.

Then you keep going.

That experimental quality is important to me.

What the course is not

Inner Decision Making is not a formula for making your life predictable.

It will not make every decision easy.

It will not guarantee comfortable outcomes.

It will not stop uncertainty.

It will not calm the ocean.

And it will not remove the very human experience of sometimes thinking, What on earth am I doing?

What it can offer is another way of navigating.

I often think of life as sailing.

You do not control the ocean.

You do not negotiate with the current.

You do not get to demand that the weather cooperate with your plans.

You learn to work with the conditions that are actually present.

Human Design does not teach us how to calm the ocean.

It teaches us how to stop arguing with the water.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

Why this course still matters to me

Inner Decision Making was created before I had language for some of the larger ideas I am exploring now.

I was not yet talking about human reliability in the way I am today.

I was not thinking about a workshop where mechanics and mystery could sit at the same bench.

I had not yet connected some of these questions with Taoism, engineering, philosophy, pressure, failure modes, navigation, or slippery earth.

But when I look back at the course now, I can see that the seeds were already there.

Decision-making is one of the places where human reliability begins.

Can I remain in relationship with myself when I do not know what will happen?

Can I notice pressure without automatically obeying it?

Can I distinguish between mental certainty and something deeper in my own experience?

Can I allow my own mechanics to participate in the way I move through life?

Those questions matter to me far beyond Human Design.

They are questions about what it means to be a person.

A place to begin

I am increasingly less interested in systems that promise to fix people.

I am much more interested in tools that help us observe ourselves more clearly.

That is how I see Inner Decision Making.

It is not an answer to every question.

It is a tool on the workbench.

A place to begin taking apart some of the assumptions we carry about how decisions are supposed to be made.

A way of becoming curious about what happens when we stop trying to operate like somebody else.

Because the deeper question beneath the course is the same question underneath much of my work now:

What would it mean to operate reliably as yourself?

Inner Decision Making is one way into that question.

There’s a chair at the workbench if you want to explore it with me.