When the Question Itself Is the Problem: On Yes or No Decisions

Photo © Yury Li-Toroptsov

Fairly regularly, someone knocks on my door already certain about the shape of their difficulty, because they have framed it as a clean binary, a fork in the road with exactly two branches, and what they want from me is help choosing the correct one. Should I stay or should I go, Paris or London, this job or that one, this relationship or its ending. By the time they reach me they have usually invested a considerable amount of thought, they have weighed the two options privately for weeks or months, and they arrive convinced that the only remaining task is to determine which of the paths is the real one.

I should state plainly what I do and what I do not do, because the distinction changes everything that follows. I work as a coach rather than a consultant, which means that I do not offer advice, I do not tell people which branch to take, and I do not arrive with a recommendation tucked away in my pocket. What I offer instead is a deep and unhurried exploration of the situation, an exploration that occasionally produces outcomes nobody at the table had anticipated, very much including the person who brought the question in the first place.

Here is what I notice almost every time. When a client presents a choice as this or that, they have, usually without realizing it, closed off a large portion of their available options, or to put it in the language I tend to use, they have reduced the horizon to a single shot. The binary feels like clarity, it feels like progress, and it feels as though the hard work of narrowing things down has already been done, and yet that very narrowing is often precisely where the difficulty is hiding.

One client came to me wanting a way to leave Paris for Nice. He was not looking for advice about logistics or neighborhoods or timing, and what he needed instead, in his own words, was someone to hold the space while he made the decision. In the world I work in, holding that space means something quite specific. It means going back, together, to the point before the question had hardened into two options, and reopening the actual problem rather than the problem as it has been presented to me, which is to say we go down the rabbit hole of why something needs to change at all.

Not every client is willing to make that descent, and I understand the reluctance, because it can feel like being sent back to square one after you believed you had already finished the difficult part. For me, though, reconnecting with the need for change itself, rather than with the technicality of how that change might eventually be carried out, is not optional but necessary, since it is the ground that everything else has to stand on.

What happens during that return can genuinely surprise the person who undertakes it. By going back to the beginning we clear the horizon as far as it will clear, so that we are no longer staring at two possibilities but at the whole field of them, while keeping every one of those possibilities tied back to the underlying need for change. Along the way we also sift through what I call false possibilities, by which I mean the fantasies and scenarios that look like genuine options from a distance but that come apart under careful inspection and reveal themselves to be unrealistic. Learning to recognize these and to remove them from the field of vision turns out to be enormously useful, because they tend to consume attention and energy while offering nothing solid in return.

When my client and I had done all of this, the two options he had carried in through the door, Paris or Nice, simply fell apart together in his hands. He moved to Madrid.

I want to be careful not to present that as a trick or a clever twist, because the point is not the surprise itself. The point is that this kind of work does not reduce the field, it opens it, and that opening is far more common than people tend to expect. Binary choices are genuinely hard, they frequently feel like the only options on offer, and sometimes, it is worth saying clearly, they really are the only options that exist. The difficulty is that this is not always the case, and the difference matters a great deal.

Finding a way out of the binary paradigm altogether usually means repositioning the original question in entirely different terms. Consider what happens when someone frames a professional difficulty as a choice between enduring an impossible situation and walking away from it entirely. The two options feel exhaustive, they feel like the whole map, and yet what they often conceal is a third territory that the framing itself has made invisible, namely the possibility of changing the terms of the situation rather than simply accepting or abandoning it. A conversation with a manager, a renegotiation of responsibilities, a lateral move within the same organisation, a boundary drawn for the first time. None of these appear on the original map because the map was drawn with only two edges. The binary did not describe the situation accurately. It described the level of exhaustion the person had reached before they sought help.

The next time a yes or no dilemma begins to close in on you, with its insistence that you must choose one of exactly two doors, you might treat that very feeling as a piece of information rather than as a verdict. It may well be a fairly reliable sign that the task in front of you is not to choose between the doors at all, but to change the game.