Three questions before deciding

This requires no consultation with us. It is done alone, on paper, in twenty minutes — and in many cases it is enough.

First: how long have I been thinking about it?

Not what I am going to decide. How long.

A decision that has matured for months and arrives calmly bears no resemblance to one that appeared nine days ago. The second is not necessarily bad, but it demands a different kind of caution.

And there is a particular case: if asking the question surfaces an old date you had forgotten — «actually this goes back to when…» — then that date matters more than the decision.

Second: what changed just before it appeared?

An arrival, a departure, an inheritance, a move, a separation, a new person in the professional circle.

This is not about blaming anything or anyone. It is about dating the beginning. Many decisions that look autonomous are in fact responses to something that happened earlier and that no one has mentioned since.

Third: who benefits from my deciding quickly?

The most uncomfortable of the three, and the most useful.

If the answer is «no one, only me, because I want to move forward», go ahead. If the answer is a name — a partner, a buyer, a relative, an adviser paid on the transaction — it is worth pausing a few days. Not because that person is acting in bad faith, but because their calendar is not yours.

What to do with the answers

In most cases, nothing further. Seeing them written down orders the situation, and many decisions clarify themselves once they stop living only in your head.

If reading them reveals a repetition — the third time the same thing happens, with other people and other money — then there is indeed something to look at differently. And there, if you wish, we talk.

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