Understanding Intrapersonal conflict and the role of values in contented decision making

Ever have that experience when choice was so difficult because the two options are attractive-and you feel stuck, like you don’t want to betray yourself, but you simply HAVE TO choose! Well, it has a name!

Approach – Approach conflict is a cognitive psychological phenomenon where a person is presented with two phenomena or options and they are both attractive.

Usually this is where somebody feels the options, events, things or people are equally valuable and they find it difficult to choose one over the other.
Approach-Approach conflict is a normal phenomenon that happens quite a lot and many people are asking how they to deal with it.
My recommendation after many decades of studying humans is to explore not just the phenomena itself or the event or the person or the thing that’s creating conflict, but it is to ask a question “what is the value of each of these options?” and by ‘value’ I do not refer to a financial value but it’s more which of these do I value more, psychologically, than the other.

Or even to ask “what makes each of these options valuable and what do I benefit from each of these?

Once that exploration has been made it will be easier to make a choice but sometimes it also means one has to also ask a question “what am I willing to Sacrifice temporarily in order to take action, or to move? “
because an approach-approach conflict actually forces you to prioritize your values.
We live our lives based on our values. while we don’t usually explicitly interrogate our values, they inform almost every decision we make conscious and unconscious and most of the time we judge people and the rest of the world, based on our values.
We make major and minor choices based on our values continuously, from food we eat, partners in life, careers, etc.
So, it always amuses me when I work with people, and I start doing an exploration of their values and they don’t even know. And it’s not that they don’t know, it’s more that they don’t have a name for them but then as we go through the process it’s a powerful consciousness raising exercise when one can give a name to that which inform almost every single portion of their lives.
They even start connecting better with others because they debate less and collaborate more and are more curious about others.
And when one is deliberate about how they apply those values, they tend to live their lives in a more content way and at peace with their choices and decisions.