S3, E7: A Professional Decision Coach’s Secrets to Making Better Decisions in Travel—and Beyond

Decisions can be hard, and indecision—whether over where to go or what to eat—is the worst. This week on Unpacked, a professional decision coach shares tips on how to make better choices in your travel life—and beyond.

Transcript

Aislyn Greene, host:  I’m Aislyn Greene, and this is Unpacked, the podcast that unpacks one tricky topic in travel each week. Have you ever faced travel indecision or, really, indecision in any facet of your life? It can be so frustrating and exhausting to be mired in that place. But today’s guest is an expert at getting people out of it—out of indecision, out of that stuckness.

Her name is Nell McShane Wulfhart, and I’ve known her for years, primarily as a travel writer, which she still is. A couple of weeks ago, though, I found out that she has also been a professional decision-maker for the last decade—and, yes, in case you’re wondering, she says that it is a job that she made up.

But she’s so good at it, she has a new podcast in partnership with Audible called The Decision Coach. So I wanted to get her take on why it’s sometimes so hard to make a decision, how we can make better decisions, and how all of that can be applied to travel.

OK, let’s hear from Nell.

Aislyn: Nell, welcome to Unpacked.

Nell: Thank you so much for having me. I am really excited to be here.

Aislyn: And we’re here to talk about something really interesting, and I was so delighted. Like, the moment I saw your email, I had to reach out because now you are—in addition to being a, a fantastic freelance writer, you are a professional decision-maker. How did this happen?

Nell: Well, first of all, I should say that if “professional decision-maker” sounds like a job that I totally made up, that is correct. I did make it up. Um, but I’ve been doing it for, like, 10 years now. Basically, people just call me when they have a really tough decision to make, and I tell them what to do. That’s, that’s it.

Aislyn: And so you’ve just been doing this naturally, like, with friends and family. Are you just a really good decision-maker?

Nell: I, I, you know, I’ve always been a good decision-maker and just sort of, like, a professional bossy boots. I, I love giving advice. I have that kind of fixer brain. Like, if someone starts telling me about a problem they have, like, I cannot help it. I can see what they should do and I start telling them, and eventually my friends and family were just like, “Shut up.” And someone suggested, like, maybe there’s people who actually want this advice and would pay for it. And it turns out that that’s true. You know, people struggle so much with decision-making, and sometimes just having, like, a total stranger, a completely neutral third party to weigh in on what you should do—it just helps them, like, get unstuck, and then they can move on with their lives.

Aislyn: I think it’s so true, and especially when it comes to big things or even small things. So what have you seen since you’ve started your business?

Nell: OK, so I’ve been doing this since 2013, so I—it’s really run the gamut. A lot of them are, are sometimes similar. Like there’s a really high proportion of people deciding between living in New York and living in L.A.

Aislyn: Oh [laughs].

Nell: Those two cities, for some reason, come up a lot.

Aislyn: That’s so funny.

Nell: Job offers. “Should I take this job offer?” Career changes are a big one. Like, you know, “Should I keep doing what I’m doing or try something totally different?” “Should I have a baby?” [is] also a popular choice. Um, “Should I get divorced?” is also something that people come to me for advice on.

And then there’s stuff that’s, like, it’s much more, I think, seemingly insignificant, but people get really stuck on it. Um, one woman called me to help her decide what color to paint her living room.

And someone else wanted to know whether or not they should get a tattoo removed.

Aislyn: Interesting.

Nell: So it’s, it’s a real spectrum.

Aislyn: It is a real spectrum. How do you approach these—because they are so different, there’s a lot of different emotional weight in there—so how do you begin the process?

Nell: There is a lot of emotional weight in there, but what they all have in common is they’ve been taking a really long time to make the decision, and they’ve, like, they’re, they’re usually kind of at the point [where] they’re, like, spiraling.

And, you know, the woman who had needed help deciding what color to paint the living room, like, she had been, her house had—they’d had a fire and they were, like, had to redecorate everything. So she was just, like, decisioned out. And this one for some reason was just, like, she just couldn’t make this one final decision because she’d making so many decisions.

And when it comes to something like, “Should I have a baby or I have a second baby?” um, or, you know, “Should I move to a new city?” or “Should I take this job offer?” . . . like, the decision-making process is more or less the same. Yeah, like, there’s more emotional impact, but the thing that they have in common is that these people are really stuck and they need to take some kind of action.

And, you know, it almost doesn’t matter sometimes what the action is as long as they do something. So I help them do that.

Aislyn: Why do you think people get stuck?

Nell: I think that there are two kinds of people. There are the chronically indecisive people who are, like, they don’t know what to wear in the morning. They don’t know what to have for dinner at night. And I think we are all that person at some point.

But I would say that more of my clients are actually high-achieving, Type-A kind of personalities, and for some reason that I have not been able to figure out—I wish I could—every once in a while, even these high achievers come across some decision that they just get bogged down in. And they just need someone to, like, pull them out of the, the swamp of indecision and set them on their way, and then they go off and they take action on that decision. And I never hear from them again, um, because they’re doing fine.

But, there are those two kinds of decision-[makers]. And, you know, the chronically indecisive people just need to make a lot more faster decisions. But the people who get stuck on one big decision, like, they just need some temporary help and then they’re fine.

Aislyn: Yeah. Yeah. I, I know some chronically indecisive people, and it is a tough place to be in because it’s like everything that you come across is a minefield.

Nell: Oh, it’s, it’s awful. I mean, I really feel for those people and I’m always trying to, like, load them down with decision-making advice when we do a session because I want to help them, like, in the future, just to make faster decisions, faster decisions, more decisions, because, like, it’s such a waste of time.

Aislyn: Do you think it’s because for those folks—and maybe it depends—that it’s almost like they don’t wanna close any doors in their life, and so if they make a decision, then automatically you’re closing another pathway?

Nell: Exactly. They don’t wanna close any doors. And it’s really what—it’s just a fear of regret. Like the decision-making business is just the regret-minimization business. You know, nobody ever wants to feel that really uncomfortable feeling of like, “Oh no, I should have done this other thing.” And that, for some people, that is just paralyzing.

And it, and it really sucks, but it, you know, it’s really hard to come to terms with the fact like, yeah, you’re gonna make some decisions that you wish you hadn’t made. But I think, like, the thing that I think people regret the most is the hours, days, weeks, months, years that they spend deciding.

Aislyn: And why do you think it’s so easy to either make a bad decision or to sit within that indecision?

Nell: Uh, sitting within indecision is, is definitely worse. When it comes to decision-making, you know, I don’t have a crystal ball, I can’t predict the future. All I can do is help you analyze the information you have right now and where you wanna go and see, like, which path makes sense. That, that’s all that I can. So sometimes the decisions are not gonna work out. We cannot know if this new job that you take is like—all of a sudden the boss is, like, a terrible micromanager. Like, you just can’t know some things in advance.

So I wouldn’t say that are no bad decisions. There are definitely some bad decisions, but, like, really, if you just make the best choice you can with the information you have at the time, like, that’s as good as it gets. No decision is really the worst for me because again, like I said, this, this waste of time and sort of energy and brain space that making these decisions takes up—like, you could be doing so much more with that. But I think you said, it’s the fear of regret. It’s a fear of making a, a bad choice. It’s a fear of feeling bad later. It’s a fear of saying goodbye to something that’s, that’s good. Actually, I just wrote a newsletter about this, like “how to say no to good things,” because sometimes when you’re making a choice, you know, both of them have pros and cons. And choosing one thing means saying goodbye to the pros of the thing you didn’t choose. Like, sometimes you have to give up something good to get something great.

Aislyn: How could we get better at making good decisions, do you think?

Nell: First of all, I think it’s important to get faster at making decisions. I would say that in general, people should think about how long they think they need to make a decision and then cut that time in half. This tends to scare people because they don’t want to think they left any avenue unexplored. They need to do more research.

But the quality of the decision will almost never suffer because you took less time to make it. And then you get all that time back. And I just think, you know, testing things out is so much more useful. You know, if you’re trying to decide, like, “Should I start a side hustle?” Like, you could spend six months thinking about it or you could just start it and six months from now, you will know whether or not you want to do a side hustle. Like you will have real, tangible data. It’s just so much more useful to take action than to deliberate and deliberate and deliberate.

Aislyn: Yes. How much do you think that the gut is involved in decision-making? And how much do you bring that into your work?

Nell: I think the conflict with decision-making is that people think they should be making entirely logical decisions and, you know, good-on-paper decisions, but the truth—at least what I’ve found in my decade of doing this—is that people are always going to do what they want to do, like, deep down inside them.

And my only job is to, like, figure out what it is they actually want and then just, like, write them a permission slip and say, “It’s OK to go do that thing.” Because most of the time it is.

Mostly, I mean, what we call “gut,” I guess that could have, like, a bunch of different meanings, but when we feel a way—like, when we’re checking with, like, how our stomach feels about a particular decision, like, we’re taking into account all the paper. We’re thinking about all those things. But really I would say if your gut is saying, “No, don’t do this,” it’s fine. Don’t do it. Just decide not to do it and then go do the other thing.

Aislyn: Yeah. And move on.

Nell: And move on. Yeah, exactly.

Aislyn: Well, since we’re talking about travel, where do you think that people get stuck around decisions when it comes to travel, living abroad? You’ve lived abroad a ton.

Nell: People get stuck in all sorts of places, but I think the biggest hurdle is, “Where do I go?” And actually I was thinking, like, I should offer that as a service. Like, you know, I’ve spent so many years—like you said, I’ve lived all around the world—I’ve spent so many years travel writing, and I make decisions for a living. Like, I’m the perfect [person] to tell people where to go on vacation—

Aislyn: You are! Or where to live.

Nell: Or where to live. Yes. I actually—people call me about that all the time, and I love talking about that.

Aislyn: That is cool. That’s really cool.

Nell: But I think, I think that’s the biggest. You know, there are so many options, like, the world is so small now, we can go almost anywhere. And just, like, figuring out, like, narrowing down the options is so difficult. So I think that’s where most people spend the most time. After that, they can narrow it down fairly quickly.

Aislyn: Got it. And how would you start? Like, say, I didn’t know where to go, how would you begin the process with me?

Nell: Yeah. Um, I, I think—like I can give some usual answer here about like, “Oh, do you like warm weather or cold weather? Do you like beaches? Do you like—I don’t know—icebergs?” But I actually think the most important thing is looking inside and thinking, like, “What kind of person am I?” Because when it comes to making decisions about travel, as well as decisions for everything else, we need to make decisions for the person that we are, not the person that we, like, aspire to be. Like, I cannot emphasize this enough.

People are always like, “Oh, but could do this. I could try, I should, blah, blah.” Those are red flag words to me. When it comes to, like, choosing a vacation spot, like if you’re the kind of person who does not like crowds and waiting in line, you are not going to magically enjoy those things just because you’re in Rome.

You know, like you think about the things you like to do in your everyday life and the things that, like, make you really uncomfortable. And could cross off a lot of places by just thinking about, like you know, “When I, when I go somewhere, like, I don’t like to be in a, in a super crowded place or a place where a lot of people are going.” “I like to spend time outside every day.” You know, just start using those parameters of, like, the things that you actually like in your everyday life, and you can apply those to travel.

Aislyn: Wow. And do you find that people get hung up in that a lot? Like the things that they should do or the person that they want to be or they see out in the world and . . .

Nell: Yes. Not just—yeah in, in all decision-making and definitely in travel because, you know, it’s so many people—the, the travel is finite, the trip is short. They think they should be like, “Go, go, go, pushing themselves to do all these things.They might never go back.” There are so many pressures and there’s this conflict between what they think they ought to do and what they actually want to do.

And people, people really struggle with that. I, I was just talking to a friend of mine who said when she goes to a new place, a new city, like, she likes to go to the natural history museum if there is one, and the secondhand stores. I was like—

Aislyn: Amazing.

Nell: —that’s what she does here. Like that’s great. You know, that’s like, those are two things you could do every city. They’re things that you know that you like, but you’re doing them in a new place. Like to me, that seemed like a perfect sort of parameter to establish for yourself. Like, what do you like doing on a Saturday in your own town? Just go do that in, you know, in Addis or whatever.

Aislyn: It’s so funny that we, don’t just naturally do that, because this is usually precious time off, right? Like this is time that we are spending to go somewhere to theoretically enjoy ourselves and to relax and you know, to learn about the place. But then we add all the shoulds and—

Nell: People are drowning in shoulds. And I think that’s like, it’s fine to have some shoulds. Like there are some things you don’t want to miss. But I think people put way more of that stuff on their list than they, than they ought to. And it really sucks some of the joy out of your, out of your trip and out of your vacation.

Um, but again, you have to think about the sort of person you are. Are you the sort of person who gets up at five-thirty a.m. every day and has a to-do list and does all their chores and does all their hobbies and does their work and then, like, goes to bed at seven? Like, OK, you probably wanna pack an itinerary full of stuff. Good you, go for it. God bless.

But if you’re somebody who, like, gets up around nine or 10 and enjoys a leisurely coffee and, you know, a little like, you know, moving around a little bit and, you know, not hurrying to get to a dinner reservation, like you could do that anywhere and still have a great time.

Aislyn: Yeah. It’s again, it comes back to that permission slip. Like you—do you actually legitimately write something for people? I would love it if you did.

Nell: No, no, no. It’s, it’s, a metaphor. Although I, I have been tempted, like I have offered to do it for people. Like, “Do you want me to send you an email right now saying it’s OK to turn down this job offer? It’s OK to break up with your boyfriend?”

Aislyn: Yeah, you could do a little certificate.

Nell: I could. I could, yeah. Put one up on Canva and send it to people. That’s actually not a bad idea. Maybe I should.

Aislyn: Well, you addressed it a little bit, but there do seem to be kind of two categories of decision-making around travel. There’s the first, the big one, like “Where do I go? What do I do?” And then there’s the, the ones that you actually make in the day-to-day on your trip. And do you have any advice for, or do you approach those differently? Do you have advice for people in terms of looking at those?

Nell: Well, you have a lot less time for the second than you do for the first. Which I think, of course, is a good thing. Like, you have to decide right now, are you going to go to this museum or are you gonna have coffee and cake in this cute little café? I think most people are, are pretty good at making those decisions on the fly.

But do have an idea for people when, who often feel caught between all the options when they are somewhere. I’m a big fan of, like, making decisions in advance, like, deciding and then not deciding. So before you go on the trip, I love the idea of coming up with, like, a theme for your trip. You know, people are big on like, “My theme or my word for 2024 or whatever.”

Aislyn: Yeah, yeah.

Nell: I don’t do so much of that, but I think that, like, if you can think of your trip, like, as, “OK, what do I wanna, how do I wanna feel the end of the trip? Um, you know, is this trip about exploration? Is it about discovery? Is it about relaxation? Is it about comfort?”

If you can pick that word or that theme before you get on the plane or train, then when you’re making, when you’re faced with those decisions in the moment, you can just go back to that word, like, “Which one of these fits in with my vacation theme? Which one of these is more in alignment with my, my vision for the vacation?” Then you could just make all the decisions according to that rubric.

Aislyn: It seems like it would also cut down on, we didn’t talk about it earlier, but decision fatigue. And especially when you’re in a new place and you’re maybe hit with a lot of sensory overload. Do you think decision fatigue is like a real, a real thing?

Nell: Oh my God, absolutely. I remember I was, like, I was living in Vietnam for a while and, uh, some friends had come to visit, they’d been traveling all around Asia and they were hanging out with me and my friends, and one of them said, “God, it’s just, it’s just so nice to have somebody else to decide where we’re going for dinner.”

It’s just like, you know, the two of them had been backpacking for months and months and every day it was like, “I don’t know, where are we gonna have dinner? And like, what do you think? And about this?” And just being able to like, like, delegate some of those decisions.

Yeah, decision fatigue is absolutely real. So you can, if you can narrow down your options and just think, “Oh, this one is, is my theme, this one goes with my theme of, of discovery, or this one goes with my theme of comfort,” like it’s so much easier.

Aislyn: And maybe giving ourselves permission to get things wrong sometimes. I don’t mean wrong in—but like, you know, I think because of the way that travel is shared on social media and online, like it’s so easy to feel like everything should be the absolute perfect thing. And maybe it’s OK if you just decide to walk by a bistro that you’ve never heard of and walk in because it smells good, the sign is cute, or whatever.

Nell: Yeah. Yes. I mean, I really think that goes back to like, “What kind of a person are you?” Because if you’re somebody who, who is a planner and has everything like lined up ahead of time, those restaurant reservations for every night—like I’m going on a trip with my partner’s family to Yellowstone in August. And his family has already made dinner reservations and rafting reservations and hotel reservations for a trip that’s not happening until August.

I’m like, “That is not how I do things.” But like, great if that is what gives them comfort, like I’m just going along. I’m a passenger. That’s wonderful. But if you’re the kind of person who, for whom that is stressful and feels like obligation and, “Now I’m gonna rush to make this reservation when I’m having such a lovely time sipping this wine, looking at the river,”—like, it really needs to go back to what kind of person you are.

And of course, the biggest decision also is, like, who you’re traveling with. And are those people on the same wavelength or not? I think that’s very important.

Aislyn: Do you have any advice for choosing your travel mates well?

Nell: Ooh. I think that’s a, a really hard one. I mean, if you’re at the stage where someone is like, “Let’s go on a trip together,” you probably know them reasonably well.

And so you should definitely, like, not respond at once. Be like, “Oh, right, lemme think about that.” And go home and think like, “Do I wanna spend all this time with this person? Like, are they gonna get up at 5:30 every morning when I wanna sleep until 8? Are they gonna make me, like, traipse around this museum when I would prefer to be, like, going around the flea market?

But yeah, I think, uh, maybe an easy way to do would be, like, “Sure, like let’s think about Paris. Like why don’t you gimme an idea of what your perfect day would be like and I’ll tell you about mine and see if they overlap even, even a little bit.” And then I think it should be pretty clear to both of you, like, we should travel together or not.

Aislyn: Yeah, or “Maybe we should just meet up in the city. We’ll have separate trips and we’ll have dinner together.”

Nell: That’s actually a great idea. Like, “We’re both gonna go to Paris at the same time. We’ll have, like, two dinners together.” Yeah. I love it.

Aislyn: Um, well, I feel like one of the things that happens that can be tough is when things go wrong on a trip. It can be you run into, you know, I don’t know, you get sick or your hotel reservation falls through. Then you have to make a decision on the fly. Do you have any tips for those uncomfortable moments?

Nell: I mean, I feel like in those situations, our options are sometimes all bad. Or, like the, you know, there’s not really that many choices and so it doesn’t really matter what you do. Um, and honestly, this is truer for more of our decisions in everyday life than we think. Like it really doesn’t matter.

In my decision-making sessions, I ask people to think a little bit about their values ahead of time, not, like, religious values or moral values, just like the things that make them happy in everyday life. Whether that’s control over your own time and schedule or, you know, financial security or recognition for your work, or time to walk your dog every day, or whatever.

So I think if you have a little bit of a sense of, like, what your, what your values are for the trip. Like maybe, um, saving money is, like, your number one thing. You wanna do everything on a budget. If you know that about yourself, like, you can make the decisions that are gonna be the cheapest, even if they maybe take more time or more effort or whatever.

I think it would behoove everyone think a little bit about those values, their own values, just in general. But definitely before a trip.

Aislyn: I love it. Do you have any examples of decisions that you’ve made while traveling or to travel that you were happy with—or maybe about moving to a new place? Like how do you, how do you go about making that decision?

Nell: I will say that I have lived, like, I’ve lived in, in Saigon. Uh, I lived in Colombo, in Sri Lanka. I lived in Seoul, in, in Korea, and all three of those places, I was just like, “Hmm, that seems nice. All right. Off I go.” My last two moves to, to Uruguay and to Switzerland, where I live now, have been because [of] my partner’s work. And you know, I can, I can tell people what to do from anywhere, so it’s fine for me to be here.

Um, but I, you know, I, those decisions were based on, well to be perfectly honest, like, like the food. Food, good food, is one of my top values. So, like, those are all like, “Oh my God, the food will be amazing.” You know, affordability and weather. Those are usually my top considerations for something like that.

Aislyn: I love it. And it sounds like you don’t get too hung up on it being . . . anything—like you don’t seem to have a lot of expectations. You’re like, “OK, they seem to have some of the things that I’m interested in. Let’s give it a shot and see how it goes.”

Nell: I think that’s something that is definitely true for me. Maybe more, uh, more so in the—when I was younger. But I really do, like, I just believe so strongly in the fact that almost every decision is reversible. And if you move somewhere and you don’t like it, you can usually leave. Or you know, if for financial reasons you can’t, OK. Make a point of, like, saving your escape money before you go. And then if you don’t like it, just leave.

Like you can change your mind. People stay stuck in locations they don’t like and jobs they don’t like and relationships they don’t like knowing that they should go, but not managing to do it for just so long. So I’m a big fan of the, uh, you know, you don’t have to call it quitting, you can call it pivoting, or as a friend of mine said, quiveting. And just do something else entirely.

Aislyn: I love that so much, yeah, ’cause I think the stick-with-itiveness, you know, that seems to be a cultural value, at least in the United States. And it’s not, it doesn’t behoove us, always.

Nell: It really doesn’t, like so many people should quit things way before they quit. Um, yeah, big, big quitting fan over here for sure.

Aislyn: Well, we do have two listener questions for you. I am gonna read the first one. This is from Christina. She says, “It’s my mother’s 70th birthday this year, and she and my sister want to take a big trip to Scandinavia, but my husband also wants us to take a three-week trip to China that we’ve meant to take for years. If we do both, it’ll be a big financial stretch for us, but also life is short. What should I do?”

Nell: I mean, if you can do both trips without, like, inconveniencing yourself hugely financially. Like if you could make it work, life is short. You should do both of those trips. Uh, but if you have to pick one, I would say that, you know, those zero birthdays, they only come around every 10 years.

And if you enjoy spending time with your mother and your sister, like it would be, it would be a gift to go on that trip, I think. And you could do China the next year. But I really do think like, if possible to pull both those things off and you’re willing to sacrifice, you know, eating out or, or whatever you spend money on in your everyday life, like go for it. You’ll have an amazing year.

Aislyn: That’s great. I mean, it sounds like also—I, I’m just reading into this question, but it kind of seems like she also knows what she wants to do and is looking for, for permission.

Nell: That is a, a surprising number of clients, like, they might not know that they know what they want to do, but they do know what they want to do. And, like, that’s my only job is to, like, yank it out of them.

Aislyn: Yes. Well, this one might be, the second one might be a little trickier to answer because this is from Inez and she is not with us, but in the newsletter where I asked for questions, I mentioned your tattoo example. and she says, “You mentioned tattoos and I’ve always wanted to get one while I’m traveling. I’m 39 and I don’t have any.” She said, “A) Is this crazy at my age? And B) How do you figure out if a tattoo artist is right for you, especially in a foreign country? And if I don’t know what I want, where do I begin?”

Nell: Well, I don’t know much about, about tattoos, but I do know that you are not too old for a tattoo. That virtually, I mean, no one is too old for anything, ever, I guess. I feel like you should, you should do what you want. Like there are, there’s literally no age-related downside to getting a tattoo at 39.

And in fact, I think about, like, the tattoos I wanted to get when I was 20 and thank God I did not get those tattoos. Like getting tattoos as a young idiot is, is so dumb. So I think yes, like embrace yourself. It could be a 40th birthday present to yourself, that could be super fun. But when it comes to picking a tattoo artist, I would just say like, if you’ve picked your destination, uh, you go on Instagram, find artists there. Find one who’s, like, put pictures that you’re like, “Wow, these look really good.” And you can go from there. But social media is your friend.

Aislyn: Yeah. All right. Well, Inez you have to let us know when you get a tattoo and what it is.

Nell: Send us a picture. Yes. And now I wanna see it.

Aislyn: Uh, one of my friends at 18, no, 19, he got a tattoo of the Superman logo on his chest. And I’ve always—we’re not in touch now—and I’ve always wondered like, did you get that removed? Is that still there? Because that’s a pretty specific . . .

Nell: Yeah.

Aislyn: Uh, so yes, I think waiting till 39 is, or 40 is smart. No Superman logos or you, then you really know that that’s what you’ve always wanted.

Nell: Yeah, exactly. Like you’re really committed to it, you know that you’re always gonna love Superman. Yeah, no, I’m, I’m you. I mean, one of my aunts just got, you know, her first tattoo at the age of like, I think, like, 61. And then recently she got another one. And they look great and she feels great and yeah, truly never too old.

Aislyn: That’s so cool. Well, I would love to hear a little bit more about your podcast. Would you mind sharing a few details about that?

Nell: I would love to talk about my podcast. Um, I made this in partnership with Audible. It took basically like a whole year to make, which I did not expect. Podcasting is complicated, um, huge amount of work. It’s called The Decision Coach, and it’s available on Audible, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get podcasts.

And it’s basically just like a, a condensed version of my sessions. You know, there’s six episodes in each episode. I coach a person who’s trying to make a big decision. We have somebody deciding whether or not to drop out of college. Somebody deciding whether or not to move from Australia to L.A. to his dream of becoming an actor. Um, a woman deciding whether or not to leave a sexless marriage.

And in each one of these episodes, I coach them to making this big decision. And there’s like, there’s tons of actionable tips for decision-making in your own life along the way. And, you know, um, I think they’re pretty useful and also fun to listen to.

Aislyn: Yeah, for sure. We’ll link to that in the show notes as well. And you had mentioned a newsletter. Is that a good place for listeners to find you?

Nell: Yeah, absolutely. Um, you can find me at decisioncoach.com and you can sign up for my newsletter that comes out every couple of weeks. There’s just, like, decision-making tips and suggestions and examples and yeah, things like that.

Aislyn: Awesome. Well, Nell, thank you so much for being here. This has been a real treat.

Nell: Thank you so much for having me. And a real pleasure to see you.

Aislyn: That was Nell, the professional decision coach. Christina and Inez, please let us know what you wind up deciding to do. And photos are always welcome. As I mentioned, I’ll link to Nell’s podcast, her websites, and social handles in our show notes. And we will see you next week.

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This has been Unpacked, a production of AFAR Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene and Nikki Galteland. Music composition by Chris Colin. And remember: The world is complicated. We’re here to help you unpack it.