Making Decisions by Committee

One of the things I have been reflecting on recently is how readily we seek answers outside of ourselves. It is such an ordinary part of modern life that we rarely stop to question it. We tend to ask for opinions before we have fully formed our own. We search for another expert, another book, another podcast, another conversation that might finally provide the certainty we have been hoping to find. The pursuit of guidance has become so woven into our culture that it often feels synonymous with wisdom itself.

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with seeking guidance. Human beings have always learned from one another. Every field of study, every profession, and every spiritual tradition has been shaped by teachers willing to share what they discovered through experience. Guidance can broaden our perspective, challenge our assumptions, and help us recognize possibilities we may not have considered on our own.

What interests me is not our willingness to learn from others, but the subtle shift that can occur when we allow guidance to become authority.

This shift is rarely dramatic. It happens gradually, often without our awareness, as we begin to place greater confidence in someone else’s interpretation than in our own lived experience. We become hesitant to make decisions until someone else has validated them. Uncertainty starts to feel less like a natural condition of being human and more like evidence that we are missing something essential. Rather than developing a relationship with our own discernment, we search for someone who will tell us what our experience means.

I wonder if this is one of the unintended consequences of living in an age of unprecedented access to information. Never before have we been able to consult so many voices so quickly. Expertise arrives within seconds, and perspectives that once required years to encounter now surface with a single search. This accessibility has enriched our lives in countless ways, but it has also made it remarkably easy to mistake the accumulation of external knowledge for the cultivation of discernment.

The longer I teach, the less interested I become in providing answers and the more interested I become in helping people strengthen their capacity to trust themselves.

People often come to me believing they need another practice, another framework, or another breakthrough. They tell me they have “tried everything,” read every book, listened to every podcast, and spent years working on themselves. Yet when we begin exploring how they make decisions, a different pattern often emerges. They are still making decisions by committee, looking outside themselves for reassurance before they trust what they already know.

One of the central intentions behind Practical Spirituality™ is to create experiences where people can cultivate discernment and begin recognizing the spiritual practices that are already woven into their everyday lives. Rather than collecting more tools, we learn to notice what is already present. More often than not, my role is not to offer another answer. It is to help people recognize that the capacity they have been searching for has been quietly developing within them all along.

This, to me, is where spirituality becomes practical. It is not a search for greater certainty, nor is it the pursuit of flawless intuition. Discernment is not certainty. It is the willingness to remain present with uncertainty long enough for wisdom to emerge, rather than rushing to replace uncertainty with someone else’s conclusion. Over time, that willingness becomes self-trust—not because every decision is guaranteed to be right, but because we begin to trust our capacity to meet whatever follows.

Perhaps this is one of the quiet invitations of adulthood: not to know everything, but to become increasingly willing to stand in relationship with our own experience. There will always be teachers worth learning from and wisdom worth receiving. The task is remembering that their role is not to replace our inner authority, but to help us recognize it and cultivate it.

The goal, then, is not independence from others. It is freedom from the belief that someone else can know our lives more intimately than we do ourselves. That kind of trust is not found. It is cultivated, slowly, through the ordinary practice of paying attention.