One old parable tells of a donkey that dies because it cannot choose between hay and water. That story feels uncomfortably modern when you're stuck over a job move, a hard conversation, or even what to watch tonight.
In her TEDx University of Salford talk, behavioral scientist Nuala Walsh argues that indecision is not a fixed personality trait. It's often a mental frame, and once you change that frame, you can start moving again.
Why indecision can stop you cold
Walsh opens with the 14th-century story of the hungry, thirsty donkey. The animal finds both food and water, stares at them, and cannot decide which to choose first. Time passes, and the donkey dies. The point is not the donkey's appetite. The point is how hesitation can become its own problem.
That old story lands because modern indecision looks similar, even when the stakes are smaller. People get stuck over what to wear, what to stream, where to go on vacation, and which candidate to hire. Then there are the harder calls, whether to leave a job, speak up about wrongdoing, end a relationship, or start a business. Walsh notes that billions of Google searches around indecision show how common this is.
Part of the pressure comes from volume. Walsh cites an estimate that people make about 35,000 decisions a day, and that roughly 95% of them happen unconsciously. The rest can feel heavier because they carry expectation. You expect yourself to get it right. Other people may expect answers too, especially if you're a parent, a manager, or the person everyone turns to for judgment. In business, decisive leaders often get hired, promoted, and praised. Meanwhile, hesitation can carry financial, ethical, and social costs.
People freeze for different reasons, but the patterns are familiar:
- You have too many options, or too few.
- You have too much time and drift, or too little time and panic.
- You feel morally split between competing values.
- You feel watched, judged, or responsible for everyone else.
- You want to keep the peace.
- You want the perfect answer.
That mix of pressure and uncertainty makes it hard to prioritize. The result is a mental maze where every path feels loaded.
The three stories your mind tells you
Walsh says indecision often lasts because of three inner voices. One says the choice is too big. Another says the consequences are too far away to deal with now. The third says the whole thing feels too hard, too risky, or too painful. If any of those voices gets loud enough, action stalls.
Her answer is reframing. In psychology, reframing means changing how you interpret a situation so you can see it differently. A problem can become a challenge. A challenge can become an opportunity. Even an embarrassing mistake can turn into a lesson if you view it from a little distance. That shift matters because perspective changes behavior.
For a broader primer on how behavior and judgment interact, The Decision Lab's overview of behavioral science gives useful context.
Make the decision feel smaller, sooner, and easier.
That is the core of Walsh's method. She does not suggest pretending risk disappears. She suggests changing the frame so your brain stops treating the choice like a looming threat.
This quick comparison captures the idea:
Inner voice | What it feels like | Helpful reframe |
|---|---|---|
"It's too big" | Overwhelm, magnified consequences | Make it smaller |
"It's too far away" | Procrastination, short-term thinking | Make it sooner |
"It's too hard" | Fear, shame, finality | Make it easier |
The point is not self-deception. The point is to regain enough perspective to move. Once you stop viewing a choice as huge, distant, or unbearable, your mind has more room to weigh it clearly.
Make a big decision feel smaller
Walsh calls the first technique the proportional frame. It helps when you've blown a decision up so much that it feels impossible to touch. She gives the example of her niece, who is overworked and underpaid in her first job and feels trapped in a "should I stay or should I go" decision. The choice has become so large in her mind that she avoids it.
Walsh admits she knows that feeling well. Earlier in her own career, she delayed over a job offer for so long that the company withdrew it. Indecision did not keep her safe. It closed the option.
The fix is to mentally shrink the choice. Instead of weighing 10 or 20 factors, look at the top three. Instead of idealizing one path, look for its flaws. Maybe the "perfect" job means less autonomy, a longer commute, or a culture that does not fit. Once you stop treating one option like a flawless rescue, its emotional weight drops. Sharing the decision with someone else can also reduce its size. As Walsh puts it, a shared decision is a shrunken decision.
She extends the same logic to much bigger situations. NASA did not get to the moon by solving one giant decision in a single moment. The mission unfolded through thousands of smaller calls, each one manageable on its own.
Framing also changes everyday behavior. Walsh points to research from UCLA and Cornell showing that people were much more likely to join a savings plan when the amount was framed as $5 a day rather than $150 a month, even though the totals matched. Four times as many consumers enrolled. That gap matters because the small frame feels easier to act on.
Research on decision-making in context supports this broader point. The way a choice is presented changes how large it feels, and that often changes whether people act at all.
Make the future feel closer
The second technique is the temporal frame. It tackles a basic human bias, the tendency to favor what feels immediate over what matters later. People know they should save more, smoke less, spend less time scrolling, network more, and take better care of the planet. Yet those benefits sit in the future, while the cost of acting lands today. So the decision gets delayed.
Walsh puts it simply: everybody loves tomorrow. The problem is that tomorrow becomes a storage unit for every postponed choice, and nothing leaves the shelf.
Her reframe is to bring the future into the present. Take the decision that's bothering you and ask how it will feel in two weeks, two months, two years, or two decades. That sequence stretches your thinking beyond today's discomfort. It also changes what seems urgent and what seems temporary.
When you picture your future self clearly, you pull tomorrow's consequences into today's choice.
Walsh says studies using age-progressed photos and virtual reality avatars suggest that this kind of future-self visualization can shift intention. People report stronger plans to eat better, cheat less, smoke less, and save more. The future stops feeling abstract.
She also points to settings where the technique already shows up. Professional golfers visualize tricky shots before they take them. Therapists use future-oriented thinking with patients in rehabilitation, especially when patients struggle to imagine recovery. In organizations, the same idea can help with "speak up or stay quiet" decisions. Walsh says her own research found that 92% of employees said they would speak up, but only a much smaller group took the first step when the moment arrived. That gap matters because corporate culture is a long-term idea, while ethical choices often happen in short, pressured moments.
If you want people to act now, the future has to feel close enough to matter now.
Make hard choices feel easier
The third technique is the positive frame, and it deals with emotion. Some decisions feel hard because they seem final, irreversible, or humiliating if they go wrong. That is where fear takes over. People worry about regret, shame, or looking foolish, so they avoid the call altogether.
Walsh is careful here. Positive framing does not mean pretending painful decisions are happy ones. Layoffs do not become good news. End-of-life care does not become cheerful. The goal is to change how you see the choice so it feels less absolute and less terrifying.
One example she gives is a wildly common search query: "Will I break up with my partner?" That wording already narrows the decision into a harsh binary. Break up or don't break up. When the mind locks onto only two doors, both can look scary. Walsh suggests expanding the options instead. In some relationships, the next step might be time away, therapy, a trial separation, or another arrangement the couple agrees on. The value is not in picking a trendy option. The value is in reducing the sense that one irreversible move will decide everything.
The same principle applies to the story you tell yourself. If you keep repeating that a bad outcome will lead to misery, embarrassment, and lasting damage, you make action less likely. If you allow room for repair, learning, and a decent future, the choice gets lighter. Walsh ties that idea to Martin Seligman's work in positive psychology and Daniel Kahneman's research on gain framing.
She also points to a public example. During COVID, many governments and health authorities used the message "Masks save lives." That wording appealed to hope, protection, and family. For many people, that emotional frame helped push them out of hesitation and into action.
A hard decision does not become easy because you smile at it. It becomes easier because you stop treating it as a cliff edge.
A simple test for high-stakes moments
When a decision still feels sticky, Walsh uses one more tool: the probability test. It is simple, but it covers a lot of ground because it brings together all three reframes.
The probability test
Ask yourself these three questions:
- What is the worst thing that could happen?
- How likely is that outcome?
- If it happens, what will I do?
The first question forces you to face the fear instead of circling around it. The second pushes you to scale that fear properly. Many imagined disasters shrink once you examine the odds. The third question restores agency because you stop seeing yourself as powerless inside the scenario. You begin to see options.
That is why the test works so well. You have already pictured the future consequence, which makes it more immediate. You have reduced the apparent size of the danger by judging its probability. You have also made the choice easier by building a response plan. The decision may still matter, but it no longer looks like a single leap into darkness.
If you want more on calibration and bias reduction, the UK's Behavioural Insights Team published a useful practical guide to debiasing decision-making.
Walsh ends with one final shift in perspective. Indecision is temporary. Most people can look back at choices from their 20s, 30s, and 40s and see that many of them worked out reasonably well, even the messy ones. That memory matters because it loosens the grip of perfectionism. You do not need certainty before every move. You need enough perspective to choose.
A better decision starts with a different frame
The donkey in the parable died because it treated two basic needs as an impossible choice. People do something similar when they enlarge a decision until it feels dangerous to act.
Walsh's argument is refreshingly practical: perspective is adjustable. When a choice feels smaller, sooner, and easier, you stop waiting for perfect certainty and start making a call you can stand behind.
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