The effect’s of the Writer’s Strike are rippling out pretty wide now. The Autumn pilot season will be full of reality shows, Autumn 2009 in the cinema is likely to be pretty quiet, and people in the industry are losing their jobs as a result.

Did the members of the Writer’s Guild know all of this would happen?

Some of it, sure they did. But the rest is probably an unpleasant surprise. The point is that life is pretty damn complicated these days. A butterfly flaps its wings in China and the next thing you know your workload doubles and your boiler packs up (I’m currently boiling kettles to wash).

Those complications didn’t stop the Writers Guild from making a difficult choice and sticking to their guns, and it’s that web of complications that makes it pretty hard for you to see to step up and tackle tricky choices with confidence.

Vicky’s a client who landed a senior post in a law firm in London, and while we were working together she came to a session saying that she had to fire someone (check out Guy Kawasaki’s excellent post on the art of firing someone if you’re in the same boat). Now, this is never going to be a pleasant thing to have to do, but it’s a reality of the business world that people are fired every day and someone has to do the firing. People just like you and me have to face the reality that one day it could be us giving the poor schmo the bad news.

She was pretty much paralysed by having to do it, and came to the session telling me that this guy had a young family and was projecting forwards about all the terrible things that might happen to him and his family when she says those two fateful words “You’re fired.”

Vicky was not only taking responsibility for the act of firing him, but for everything that followed

That was her mistake, and once she’d finished letting me know about all the terrible things that might happen to the guy, I simply said to her, “What makes you think that what happens to him is your responsibility?”

There’s a massive difference between thinking your decisions through and considering every variable of a decision. Do that and you’ll find yourself on a one way trip to I’m-paralysed-by-indecision-ville. Keep doing that and your self-confidence will hit a new low.

With Vicky, we took a good look at what was stopping her from taking action, and pretty soon she saw that she was:

1. Conjuring up fictitious scenarios that painted a black picture.
2. Taking personal responsibility for each outcome, real and imagined.
3. Making herself feel smaller than the task, forgetting entirely about her ability to get great results.

The bottom line is that life will always have difficult choices. Some of your choices may well have a negative impact on other people.

There, I said it. Get used to it.

While it’s generally a good idea to consider the impact of your choices or to minimise the negative effects of them, those considerations don’t need to affect the choice itself.

PS: By the way, Vicky reported back to me that the guy she fired was looking for another job in a different field anyway, and that she’d done him a favour because he was feeling guilty about not putting his all in.