Every business owner has a decision they keep circling. A hire. A big contract. A pivot. Letting someone go. You’ve built the pro-and-con list twice. You’ve run the numbers, slept on it, and run them again. And the data has told you everything it’s going to tell you—and it still isn’t enough to make you sure.
A good decision isn’t the one that turns out perfectly. It’s the one you made well with what was in front of you. So if certainty isn’t coming, it helps to have a process you can trust instead.
A Saint Who Understood Hard Decisions
St. Ignatius of Loyola spent his life studying how people make decisions. Before he was a saint, he was a soldier recovering from a battlefield injury, forced to sit with his own thoughts for months. What he noticed became the foundation for how he taught others to discern.
One of his central warnings: don’t make a major decision while you’re in desolation—that state of inner turmoil, anxiety, or darkness. When you’re anxious, drained, or spiraling, your judgment is running on fumes. Desolation clouds clarity. It convinces you to move when you should wait, or to freeze when you should act. Notice your interior peace before you commit. If the only thing pushing you toward a choice is panic, wait for the panic to clear, then look again.
The Framework
Once you’re steady, Ignatius offers a simple three-part process.
- List the pros and cons. Not to arrive at certainty, but to get the decision out of your head and in front of you, where you can see it.
- Imagine the outcome and imagine what it would feel like. Picture yourself having made the choice. Sit with it for a day. Does it bring peace, or does it bring unrest? Ignatius believed that peace—real, settled peace, not just the absence of conflict—is often how God confirms a decision already well made.
- Seek the advice of a trusted person. This is where most owners stop short, and it’s the step Ignatius considered essential, not optional. This is exactly what your chapter meeting was built for. Once a month, you sit in a room with other faith-driven entrepreneurs who have weathered the storms, made the mistakes, and come out the other side. They’re not consultants guessing at your situation from the outside—they’ve lived it. Bring your decision to them. Present what you’re leaning toward. Don’t just ask what they would do, but what they see that you might be missing. These are people you can trust with the real weight of the decision, because they’ve carried similar weight themselves.
- Make the decision.
At its core, this framework is about letting go—trusting that there’s a process, that God is part of it, and that your community is part of it too. You’ll still plan, and you should—planning is good stewardship. But hold the plan with an open hand, so you can lean on Christ and fellowship to carry you through.
“The human heart plans the way, but the LORD directs the steps” (Prv 16:9).