The big choice before the ordinary choice
On making a conscious decision about the kind of person you're committing to being.
"The reverse test doesn't discover your values. It gives you the chance to choose them."
A friend mentioned in passing that they might skip their sister’s birthday dinner. They were tired, the week had been long, the drive was forty minutes each way. I could tell it had been sitting with them.
They weren’t asking what I thought, just thinking out loud.
I empathised, because I’ve been in that place where you’re trying to weigh what you want to do against what you know you probably ‘should’. Over the years, I’ve gone both ways on it. Shown up, and not shown up. The deciding factor, in more recent times, wasn’t how tired I actually was. It was whether I’d asked myself the right question before I responded to the invitation.
The question that shapes the answer
The question I’ve learned to ask involves a reversal of perspective: putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes.
I ask myself, if the situation were flipped and it was my birthday dinner, and my friend or sibling was the tired one with the forty-minute drive: would I want them to come?
The answer, for most of us, comes quickly. Yes, of course.
After this first question comes the more important one: am I the kind of person who shows up for the people I love, in the way I’d want them to show up for me?
This isn’t guilt, or a trap. It’s an opportunity to make a conscious choice about a principle, and then to let that principle do the work of guiding the decision. The tiredness becomes a logistics question we can plan around in advance, not the deciding factor on the day. We can rest around it.
That shift, from whether to how, is what a consciously chosen principle actually does. And it works in both directions, something I’ll come back to.
When the irritation is real too
My daughter plays netball most Sunday mornings. There’s another parent I see most weeks, someone I’ve gotten to know a bit over a season of sidelines and scoresheets. A few months ago, outside of that context, she reached out and asked if I’d be willing to read over a funding submission she’d been working on for a few months, that she was putting together for a community project. It wasn’t something I had any involvement in, and she needed it back within a couple of days.
My honest first reaction, if I’m being honest about it, was a familiar internal resistance. I had things of my own on, and the timing wasn’t great.
But before I responded, I reversed it.
If I’d spent the better part of three months on something, and needed someone with a fresh set of eyes to look it over before it went somewhere important, would I want someone to say yes? Without question. And to be seen as someone who could offer some value there is a compliment, too.
So the question then becomes, am I someone who shows up for people the way I’d want them to show up for me?
I read the submission that evening.
What I noticed doing it that way, is that the resistance didn’t disappear, as the timing challenge was still real. But it stopped being the deciding factor, because I’d already made the bigger decision. The principle was already in place, and that moment just asked me to honour it.
What this actually is
This isn’t about discovering who you are. Most of us have a reasonable sense of that already.
It’s about deciding, in advance of the response, which version of yourself you’re committing to: the one who defaults to what’s easiest in the moment, or the one who pauses to check whether that choice is consistent with something they’ve already decided.
Looking at things this way makes decisions easier. It removes us-at-that-moment from the centre of the decision. When we’re tired, or busy, or mildly irritated, we become the most important variable in our own reasoning.
The reversal helps us step outside ourselves to consider, if we weren’t the one being asked, what would we want? And from there, the question becomes whether we’re genuinely living with integrity toward our own stated principles, or only when it’s convenient.
The reversal works in the other direction too. The same question that asks whether we’re showing up also asks whether the people we’re turning up for extend the same consideration to us. If the honest answer, over time, is that they don’t, that’s information.
A principle isn’t a contract we keep regardless of what’s returned. It’s a reflection of who we want to be, and part of that is knowing when a relationship has quietly become one-sided. We don’t have to manufacture obligation toward people who have long since stopped applying the same standard to us.
Releasing ourselves from that isn’t a failure of principle, or selfishness. It’s how we protect the energy we need to show up well for the people and moments that are genuinely mutual.
Done consistently, this is how our decisions in ordinary moments become our character.
Who we are is a direct result of whether we make the forty-minute drive for someone who also cares about us, or read the submission for someone kind on a busy week, or the hundred other moments that feel small at the time, but actually show who we are.
The big choice of our principles comes first. The ordinary moments just ask us to follow through.
Three things to try.
1. Name one principle you want to commit to.
Something specific, not aspirational. Not ‘I want to be a better friend’ but ‘I show up for the people I love the way I’d want them to show up for me.’
The more concrete the commitment, the more useful it is when a moment arrives.
2. Run the reversal before you respond.
Next time a request or situation arrives that produces resistance, pause before answering. Flip the scenario and notice what you’d want. Then ask whether your response is consistent with that.
3. Separate the logistics from the decision.
Once the principle is named, treat the practical obstacles as logistics, not as the decision itself. Tiredness is a logistics question. Whether to go is already answered.
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