The North West of England Way To Make Decisions

First published on July 17, 2019

I'm part of a Whatsapp group with seven of my oldest friends. It is one of those times when technology has completely enhanced relationships: I get to speak almost every day with people who I have known for more of my life than I haven't. As you can imagine for a group of 30-something men raised in the North West of England, it involves a lot of talk about football, running jokes and nicknames.

More recently, we have developed a frame for looking at the world. It may have originated from my habit of giving balanced answers to questions; I can't quite remember. Either way, we now view the world, in the group, through the frame of:

Good... or Shite?

There is no in-between. There is no grey. Things are either good, or they are shite. Therefore £4.75 is good value for a pint, but £4.76 is, according to my friend Chris, shite. Similarly, Harry Maguire must be a good signing for Man United because he is not shite. And if someone's evening definitely hasn't been good, then in fact it must have been shite.

Now the interesting thing about this frame is that I've come across it, essentially, before. In fact, I use it with clients quite often. My former coach, Rich Litvin, talks about it. Things are either Hell Yes, or they are Hell No. Rich does have a name for the in-between. In between Hell Yes and Hell No is just... Hell.

Once you play with this kind of frame in your life, you see things more clearly. One of my clients realised that she wasn't ready to say Hell No to her business, and so instead might need to go Hell Yes. It was being trapped in the Hell in between that was draining her energy and thinking and holding her back in her business.

Now I'm the sort of person who is interested in specificity around language, and some of you who are reading may notice there is a subtle difference between Rich's frame and ours. If you want to really prioritise in your life, then it helps if the 'yes' part of the dichotomy is a big yes - a Hell Yes. Because we know what a Hell Yes feels like. We can check: am I 'Hell Yes' for this or not?

That's what gets us out of doing things that we should really say No to, and in the modern world most of us should say No more to mediocrity (or even Good), socially and professionally, in order to be able to say Yes to the extraordinary.

And so perhaps the true North West of England equivalent to 'Hell Yes or Hell No' is in fact 'Bloody Good or Shite.'

Whether you prefer the Croydon/California version shared by Rich Litvin, or the North West of England version shared me and my friends, take these frames out into your life. Where are you putting up with mediocre because you simply haven't asked yourself if something is what you really want? And what would life look like if you played through the frame of Hell Yes or Hell No, of Bloody Good or Shite?

Try it just for a day, or a week. See your decision-making and commitments through these frames. Sometimes it is ideas like this that create space for magic to happen.