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🎙️Episode 3: The One About Decisions (And Painting Cabinets at Midnight)

Updated: May 6

all we know about the stuff we know what type of decision is this

What Kind of Decision Are You Making?

In this episode, we dive into something deceptively simple: understanding what kind of decision you’re actually making. Because not all decisions are created equal—and if you treat a reversible choice like a life-altering one, you're going to stress yourself (and your team or partner) right into a standstill.


Enter: Type 1 vs. Type 2 decisions.

  • Type 1 = Reversible. Low risk, flexible, and often mid-priority.

  • Type 2 = High Stakes. Irreversible or costly to undo. Think house buying or product launches.


Knowing which one you’re dealing with helps you decide how much energy, time, and emotional weight to throw at it.


Listen or Watch This Episode:


A Cabinet-Painting Crisis (And Why It Matters)

Ashley shares the internal spiral of deciding whether or not to paint her kitchen cabinets—a “Type 1” decision in disguise. The real cost? Not money or materials—but the emotional toll of indecision.

“If the sun rises and the cabinets are a different color and I hate it, I’ll have to remix paint, get more samples, test again... and I just want to get it right the first time!” —Ashley

But Dave reframes it: What if it's not a failure, but a version 2.0? The cost of “redoing” something isn’t always a dealbreaker. Sometimes, it’s just part of the process.


Decision-Making Styles and the DiSC Factor

Different personality styles approach decisions differently. Your style might push you to jump quickly (hi, high-Ds!) or stall out (looking at you, cautious Cs). Understanding this about yourself—and the people you work or live with—can smooth the entire decision process.

“You’re not indecisive—you just haven’t named the stakes yet.”

This is where frameworks like DiSC help. For example:

  • High S and C styles might hesitate more, preferring certainty.

  • High D or I styles might act faster—but need help checking the risks.


Group Decisions: Who Actually Has the D?

If you’ve ever tried to make a decision with a team (or your partner) and gotten stuck, there’s a good chance it’s because no one clarified roles.

Cue: RAPID Roles.

  • R = Recommend

  • A = Agree (has veto power)

  • P = Perform

  • I = Input

  • D = Decide


When one person assumes the “D” and the rest of the team disagrees? Chaos. Dave shares a story about a 13-person team where one guy tried to claim the decision—and 12 heads whipped around in disbelief. The real win was that they talked it out before making the call.

And yes, this works at home too. (See: Dave and Mary’s piano room.)

“You can give your input, but you don’t have the D.”

If You’re Going to Say No, Bring an Option

Ashley brings up a common source of frustration in partnerships and teams: when someone shuts down a decision but doesn’t offer a solution. Here’s the golden rule:

If you veto, you have to propose a viable alternative. With great veto power comes great responsibility.

This small shift creates shared accountability—and keeps things moving forward. Watch their interaction below:



Self-Awareness Is the Real Superpower

Toward the end of the episode, you get into the deeper stuff: how your past decisions shape your instincts, and how every hard decision becomes future wisdom.

“You’re grooming your intuition. Every time you make a choice—even a messy one—you’re building decision muscle.”

We call that growth, friends.


🎧 Listen Now

Episode 3 is available wherever you stream podcasts. If you’ve ever stared at a paint swatch for too long, over-analyzed a job offer, or argued with your partner about moving across the country—this one’s for you.


📚 Download our Book

Did you here the news? We wrote a book! Here’s what people are saying so far about 5 Things You Need to Know About Decision Making…

“You don’t know what you don’t know until you read this book.”

“This is an example of something we all think we’re good at it…and we’re not.”

“Very practical and immediately usable. The decision-making framework and tools are outstanding resources for business and everyday life decisions.”


We’ll be discussing each of the 5 things in our upcoming episodes, so make sure to click that subscribe button so you’ll get notified!


Grab your copy of the book here: https://www.focustools.com/5things 


🧠 Find Your DiSC Style

Intrigued by DiSC? So are we! Find out your DiSC style by taking the DiSC Workplace assessment here: https://bit.ly/DiSCstyle


🙏Lastly, we need your help!

We’re just getting started, and we’d love for you to be part of this journey. Please like and rate the All We Know About the Stuff We Know on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.​ Your five star reviews help us spread the word, and helps us keeping bringing you All We Know About the Stuff We Know.


We've included the transcript for your reading pleasure below.


Episode 3 | What Type of Decision is This? | 5 Things You Need to Know About Making Decisions


Ashley Martin (01:37)

Okay so you just said that you have five things about decisions that people need to know. No particular order. Number one...


Dave (01:40)

Five things. Yeah, and again, in no particular order. Yeah, you really need to know is this, what kind of a decision am I facing? Whether it's a work decision or a personal decision, is it a type one or a type two decision? Because they require different kinds of approaches. Type one decisions are decisions that are reversible, basically. The cost and time, money, stress, pain to reverse the decision is doable. You know, these are the lower to mid-priority decisions. Even some of the more important decisions, especially at work. Hey, should we move forward with this project? Hey, should we partner with this company?


If those decisions, if you try them and they don't work out, if you can recover relatively easily from them and switch course and do a reset, then it's a type one decision and you shouldn't agonize over it. You should take your best shot and go.


And those are decisions, at least in business then, that should be made further down in the organization as long as they're given permission to do that. And so that's part of the speed part. Like, you know what, let's get on with things. A good decision now is better than a great decision later.


Ashley Martin (02:47)

Right, right. So a type one decision would be really good for people who are on the right side of the disc circle. Maybe the I or the S, no, the bottom. Your S's and your C's who are going to be more slower, more reluctant to change. So because this fear of failure is pretty low and you could flex and bounce back relatively easy, it would be great for those types of disc styles or those types of personalities to start flexing your muscle with the tiny decisions.


Dave (03:18)

Yep, not even tiny, but kind of the tiny to mid-weight decisions. Because again, what would be a personal decision? You know, should we...


Ashley Martin (03:22)

Got it. Should I paint the cabinets green or leave them white?


Dave (03:31)

There you go. Perfect. Perfect decision. Should I leave them the way they are or try a new color? Well, you know what? Yeah, if you are the kind of style that you wanted, you couldn't handle failure, like, what if it doesn't work out? Then what's, then what am I going to do?


Ashley Martin (03:46)

Well, let me tell you, I'll spiral because one, it takes a lot of time to paint these cabinets. So it's gonna take me a few days and a few hours. And then if I don't like it, if the sun rises and like these cabinets are a different color because I painted them at night and I hate it, my gosh, I'm gonna have to go back to the hardware store. I'm going to have to remix and paint. I need to pick some more samples and test them all out on the wall. And it delays the decision-making because I wanna get it right. And it's annoying.


Dave (04:11)

Yep, so then you'd, again, so you'd say, okay, what is the cost to pivot? What's the cost to reverse this decision? Not just money, but time, you know, emotional stress, that kind of thing. And if you're okay with that, or if you can mitigate that somehow, like, well, instead of painting the whole kitchen, maybe I just choose one cabinet and try that and see then then go do it because you've got you know the time and pain to reverse the decision is you can handle it right so versus type two decisions where the cost in terms of time money pain stress is huge and mean you may not be able to undo that decision then those are the decisions where you really got to get them right and you really got to take your time and you really gotta find experts if you need experts to help with the content. You have to have a process that you can follow to make sure you're gonna get the best outcome possible for your decision. And those are the decisions where it does pay to take a little bit more time to get it right the first time because they're, either irreversible or the cost is so high you don't even wanna face having to do a pivot or a reset.


Ashley Martin (05:18)

So I'm thinking personally, buying a house, getting a divorce, leaving a job, and you're thinking corporately, what are these types of decisions?


Dave (05:29)

Yeah, corporately could be giving the go on a product launch. That's costing huge amounts of time and money. Now, most product development efforts have lots of gates that need to go through so that you're not making that decision all at once. It could be a merger decision, a big merger decision. It could be hiring a key C-suite executive, that kind of thing.


So those are the high value, high consequence, but high potential benefit kinds of decisions out there.


Ashley Martin (05:59)

I love it. Even like just separating that makes it more clear to me. It makes me realize I don't have to fret over this. Like even deciding to paint something green, my friend Dina was like, you could always paint it back white if you don't like it. It'll be okay. what am I doing to myself?


Dave (06:15)

Okay. Yeah, exactly. And so, especially for personal decisions, you can give yourself permission, and you probably won't like this term, you can give yourself permission to fail because the cost of failure is no big deal. Yeah.


Ashley Martin (06:31)

Virgo, I'm a perfectionist. I don't want to get anything wrong.


Dave (06:36)

or the cost of let's let's say it this way uh... that not the cost of failure but the cost of having to do a two point oh you know i did i didn't one point oh i i painted my cabinets green well you know what i can do better let's go to two point oh now that's just that's just reframing it as an evolution rather than a failure and a reset but however you frame it uh... yeah it's it's it's not a giant deal to reverse that decision


Ashley Martin (06:51)

Yeah. Right, right, and you're talking in terms of cost. I think of like my internal, the cost of the internal struggle to my emotions, to my mindset. The longer we let it all continue and ruminate without taking action, it's a big one and we don't recognize it as one, right?


Dave (07:23)

Yeah.


In business decisions, the mistake that many companies make or many individuals inside companies make is they think they're dealing with type two decisions when really they're dealing with type one decisions. Really they're dealing with decisions that can be overcome or reset can happen. And so what happens is all this great overlap of decisions that sits between type one and type two, they end up more into type 2 decisions which slows everything down to a crawl because decisions never get made because people are over analyzing them getting too many people involved getting buried in approvals all that stuff and so the organization slows down to a grinding you know pace and you know in most companies today maybe more than ever speed is just as important as quality in much of what organizations do so yeah so when we're talking with companies then yeah especially for things like Decision Focus yeah you don't you want to be applying process in a formal way to those decisions that truly matter you can apply process in an informal way to almost any decision because a lot of it's mental right you know mustn wants and things like that


Ashley Martin (08:35)

Yeah, I was going to ask you whenever things slow down. It's because a lot of people, there's a lot of...hands in the fire. There's a lot of, like maybe one person in this team of group think has a certain opinion and is not going to budge. Or they're having so much weight in on the decision process that it's slowing everything else down. Like how do you get that person on board? How do you collectively come to a team decision where we're all unanimous when one person feels like, uh-uh, I don't want it.


Dave (09:07)

Well, you know, it's interesting because that really is a great segue into the Decision Roles process, the Rapid Roles process, because it could be that the person or people that are slowing down the decision shouldn't have decision making authority on that decision. They shouldn't have the D, which in Rapid as you know, means D, the decider. Maybe they are I people, R-A-P-I-D, they're input people. And if they're input people, you know if they throw up the stop sign, it really shouldn't matter because they don't have that authority. So having teams get clear on who's assuming what Roles is really really important. We had a deal, Mary was involved in a deal many many years ago, with a team where they were talking about a fairly important team decision and one guy got it and they were talking about RAP ID who's got the R for recommendation, who's got the A for agree, which really means veto power, who's got the D who's the decider, the I means input and the Rapid, what do I, the P that means, yeah, I got it out of order. The P means performer, okay, the people who are implementing the decision. Anyway, they were talking about who has the D in this decision


And one of the guys, this is a cross-functional team, one of the guys raises his hands, well that's my decision. And like the other 13 people did one of these.


Really? Like, you're kidding me. That's not your decision. And so they had a big discussion about who owns the decision. Was it this department? Was it that part of the organization? Was it this job function? And they really lucked out by having that discussion early in the process because it allowed them to hammer out, all right, what is your role in this decision? What is my role in this decision? Who else out there can veto this decision or needs to be

part of it and we've to get straight on that right away.


So that would be the question I'd ask right away is like, have you figured out your decision Roles? Because if you haven't, then you open yourself up to all those potential issues. Again, more in a business setting, but you can apply that and, you know, talking about Rapid Roles you can apply that in a personal setting too. And when, when we did our remodel in this house, we, you know, as funny as it sounds, we had a discussion upfront. Okay. Who gets the D on different things, right? So of course, the piano room, the room that Mary put her piano in, she had the final D on all of that. She gave me I, she gave me input, but at the end of the day, it was her decision. Well, you know what, if I didn't like the color of the curtains in that room, I could tell her but you know what, it was her choice. And it kind of freed us both up to say, all right, you got your input, but you know, we know who owns this decision.



Dave (11:40)

And so even in personal decisions, you know, it does pay to get straight on that stuff as early in the process as possible. Yeah.


Ashley Martin (11:48)

Sir, I have a question. Can we level up the personal decision of you and your wife deciding the piano room? Can we level up and say, how do you decide to get the remodel? know, like who has the final D on...


saying yes to the remodel, you know? Like these bigger decisions that cost a lot of money. Maybe it's a type two decision in our personal world. And I've had this and I see it in my discussions in our Facebook groups where you have a partner where you kind of each maybe want to do something like move across the country, but you don't know the timing. Somebody will be like, eh, I don't want to do that today. And then they'll decide the next day that they do want to move. And then they decide, no, I don't want to move.


Like, how do you get your partner on board if you really want to do something and the other person is kind of like, uh-uh.


Dave (12:40)

Well it's easy. You do it behind their back.


Ashley Martin (12:42)

I'm going anyway! Ask for permission? No way! Ask for forgiveness! That's what we're doing. We're moving this ball forward no matter what.


Dave (12:48)

Well, I'm...smiling as you're talking about this because one of the rules of decision rules is is in the a in Rapid a stands for agree and that's really the person who has veto power over the decision the purpose the person that can put up the stop sign and say I have the authority to stop this decision until I get my needs met so yeah well or


Ashley Martin (13:13)

Needs? We gotta talk about their needs now? What about my needs, Dave?


Dave (13:18)

Exactly needs or wants or objections or desires or whatever it is that they're that's causing them to put up the stop sign. So and the way it goes for business decisions is that if you are if you have that veto power and you put up the stop sign, then one of the rules of the game is then you must come up with an alternative that's acceptable in the decision, right? So


Ashley Martin (13:37)

Yes! Yes! Yes! That's where the ball rolling stops. It's because they would have the veto power, but there's no alternative being presented that would...


Dave (13:52)

Isn't that, yeah, where was that quote first coined with great power comes great responsibility. So the same thing with veto power. you, yeah, if you throw up the stop sign, then you have assumed the responsibility to come up with a viable alternative. yeah.


Ashley Martin (13:59)

Yeah. Love that. my gosh I love it. That little nugget is life-changing because it holds them accountable. It holds your counterpart accountable to saying hey I have needs too. I understand your needs and you're gonna throw the veto because you feel like your needs aren't being met. That's fair but let's continue.


Dave (14:14)

We were working with a team from a medical device company many years ago, team member from regulatory.


was famous for throwing up the stop sign on things. Well, you can't do that because that's what you can't do that. You can't do that. And so we took that team through the Rapid process and said basically that rule then became really important in that if you throw up the stop sign, then you must work with us to find an alternative that works for everybody because it's really easy to say no, right? No, you can't. Why? Because I said so and I have veto power.


Ashley Martin (14:55)

Uh-huh!


Dave (14:57)

But if part of that rule is, okay, then you gotta dig in and do the work to find an alternative that's acceptable, then everyone wins. And there's much more shared accountability for the outcome.


So I suppose you could say in like a remodel, hey, do you want to move forward with the remodel? No, I don't. Stop. All right. Well, then give me an alternative because the current situation is not workable because, you know, in...


example, know, hey, the wallpaper is peeling off the walls, hey, you know what, the laundry room is completely unworkable because of this, this and that. So we got to, you know, give me an alternative, but you can't just say stop. So, yeah, so that's the way it should go. Now, whether it goes that way, I don't know.


Ashley Martin (15:41)

I love it. That is so helpful. I'm so glad we talked about that. I'm going to take this into my next partnership or relationship or whatever where it's like instead, here's where I found myself personally. Because I was married to a disc style that's on that lower half of the circle who's slow to change, I found myself gravitating to people who were quick decision makers, who could be very direct, but


Dave (15:45)

And that was all.


Ashley Martin (16:07)

I'm not saying that that's going to be like my perfect partner forever. So I may end up in the same situation again. And it's like now I know how to handle it better, even in family relationships, even in my next business world or whatever. Like I can see these types of conversations coming to fruition because we just have different personality styles. I mean, that's just the way the world works.


Dave (16:31)

And this is a topic for another discussion, but what you're doing is you're honing and grooming your intuition so that when another situation comes up that either reminds you of a past relationship or situation, you can quickly recall that memory, recall the lessons learned, and deal with them instantly without having to grind over it or having forgotten about it.


Ashley Martin (16:47)

Yes. Yes, yes, I needed to know this thing that you knew, Dave. Thank you for telling me all that you know about that thing that you knew.


Dave (16:57)

Yeah, exactly. That was just one of the top five things that go into this course.


Ashley Martin (17:05)

That's a whole podcast episode right there. Thank you.


Dave (17:08)

podcast episode.


Ashley Martin (17:11)

Wonderful. I told you we're creating content no matter what.


Dave (17:15)

You know what? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So you want to hear the other four right now? Or do you want?


Ashley Martin (17:19)

No! Hell no! We're gonna record that later and we'll dive into number two.


Dave (17:24)

Yeah, that was a lot to unpack there with just one statement. And some of this stuff is connected. mean, you know, we'll dive into like when you talked about styles. Yeah, you gotta have an awareness, especially in personal, even business decisions. You gotta have awareness, self-awareness of what your style tendencies are in the way you approach decisions.


Those style tendencies are going to serve you well in a lot of cases, but they're going to get in your way in a lot of other cases.


Ashley Martin (17:48)

Yeah, yeah, we know it. We've been there. We lived it.


Dave (17:53)

We lived it. Exactly.

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