JM: What is 10,10,10?

SW: 10-10-10 is the name of a decision making tool
that can change your life. Its a way of making value-
based decisions and considering them in the context of
consequences in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years.
This tool, really allows you to make decisions that are
not based on speed, expedience, or stress, or the voices
in your head, but decisions based on the kind of life you
want to live.

JM: Why is your value system so crucial to
its effectiveness?

SW: Well, although you can certainly use 10,10,10 with-
out thinking about your values, it’s then so much less
effective, because that’s where its power really lies.
I think the reason why people make less than good
decisions, or decision that they later regret, is because
they didn’t make them according to their values (the part
inside you that drives how you want to live and the kind
of person you want to be). So, you could consider your
consequences in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years,
but that's sort of in a vacuum unless you say, “Okay,
which one of these consequences really matters to me.
If your highest value is let's say, not making anyone
angry, then you’ll have a decision that’s different than
if you had a value that's let’s say, building a new
business for yourself. Both of those values, I should
say are legitimate, and profoundly personal, just as
long as they are not causing anyone harm.

JM: Most of us have learned to listen to and lean
on our gut feeling for making those in the moment decisions. Are you saying that 10-10-10 can actually
improve on this almost automatic response?

SW: Yeah, gut is a funny thing. We’ve all had those
experiences when gut has been fantastic for us, and
we can say “ you know, I just followed my gut and it was
great!”. But neurologists and people who study the mind
and the way it works will tell you that gut is pretty incon-
sistent. In many ways, it is a sort of inborn response
that's been embedded in your consciousness for many,
many different reasons. And so what 10,10,10 does, is
backstops your gut calls, allowing you to unpick them,
and then slows you down just enough so that you’re not
making decisions, based on lack of time, energy or mis-
information. 10-10-10 also allows you to identify what questions you don't know the answers to, which trans-
forms your decision making process into teachable
moments, especially when using it with your children.

Imagine giving kids a language to take the emotionality
and the game playing out of their decisions? For me, as
a single mother of four kids in then fraught circumstances,
I now know that today I am so much closer to my kids
because I never made a decision that they didn’t under-
stand, and so they trusted me. And you know, even in
matters of faith, as I explained a 10,10,10 decision, one
of my kids would always say, “mom, what does the bible
say?”, which allowed me to incorporate the values that
I was trying to teach them, into our decision making.

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