That sentence has been doing real work in my head since one of my Inner Circle clients said it to me last week.
We were on a call. She had been wrestling with a decision for a few months. Pros lists. Budget projections. Conversations with her partner. Spreadsheets. The works.
I asked her what kind of decision she was actually making.
She paused. Then said it.
“It’s a hat. I have been treating it like a tattoo.”
I have not been able to stop thinking about how many brilliant women in business are doing exactly the same thing – treating every single decision like it is permanent, when most of them are not even close.
There are really only three kinds of decisions you ever need to make.
The hat. Something you can try on. Don’t like it? Take it off. Low cost. Low risk. Short-term experiment. Most decisions in business are hats – test a new offer, try a new format, run a campaign, change your pricing for a quarter, write a different style of email. If it does not work, you take it off. Nothing burns down.
The haircut. More commitment than a hat. Everyone remembers a bad haircut, but hair grows back. In six months, it is a story you tell at dinner. These are the decisions where the worst case is you end up back where you started in three to six months. Hiring a contractor. Launching a new service line. Investing in a new system. Bringing in a coach for a quarter. More thoughtful than a hat. Not permanent.
The tattoo. Decisions that reflect who you are and where you are going. Significant time. Significant money. Significant identity. Undoing them takes the same level of commitment as making them. Selling the business. Choosing your life partner. Walking away from a six-figure client. Closing a service line you spent five years building. Tattoo decisions are the ones where you want a Teacher in your corner, not a pros and cons list.
Sit with this for a minute. What is the decision you are currently wrestling with and is it actually a tattoo?
Most of the time, the answer is no.
What I keep hearing, on call after call, with brilliant women who have built serious careers is the same pattern. Hat decisions getting six months of mental energy. Haircuts being agonised over like they are permanent. And then, when a genuine tattoo decision lands – the kind that actually needs careful thought, expert counsel, real consideration – the energy is gone. The thinking is exhausted. The decision gets made too fast, alone, on the one that actually deserved every ounce of attention.
That is not careful decision-making. That is decision avoidance dressed up as diligence.
And it is expensive. You just do not see the bill until later.
Free up the hats. Get curious about the haircuts. Save your real attention for the tattoos.
Not every decision is permanent.
Most decisions are not even close.
Janine x