Dave Remitter is a man on a mission. A practitioner in the relatively new field of life coaching, he works with individuals and couples wrestling with difficult personal decisions. Unlike most coaches who come from a background in psychotherapy or organizational development, Reiter is rooted in strategic decision analysis, a decision-making process originally designed for engineers.

Why would people wrestling with these dilemmas turn to a decision coach instead of consulting specialists, like psychologists, doctors, lawyers, or accountants? Actually, most of Reiter’s clients have consulted one or more specialists before seeing him. As reservoirs of the most current and pertinent information in their fields, they are obvious choices. But many people find themselves no closer to making a decision once they leave the professional's office, no matter how sound the information their received. In fact, they may feel even more overwhelmed by the amount of information and the options they are given. And, if they consult with more than one specialist, they can be further confused by the sometimes contradictory opinions offered. In the end, they find themselves with even more reasons to be muddled about the right course of action. That’s where Reiter comes in.

Reiter makes no claims to being an expert on the varied situations clients bring to him. He’s never formally studied medicine, financial planning, or career counseling. But, as he points out, "An editor doesn’t have to be an expert on the content of a book or article to edit it well. Similarly, I don’t have to be an expert on cancer to coach a client on making a decision about choices of medical treatments. My role is to help people integrate information into the broader context of the decisions they face as individuals".

In the same vein, even though many of his clients are in emotional turmoil when they come to him, Reiter's mission is not to act as a psychotherapist. Coaches and psychotherapists, he explains, work from fundamentally different premises. “Psychotherapy is about healing people who are troubled or who want to change something about themselves. Coaching is about helping people work through tough decisions—real head bangers that are difficult, messy, and too tough for them to figure out on their own. The focus is always on helping people get clear about what they want, and working toward a goal."

Over the past year, Reiter has coached couples working through common dilemmas: separations and divorces, employees stuck in dead-end jobs, families debating where to place a relative with Alzheimer’s disease, patients weighing contradictory medical advice, individuals debating whether to move, buy a house, or start a business, and clients who face hurdles in having a child. These decisions are inherently tough, but they can seem insoluble when people recycle old approaches to decision making, unaware of the fact that they haven’t worked well in the past.


Common obstacles to making difficult decisions:

• Not knowing what you really want
• Not having the tools to figure out what you want
• Making a fast decision rather than a good one
• Failing to anticipate consequences
• Giving up control and acting like a victim
• Not imagining how things can be different
• Not following through
• Avoiding making a decision

Struggling on their own with big decisions, people often find themselves going round in circles because they get caught up in the content (the problem) rather than focusing on the process. Reiter has a full bag of tools (see below) for helping clients break through barriers to make good decisions. To help them get started, he breaks the process into three parts: declaring a decision, deciding what you want, and following through. In decision analysis parlance, declaring a decision refers to a conscious choice to make a decision. Instead of reacting automatically to a stimulus, the person creates a space to stop, think, and then decide.

“By declaring a decision," says Reiter, “they acknowledge their personal power to choose and their responsibility for their choices. The second part is deciding what they really want; that’s the most important and the hardest part. Last is follow-through, finding ways to make what they want happen. Unless people complete all three steps, they will get into trouble.”

Mary (not her real name) is a 39 year-old unmarried teacher. More than anything, she wants to have a baby. With her window of fertility narrowing and her chances of marrying remote, she may have to have a child on her own. The prospect, however, scares her. She isn’t sure that she is suited to be a single mother or that she could afford to have a child on her own. After years of discussing her predicament with doctors, therapists, and friends, she remained as confused as ever about what to do. When a friend told her about life coaching, she turned to Reiter for help.

Reiter walked Mary through the three-part process. Mary had no trouble with part one of the process: declaring a decision. The second part proved trickier. She knew that she wanted a child, but she wasn’t sure on what terms. Reiter worked with her on exploring options, e.g., In-vitro fertilization, adoption, finding a husband. To help her figure out what she wanted and actions she could take, Reiter worked with her using tools such as enlisting brainstorming partners, envisioning herself in various scenarios, and looking at those scenarios from the perspectives of people she valued to see whether their opinions would affect her choices. And, together, they made a matrix of her options, listing her choices, the pro and cons, and the possible outcomes.

To help clients test whether they’ve reached a final decision, Reiter uses the metaphor of boarding a train: “Your bags are packed, you have the train schedule in hand. Are you ready to board the train?” At one point, Mary, believing she had come to terms with being a single mother, found the phone number of a sperm bank. But when Reiter asked her whether she was ready to board the train, she realized that she wasn’t. She still hadn’t given up on getting married. Reiter shifted gears and together they started focusing on the best ways for her to meet a prospective husband.

“I can’t be invested in my clients’ choices,” says Reiter. “If she says she’s not ready to board the train, my role is to hear that. I have to be careful how I frame the decision when talking to clients. I can’t influence their choices. My job is to help them find clarity, insight, and confidence in deciding for themselves: clarity about what they want to achieve, insight into their own decision-making process, and confidence that they have found a decision that makes sense rationally and feels right emotionally. By ignoring the heart side, people can make even worse mistakes. A good decision makes sense to the head and feels good to the heart.”

How did Reiter come to his own life-changing career decision? After a decade of teaching high school math and physics, he decided that he wanted to be in higher education. In 1996, he entered the Decision Analysis Program of the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University as a doctoral candidate. The first decision analysis class he took was taught by Ron Howard, credited for defining the profession of decision analysis. (See accompanying interview.) Howard demonstrated the powerful and profound applications of simple math to some of the most important decisions students and adults struggle with. For Reiter, the class was a revelation.

“When I taught high school trigonometry,” he says, “students used to ask me why they should care about learning it. I’d give them the standard teacher’s answer that it would build their reasoning skills. Howard’s class showed me how math should be taught in schools to make it useful and meaningful to students’ lives.”

Besides teaching at Stanford, Howard was a founding director of a consulting firm, Strategic Decisions Group. When Reiter learned that Howard and some of his associates were starting a foundation to teach decision skills to high school students, he jumped at the chance to work with them. In 2001, Reiter took a leave from the Ph.D. program to serve as the founding executive director of the Decision Education Foundation (DEF), headquartered in Palo Alto, California. (See accompanying article.)

DEF was founded on the premise that making good decisions is an essential life skill that should be as vital to our early education as drinking water is to our physical health. Working with an enthusiastic group of volunteers trained in decision analysis, the organization started decision literacy programs for teenagers in high schools, and after-school programs in boys and girls clubs, children’s shelters, juvenile detention facilities, and clubs for gifted students. Reiter, along with the board and staff, developed curricula and trained teachers.

After three years, the program was on solid ground, expanding to new cities and reaching more students and teachers. Reiter knew it was time for him to move on. He continued to support DEF as a trainer and curriculum developer but, as he says, while the work of building an organization that he believed in was gratifying, it was not soul-satisfying. More exciting to him now was using decision analysis techniques in helping adults work through challenging situations.

In launching his personal coaching business in 2004, Reiter put himself through the same steps he would later use with his clients. Before studying decision analysis, Reiter believed that a good decision was just a matter of reasoning well. Assessing information, making judgments about probabilities, choosing among alternatives, and tying together the pieces are critical, Reiter learned, but sound reasoning isn’t enough. Equally important is the heart side—how people feel about their decision, how it fits with their values, how it may affect relationships with friends, family, and coworkers, and how comfortably they can live with their decisions.

Armed with that awareness, Reiter started by brainstorming all the things he could do. He was attracted to the new field of coaching, although not the model that most coaches use. “What excited me was the idea of using the DEF tool kit to help people make decisions,” he says. “But I was leading with my heart; I had to step back and check my head to see whether it was a viable plan.”

Reiter worked out a business plan for delivering and marketing his services and consulted with his wife. As parents of a young child, they weighed the pros and cons of Reiter launching his own business.

“If my wife didn’t have a career, I couldn’t have done it,” he says. “The risks would have been too high. But with enough of a cushion under us, we decided to take a chance with the understanding that I would evaluate my progress every few months.”

Reiter is now pleased with his decision to become a life decision coach. “Our lives are largely defined by the decisions we make—and don’t make,” he says. “I see so many people grinding their teeth about problems they can’t make any headway on. It’s tremendously gratifying to watch them go through the process of discovering what they want so they can be free to pursue their dreams.”