Radio Silence Weekends: A method for taking executive decisions faster and smarter by Xue Mei Rhodin
- Xue Mei Rhodin
- Feb 9
- 16 min read
Radio Silence Weekends is my method I created to get away from the noise and decision fatigue of others and build strong self-reliance and make informed decisions without stalling or procrastinating in difficult situations.
It is a major part of why people now perceive me as having strong self-boundaries, self-reliance and courage and why many people come to me for authentic and non-coddling advice when making major decisions like buying or selling companies, switching careers, getting married/divorced and advice on how to raise their children.
Learning to make informed decisions with full awareness of the risks/rewards, being deeply connected to your intuition and experience while focusing on long term results and authentic human needs is a superpower.
As a person who has been running companies and has been a board member, CEO and executive for my whole career I’ve had my fair share of difficult decisions. And it was my company's business offer to analyze, evaluate and give company leaders solid plans with an A, B and C option on how to handle difficult situations.
How to get out of cash flow problems and make their companies profitable.
How to market and brand their companies and products better to increase sales and loyalty from their customers.
Or how to mitigate the negotiations between two former business partners that couldn’t be in the same room with 6 million being trapped in their inability to collaborate.
As you probably understand, I have a knack for reading people, understanding human needs and making strategic plans. I absolutely love solving problems for people.
In fact, that is the role of a board member and CEOs and leadership positions in general, taking informed difficult decisions that other people either don’t have the data, insight, experience or permission to make. Yet so many leaders shy away from decisions.
I’ve also had to make difficult decisions in my personal life, like deciding if I should move to a different country and work in a timezone 9 hours away from my family where I don’t speak the language properly. Or decide if I’m gonna accept proposals on different occasions from men that on the surface might look impressive but something told me I need to truly ask myself if it’s the right choice. Everyone has to make difficult decisions in life.
In all of my business ventures I was the person with the most dynamic experience and strategic skills so even when I had business partners, the burden of tough and critical decisions landed on me. Radio Silence Weekends became my most effective process for getting major decisions dealt with in assertive, constructive and healthy ways.
The difference between informed self-reliant decision making and externally validated decision making
When you get great opportunities like taking a job abroad, investing in a new company or someone proposing to you, others might get really excited and impressed because they see your life from the outside like a fairytale. To them your life is like a movie they are watching from a safe distance with popcorn. That might make you want to suppress your real feelings and thoughts about the risks and rewards of the choice, because you think you need to “fulfill your role” as the main character in someone else's movie. Or even your own movie in your head.
In general I believe that having new experiences and taking opportunities are a great source of growth. But there is a difference between taking opportunities completely blinded by external validation or the excitement and attention something brings you and taking informed decisions with a self-reliant and responsible process.
Going through life just taking any opportunity that presents itself to you without learning to critically clarify for yourself the risk and reward and effect they will have, is not growth. That is just being a follower who says yes to anything and never learns real self-reliance and self-boundaries.
This can lead to becoming someone who bounces around in life and never learns to listen to your internal cues and critically look at an opportunity with discernment.
Seeing Beyond Superficial Allures: Respect, Transparency, Consideration, and Accountability Outshine All
People who want you to do what they want will try to overload you with their feelings, needs, wants and expectations. A person who wants you to stay in a chaotic and destructive relationship will continuously try to bombard you with emotional highs and lows so it will be difficult for you to calm down and process the decision clearly.
A person who proposes without actually having gotten to know, trust and love you and has built the same in return, just wants you to say yes without an informed and self-reliant decision making process to confirm their ego and make sure you don’t leave.
Just because a proposal includes an expensive ring or public romantic displays of affection does not automatically mean that the person is reliable, loving, respectful and has good intentions. But traditions, movies and the pressure to be nice and positive will make you more likely to accept it to confirm the “success story” you have in your head.
If you haven’t seen the crazy 50-videos long TikTok story called Who TF Did I Marry it is a great example of someone ignoring signs of a person having a deceitful and destructive personality to confirm their story in their head that it “was my time to get married” and therefore said yes to marrying someone they didn’t know. It’s a sad story but one that can teach you a lot of lessons on what not having self-boundaries and being self-reliant in your decision making process can lead to disaster.
In the same way you need to be able to separate a company's offer that seems to have all the bling and glitter and corporate jargon and the reality of how they treat their employees and if it aligns with your personal goals.
Just because a company has a cool startup office doesn’t mean it pays an appropriate salary for the hours you work.
Just because a client has a well known name and brand doesn’t mean they will pay their invoices on time or be your most profitable client.
One of my best clients in my previous company came into our office in blue overalls and a dirty cap. Sometimes other people at the office would mistake him for being a janitor. He was a multi-millionaire that had the most profitable company of all of our clients. His company was in ocean-based construction and his company was often the only one who could complete complicated jobs that demanded construction on water or on remote islands. He was irreplaceable in his industry and could charge what he wanted.
Don’t let superficial judgment and cover-emotions lead how you take decisions and evaluate people and situations. Nothing beats reliable, trustworthy people with high integrity and self-boundaries. No amount of sparkling diamonds, trends or excitement should outweigh your real experience of someone's lack of respect, transparency, consideration and accountability.
Decision Fatigue: Navigating Anxiety and Paralysis in High-Stakes Decisions
Research has shown that making a large number of decisions can lead to a phenomenon called "decision fatigue," which can impair an individual's ability to make sound judgments. This depletion of cognitive resources can result in decision avoidance, impulsive decisions, or reliance on heuristics (mental shortcuts).
When the stakes are high it creates anxiety and stress. When there is too much data and possible choices it creates a sense of paralysis. And the fear of the unknown that we all have as human beings heightens the discomfort and feeling of not being in control of the situation.
You will feel the same stress when making big decisions like getting married or divorced, leaving your job, moving to a new city or other major life changes as when making major decisions in business.
Business owners and executives avoid decision making more than you think
It is commonly known that a lack of decision making is often a reason why companies stay still. The fear of making the wrong decision and the accompanying ruminating is what keeps people in high-stress and high-anxiety mindsets while still not progressing towards a solution.
“The reduced cost of communications brought on by the digital age has compounded matters by bringing more people into the flow via email, Slack, and internal knowledge-sharing platforms, without clarifying decision-making authority. The result is too many meetings and email threads with too little high-quality dialogue as executives ricochet between boredom and disengagement, paralysis, and anxiety. All this is a recipe for poor decisions: 72 percent of senior-executive respondents to a McKinsey survey said they thought bad strategic decisions either were about as frequent as good ones or were the prevailing norm in their organization.”
As someone who has been running companies for many years and advised other business owners and their teams I can tell it to you straight: most business owners, executives and managers rather talk endlessly about how difficult a problem is instead of taking 3 practical steps to solve it. Don’t continue being part of that club.
Let’s take some active steps towards training yourself to make informed self-reliant decisions.
Taking timely, informed and intuitively strong decisions is a skill you build over time.
Research using brain imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), has shown that intuitive decision-making involves the activation of various brain regions, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior insula, and anterior cingulate cortex. These areas are associated with emotional processing, bodily awareness, and decision-making under uncertainty, suggesting that intuition involves the integration of emotional and somatic (bodily) signals.
You could call it intuition, but you could also call it instinct. More often than not you are focused on the feelings and physical effects in your body. Heightened anxiety, cortisol rising in your body and sense of unease and tension in your shoulders. Blaming yourself for being in the situation you are in and ruminating on what bad choices that got you there. And questioning if you are strong enough or good enough to take the right decision.
What you are forgetting is that heightened stress hormones are a defense mechanism in our body that is made to make us aware, alert and move into action. It’s made for us to get out of dangerous situations and get moving. It’s when you do what is unnatural for your nervous system, ruminating, focusing on the anxiety and your heightened feelings instead of using the alertness to take action and search for a solution that you stop building good intuition and decision making skills.
Studies have found that individuals who have experienced more intense emotional events in their lives tend to have a stronger reliance on intuition. Researchers believe that emotional experiences can shape and refine intuitive abilities by providing a rich database of somatic markers and gut feelings that can be accessed during decision-making processes.
Taking timely, informed and intuitive decisions is a skill you build with time and a method and by imposing self-boundaries that makes it easier for you to build that skill and use the method without getting distracted or resisting the process.
How I do my Radio Silence Weekends.
I would book a suite at a hotel with a spa and gym in my own city for a weekend and bring all the documents and data needed to make decisions and turn off my cell phone connection and allow myself 2-3 days of fully submerging myself in the decision that needed to be made and emerge clear, focused, certain and composed in my decision.
Day 1, Friday: I’d check in to the hotel on Friday afternoon, go directly to the gym and workout, thinking about possible choices I could make for my Decisions Question. Then I’d read through my Bank of Information and make notes of what could inform my choice while eating dinner in the hotel restaurant and go to bed early to get a full night's rest.
Day 2, Saturday: On Saturday morning I’d wake up and go to the gym for 1-2 hours and then to breakfast. Afterwards I’d go back to my suite and write up my choice columns and answer each question for all the different options, referring to my Bank of Information when needed. No matter how much I wanted to write I wouldn’t stop. I’d write down all my fears, all the people affected by the decision, the possible financial loss and possible financial gain. For all fears I’d write down a solution. For people involved I’d write down how I’d handle those interactions. For each of the 2 to 3 choices I’d write out a negative and a positive outcome for that choice and write down how I could mitigate the negative effects.
This way I would turn the fear of the unknown into a few possible logical outcomes and a contingency plan for all of them. Often I’d order food to the room or have brought some with me to be able to keep going uninterrupted throughout the day.
When I felt I couldn’t add anything valuable anymore I’d take a break and go down to the spa and bring my own personal spa-kit with me and do a full body spa routine as well as swim in the spa pool to relieve stress and tension.
While doing my spa routine I’d think about my 2-3 choices and feel what each choice made me feel. I would think about my moral and ethical values and if these choices aligned with them. I’d look at if the choices aligned with my purpose and goals. And I’d look critically at if I had abandoned self-boundaries for someone else or not.
I’d eat dinner at the hotel restaurant and then go to bed early again. Sleep solves a lot of problems. Your brain can sort through thought and clarify many things when it gets the clarity of deep and restful sleep.
Day 3, Saturday: On Sunday morning my decision, my best choice and all its benefits and risks would be clear to me and the emotional experience of sorting through fears, worries and self-doubt would be gone. The emotional bank account would be emptied and I’d feel incredibly free, focused and determined.
I also would go through with my choice with confidence and energy, having validated the choice and accepted it fully. The decisions I’ve made this way I’ve never regretted or doubted afterwards. Not 1 year, 5 years or 10 years later.
Radio Silence Weekend Method
Radio Silence Space:
Book a hotel room, cabin or house that you can easily get to in under an hour for a Friday to Sunday or Saturday to Sunday. Or simply take a tent and go out camping in the woods. The main purpose is this: it can’t be at home where your regular life is and it has to feel calm and undisturbed.
Make sure it is a place where you won’t run into your family, colleagues or people you know. The purpose is to make it a place where you can be completely present with the problem you are trying to solve without being interrupted or seeking advice, attention or comfort from others.
By going to a separate space from your regular life and work you can immerse yourself in focusing on the decision completely and when you leave after the weekend is done you also leave the worry, rumination and preoccupation with the problem. The decision is made, you weighed out all your options, felt all the emotions and shut nothing down. You have given yourself the full opportunity to make a conscious choice.
Physical Activity:
Make sure that whatever you booked has access to a gym, spa, yoga, hiking or some form of physical activity that you enjoy. Physical activity and movement is crucial to lower your anxiety and stress and bring clarity and sort out your thoughts. Do physical activity all days during your radio silence weekend at least for 1 hour each day.
The Decision Question
Write down the specific problem you are trying to solve in question form in a document or journal. Write this down before you leave for your Radio Silence Weekend. Your brain will already start to try to find solutions for your problem and you will be primed for the weekend.
The Decision Question examples:
Should I sell my company?
Should I get a divorce?
Should I move to a new city?
Should I take the job offer?
Should I fire this employee?
Should I pursue a career in medicine or in finance?
Your Bank of Information:
Gather all the information and data you need to make the decision the days before leaving.
Bring your folders or laptop with a file that contains all the data you gathered beforehand and decide it’s gonna be your Bank of Information for this decision.
Resist going on long google searches and scrolling for more information on your Radio Silence Weekend. More data won’t make you smarter and more clear. It will only serve as a distraction and create decision fatigue.
Your Bank of Information is what will be your data. You are here to make a decision, not to do more research.
Your Decision Document:
Write your Decision Question at the top.
Make a simple list with two or three separated columns. One for each possible option you have in the decision. Narrow it down to only 2-3.
Choice 1
Choice 2
Choice 3
Write down responses to these questions for each column:
What will I gain from this choice?
What will I possibly lose?
Why is this choice important to me?
Is there any reason here that I am afraid to choose this option?
How will this affect my self-image, confidence?
How will this affect my career options and reputation moving forward?
How will this affect my family or personal relationships?
How will this affect my finances?
Can I deal with these consequences in a practical and responsible way?
How can I do this with honesty, respect and consideration?
Can I do anything to mitigate the possible negative effects for each area?
Write down a list of 5 bullet points. This is where you will write down your 5 next steps before you leave your Radio Silence Weekend.
Trust your intuition and lifelong experience:
The constant second guessing that has become normal in today's society, especially in the younger generations is constructed habits of ruminating and negative self-talk that is so loud, many no longer have any connection to their natural intuition. They have habitually been second guessing themselves to where they no longer trust themselves. They have internalized a thought-model that say they are weak, unsure, unreliable and don’t know enough. A lack of stable self-reliance but also accountability and responsibility. When you tell yourself you’re weak, unsure and don’t know enough, you are also opting out of having to make the hard choices. It is weaponized incompetence used on yourself.
What you need to accept is that you already have the ability to make this decision. You have the necessary intuition, life experience and self-insight to take this decision and even more difficult decisions in the future.
Millions of people in the world have taken the same type of decisions before and survived it and thrived after it. Don’t make it bigger and more complicated emotionally than it really is.
You thinking you need more time or more data is just you procrastinating and avoiding the problem that needs to be solved.
When this weekend is over, you will know intuitively which decision is best for you and your current situation.
Be fully immersed, emotionally and mentally:
Allow yourself to not fill the time with distractions. Allow yourself to actually think about this problem, the possible solutions and effects of your decisions during your Radio Silence Weekend.
Allow yourself to feel all the fear, sadness, happiness, uncertainty or certainty. The way to get through a difficult decision is to go right through it. Feel all of it instead of holding the emotions back and suppressing yourself. Then they lose their power and you gain sober clarity and get intouch with your intuition and experiences.
Research has shown that intuition plays a crucial role in expert decision-making. Experts in various fields, such as firefighters, nurses, and chess players, often rely on their intuitive abilities to make quick and accurate decisions in complex situations. This intuition is built upon years of experience and pattern recognition, allowing experts to rapidly process information and make decisions without consciously analyzing all the details.
All humans know what they deep down feel is right and wrong, moral and immoral. Make sure what you choose aligns with your basic truth.
All people know when they are abandoning themselves and their values for someone else's gain or attention.
Your 5 Next Steps:
On the last day of the Radio Silence Weekend, when you have made your decision, write down the next 5 steps you need to take to implement your decision. So when you check out, the decision making process is completely done and the only thing you have left to do when you come back home is to start implementing with full clarity.
You've read an article written by Xue Mei Rhodin, international speaker and entrepreneur from Sweden, with more than 19 years in developing methods for personal development, leadership and business.
Xue Mei means "Plum flower in Snow" so for every article published on xuemeirhodin.com I add an image representing my name generated by a AI engine to help you remember my name and just for fun.
If you like these types of methods, I suggest you read my articles on Think Weeks by Bill Gates and my own strategies and experiences doing Think Weeks since 2012.
You'll find my finishing notes and further reading recommendations below.
If you’re trying to cop out of making a choice during your Radio Silence Weekend
If you still are trying to procrastinate the decision after answering all the questions and letting them marinate during the weekend, you simply use an online roll a die site and put in the number of choices you have and roll the dice. Here is the fastest way to do it: https://rolladie.net/. Just do it now.
Whichever choice you land on it is what you do and move forward with. It is highly unlikely that you’d ever need this. But if you do, you need to practice making choices and implementing them as a skill desperately.
Choosing an option for your decision and then adapting to what you need to do to make it the best option you can is better than not taking a decision at all.
Don’t romanticize chaos, drama and stress that comes from prolonging making responsible decisions. Dragging out difficult situations to be the center of the drama and get attention and comfort does not make your life more valuable or interesting than anyone else. It makes you irresponsible and unkind to the people involved. Including yourself. You might be addicted to the attention it gets, and then you need to deal with that.
Don’t keep yourself in a constant state of heightened stress hormones, fight, flight or freeze mode and telling yourself that the weaponized incompetence you are using on yourself is your personality. It’s not. It’s just a bad habit you need to break.
Let that start today. It's simple. You just have to practice it over and over again.
If you struggle severely with decision fatigue and procrastination of decisions in your everyday life or work for smaller tasks too, you can download my decision making PDF and use it on your everyday life. It helps you sort your thoughts, get clarity and make decisions faster without getting stuck.
You can download my worksheet for my Radio Silence Weekend Decision Document here:
