For many people, depending on their experience with ‘authority’, authenticity and authority are  in conflict with one another.  When these two terms are in conflict inside a person, life can become challenging and stressful.  A central purpose of The Good Decision(TGD) is to create a process that resolves this contradiction allowing both authority and authenticity to  decide the course of action.  In workshops I deal with authority by pulling that term off the hierarchy of power.  Usually people who resist authority  tend to have mistakenly associated authority with power exercised within the frame of hierarchy.  Frequently people in power disappoint  when those under that hierarchy find their  bosses may have power, but are lacking in authority and consequently authenticity.  When power and authority come together authentically, good things tend to happen. 

The sequence of TGD  can be reduced to feel, think , decide, then act.  In our complex world, feelings  inform but rarely decide on their own.  Feelings however are the roots that feed authenticity into any decision we make.  You ignore your feelings, intuitions, and subjectivity at the peril of losing the authenticity of your life course.  ‘Feelings’, as a word used in TGD, are meant to be experienced as a non-cognitive filter rather than a particular sentiment.  We tend to feel our way into thoughts more efficiently than think our way into feelings.  Holding that open feeling state in the first Pause is a form of shorthand to a more authentic response that subsequently includes cognition and thought as a secondary discipline to the Sense of Good. Cognition and thought do not serve as the sole vehicle to the discernment of the good response.  Cognition, strategy and technique  can get you to the top of  a hierarchy, but absent the informing intuition of  subjective feeling, authority cannot accompany that rise.  The integrity of The Good Decision lies in your honest open state authentic response to the four Pauses.