purpose

How to Tell if a Decision Is Yours: The Three-Marks Practice

Purpose

Apply the able–drawn–reciprocal reading to a specific situation currently in front of you, in a way slow enough that the counterfeit signals get separated from the real ones. This practice is not for the question 'what is my purpose in life'. It is for the question 'is this, here, now, mine to do' — which is the only version of the question that ever has a clean answer.

When to use it

When you are facing a concrete decision and cannot tell whether it is yours to act on. When you have been talking yourself into something. When you have been talking yourself out of something. When a request has been sitting in your inbox or your mind for longer than it should, and the lingering itself is a signal you have not yet read. The practice is for one situation at a time. If you have three open decisions, run it three times — never all at once.

Steps

Pick one situation. Specific, concrete, current. Not 'should I change careers' — that is too large for the practice to operate on. 'Should I accept the role at X' or 'is the conversation I owe Y mine to initiate' or 'is this house the one' are the right size. Write the situation in one sentence, in the present tense, on a card or a single note you can return to. The specificity matters more than anything else in this practice.
Sit with the first mark — able — for ten minutes. Ask, in this exact form: 'what does this situation actually require from the person who acts on it?' Write the answer as a short list. Then ask: 'on which of those do I have specific previous evidence that I am equipped, and on which am I imagining?' Be hard on the distinction. Imagined ability looks like 'I could learn it'; demonstrated ability looks like 'I have done close to this before, here and here'. If most of the required equipment is imagined, the first mark is not clean. Note that.
Sit with the second mark — drawn — for ten minutes. Do not ask 'am I excited by this'. Ask: 'three months ago, was I oriented toward this in some quiet way? Will I, three months from now, still be oriented toward this if the current excitement subsides?' If the situation has only been in your attention for a week, you do not yet have enough data to read this mark, and the honest answer is 'unknown — needs more time'. That answer is fine. The corrective is patience, not a guess.
Sit with the third mark — reciprocal — for ten minutes. Ask: 'over the period this work would last, am I being given back something that makes me more of who I am, or being subtracted from?' Use evidence from any similar work you have done before. If you have started something analogous and noticed yourself becoming smaller during it, the third mark is not clean here. If you have started something analogous and noticed yourself becoming more whole during it — even when it was hard — the third mark is showing positive.
Look at the three readings together. Note which are clean, which are uncertain, and which are absent. Resist the temptation to override one mark with another. Two-out-of-three is not the same as three-out-of-three; the missing mark names what is wrong with the situation as it currently stands, and that naming is what the practice is for. Write a one-sentence diagnosis: 'able yes, drawn yes, reciprocal uncertain — would feed me in this season, would deplete me in the next.' Specific. Honest. Short.
Decide nothing today. Sleep on the diagnosis. Return to it the next morning and read it again. Most readers find that what looked clean the night before now looks slightly different — usually one of the three marks shifts in either direction. The morning reading is closer to accurate than the evening reading, because the inner system has had a night to subside from the day's reactivity. Use the morning reading as the working answer.
Act in proportion to the reading. Three marks clean and aligned: proceed. Two marks clean and one uncertain: do the smaller version of the action that develops the missing mark — talk to one person, take one small step, ask one specific question — rather than the full commitment. Two marks clean and one absent: the situation is not, in its current form, yours. Decline cleanly and without elaborate justification. One or zero marks clean: the situation was probably not yours from the beginning, and the work now is to notice what was making it look as if it were.

What to notice

Notice which of the three marks you skipped past quickly. The one you wanted to skip is almost always the one whose honest reading would cost you something. Notice the moment, partway through, when your mind tries to pre-empt the reading — when you find yourself saying 'I already know what the answer is'. That is the counterfeit doing the deciding before the marks have been read. Hold the practice anyway. Notice whether the body's signature changes between the morning reading and the evening reading; that change is part of what you are learning to read. Notice, at the end, whether the diagnosis is something you could say out loud to a person who knows you well, without flinching. If it is not, the diagnosis has not yet found its honest version; sit with it another day.

Journal prompts

Which of the three marks was the hardest to read accurately, and what does the difficulty tell me about the counterfeit currently loudest in me — competence-anxiety, excitement, or gratification?
If I were not the person who normally takes on this kind of situation, who would be? Is that other person, in fact, the one this situation belongs to — and what does my taking it on prevent them from doing?
What would change in my reading of the third mark if I imagined doing this work for five years, not five weeks? Reciprocity reveals itself most clearly on the longer horizon.
Where is the drawing in this situation actually pointing — at the situation itself, or at something the situation symbolises (escape, approval, identity)? If the latter, the drawing is on the symbol, not the thing.
After the morning reading, what is the smallest, most honest next action that is consistent with the diagnosis? Smaller than I want it to be is usually the right size.

Common mistakes

Picking too large a situation. The practice does not work on 'what is my calling'. It works on 'is this specific opportunity, in front of me this month, mine to act on'. If the situation cannot be written as a single sentence in the present tense, it is too large for the reading — break it down first.
Reading all three marks in one sitting without the overnight gap. The reactivity of the day distorts the reading more than most people realise. The overnight gap is not optional. Without it, you are still reading from the system that is partly making the decision; with it, you are closer to reading from the system that is observing the decision.
Treating two-out-of-three as good enough. It is not. Two-out-of-three is the reading working — it is telling you exactly where the situation fails. The right response is to address the failing mark, not to ignore it. If the failure cannot be addressed within the situation, the situation is not, in its current shape, yours.
Confusing the absence of excitement with the absence of drawing. The practice is partly training you out of this confusion. If a situation has been quietly in your attention for months, the drawing is real even if the felt spike is gone. Conversely, if the only signal is a recent spike, the drawing is probably excitement and will subside within weeks.
Running the practice on a decision you have already made. The practice cannot undo a decision that was made before the reading; it can only inform decisions that are still open. If you find yourself running it on something you have already committed to, what you are actually asking is whether to undo the commitment — which is a different question, and the practice does not address it well. Run it instead on the next decision, while it is still in the open.
Doing the practice every week. It is not a routine. Decisions of the kind this practice handles do not arrive that often. If you find yourself running it weekly, you are either generating decisions to run it on, or applying it to questions that are too small for it. The right frequency is approximately the frequency at which significant choice-points actually appear in your life — which is usually a handful of times a year.