You know things aren’t right, that something has to give. You’re just not sure what. You’ve got that feeling you know so well, the one that raises an alarm in you, without telling you why. You don’t know what to do. So you push the feeling aside and carry on as you were.
Pretty soon, it’s back. That feeling. You think and think and think about it, but you still can’t figure out what it’s about. So you push it aside again. This goes on for weeks, sometimes months. Then, one morning you wake up and know. You know exactly what’s wrong. But instead of feeling relief, you feel anxiety, which paralyses you. It paralyses you, because now you have to make a decision. And you suck at decisions.
You don’t suck at decisions. You’re afraid of making a wrong decision, a mistake.
In fact, you’re so afraid of making wrong decisions — especially the important ones, the ones that will have a meaningful impact on your life — that you do nothing. But doing nothing is actually a decision — you decide to do nothing.
If you do nothing when faced with an important decision, you’re really making THIS decision: to stay stuck with something that’s wrong for you.
The decisions you make in your life define you. The decisions to do something AND the decisions to do nothing. For some reason, you’re more afraid of making what you IMAGINE to be a wrong decision than you are of staying stuck in something you KNOW to be wrong.
You’re choosing the POSSIBILITY of something being wrong over the KNOWLEDGE that something is wrong.
Let’s face it, no one intends to make a decision like that. The way to stop being afraid of making wrong decisions and start choosing to move away from something that’s not working for you is this. You take a deep breath and say out loud as many times as you need until you believe it: “Just because I’m making this decision today, it doesn’t mean that I can’t make a completely different one down the road.”
Imagine that. Decisions aren’t actually cast in stone! But if you think about it, how can they be? The situation you were in when you made a decision — the way you felt, what was going on in your life, what was going on around you — was unique to that moment.
How can a decision made a week or a month or a year ago possibly be as right for you now as it was then, when how you feel, what’s going on in your life and what’s going on around you have inevitably changed?
The only decision that’s always wrong is the one to do nothing when you know that you need to change something in your life. All other decisions are right — right for you in the moment you took them. Let’s say you decide to move to another country one day, and then decide to move back some time later. That’s great! Your situation (legal, personal, financial, etc.) changed. Let’s say you decide to try your hand at being an entrepreneur and change the type of business you have a few times before you find the right one. That’s great! Your situation (knowledge, market conditions, awareness, etc.) changed.
The other reason you’re afraid of making wrong decisions is that you’re afraid of appearing stupid / incompetent / indecisive / unstable to those around you. You’re worried that they’ll judge you in some way over your change of plans. The first thing to understand is that if people do judge you, their judgement just reflects their OWN fear of making wrong decisions and their misunderstanding of the true nature of decisions. The second thing is that you are the ONLY person who can make decisions for yourself — no one else knows you as well as you do. So if you allow what others think about your decisions to derail you, you’re saying that other people know you better than you do. By all means seek feedback from those close to you, but the final decision lies with YOU.
Your life is the sum of your decisions. Make them count.
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Sarah Blick is Well-Being Wizard and Life Coach at Aging Disgracefully Well. Sarah has the rare combination of unparalleled life experience and serious business expertise. She spent 28 years as a game-changer in senior marketing roles internationally, including a couple working directly with Richard Branson at Virgin, and four as a life transformer in coaching and mentoring roles. Alongside her successful career, Sarah relentlessly pursued another passion: understanding why, despite having everything, she felt as though something was missing from her life. This pursuit led her to experience more life changes than most people experience in three lifetimes, many of them very challenging. By the time she found what was missing, Sarah had completely transformed her life and lifestyle. Today, she is fit, healthy, happy and fulfilled — and aging disgracefully well. Her successful career and personal transformation have helped her develop what she considers to be three of her superpowers: exceptional courage, uncommon resilience, fearless action-taking. These now sit alongside her instinctive qualities of compassion, leadership, and tenacity, to enable her to make a meaningful difference in the lives of others.
She works with exceptional people who have everything in life… except for the meaning they crave. They know they’ve been settling, not living fully, but don’t know how to change that. She helps them access what they need to make this change, and prepares them to make a meaningful difference in the lives of others.
In her personalized signature programme, Your Lifestyle Rehab™, Sarah gives her clients what they need to overhaul their lifestyle. To enable them to start living fully — as their best self, and making a meaningful difference in the lives of others. Your Lifestyle Rehab™ is designed with her best self — the expertise she developed in her high-level business career and the life lessons she learned in her 30-year quest for a life with meaning — PLUS the latest thinking from the fields of neuroscience, aging and psychology. This powerful combination is capable of delivering transformative results, leaving her clients ready for the life they’ve only dreamed of until now. And that’s what aging disgracefully well is all about. To schedule an exploratory chat, contact Sarah today.
Originally published at medium.com