We all face it.
Day in, day out.
Decisions.
We are surrounded by choice. But it’s not easy.
There are good reasons why so many of us find it impossible to make decisions, and there is normally huge pressure and a fear of failure.
Everything from what outfit to wear, to career choice, to investments, it can be mind numbing.
The truth is that it can be extremely overwhelming and you end up overthinking and avoiding a decision. And nothing changes in your life.
You can never have 100 percent of the information, and the future is invisible. So it is impossible to predict.
Of course, you can rely on Tarot cards or astrology.
But how would you feel if you relied on the cards and the decision went wrong? Would you blame the cards or yourself?
So what to do?
A couple of years ago, I was faced with a huge life-changing decision. I had been living in Adelaide (Australia) and out of the blue, I was offered a job in Sydney. It was a much better job with more pay, better promotion chances, and so on. But it would mean packing up literally my life and taking off into the unknown.
This blew my mind, and the inside of my brain felt like a swirling snow globe. It was overwhelming.
But then a memory came into my head. Something I had read in a magazine many years ago about a man unable to decide if he wanted to buy a motorbike or not.
I am impulsive by nature but still have a logic streak in my thinking. So this spoke to me.
Using the bikers rationale, I swapped the logic and thought about it from a different perspective. Instead of “will I or won’t I?”, I rephrased it thus: how will I feel if I don’t do it?
The answer, of course, was crystal clear.
If I don’t do it, I will spend the rest of my life thinking “what if.” And every time something went wrong, “if only.”
Now I simply didn’t want to go through life with regret, so that left me with the obvious choice to actually take the bull by the horns and do it. Why not?
Of course, it could end up being a disaster, but at least I gave it a shot. And if it worked out, I would always remember taking a life-changing decision.
So the decision was made with little anxiety.
There would be plenty of that to come with the move, of course, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life in the end.
I could have been sitting thinking, “What if?”
PS. The guy bought the motorbike.
~
AUTHOR: GRAHAM SMITH
IMAGE: MANIACODAMORE/INSTAGRAM
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