Making Decisions

I had someone ask my advice recently about a decision they were facing. As with most decisions, it was a very complicated situation, and we discussed it thoroughly, but in the end, I gave pretty much the same advice I always do when someone is making a decision - Go with your gut.

I think we need to follow our own instincts more. Listen to our own inner voice. It seems like we try to actually disprove our instincts by picking them apart with logic and arguments. We want other people who aren’t even involved in or effected by our choices to weigh in and tell us what to do. Why? Why don’t we trust our own thoughts and feelings? We are smart, capable people! We can trust ourselves!

I also like to advise decision makers that we really only make the “right” choices about 50% of the time anyway, so stressing out and overthinking our decisions really doesn’t help us much. We tend to look at every decision as permanent or life altering when if fact, hardly anything is. If we find we have gone down a wrong path, it might be a pain, but we can stop and go down a different one. Very little that’s done can’t, eventually, be undone.

I think it comes down to our fear of failure. I know this fear has plagued me most of my life. We don’t want to be wrong. We don’t want to fail. Albert Einstein said,” You only fail when you stop trying.” So, make a decision. Trust your instincts. See if it works out. If it doesn’t, try something else.