There are countless times over my life when a decision felt like it needed to be made. Shall I change my job? Should I leave my partner? Shall I buy that new car? Should I go to the Indian or Chinese, and when I get there what should I have? This is the worst for me. Unsupervised I can spend hours pondering over what I should choose from the menu, the wrong decision finding me coveting my partner’s plate. Reaching across with my fork for a try of what I can now see would have been the better choice.
There is an endless and frankly exhausting amount of choice out there these days as we are bombarded with all the things we need, deserve, can’t do without and are even in danger without.
If it was all to be believed then as a woman in my early 50s, my face ought to have fallen off and my hair dropped out by now from lack of hyaluronic acid, my life not be worth living because my armpits aren’t moisturised whilst being a social outcast because I don’t use fabric conditioner. Perhaps I digress a little.
But what happens when there are real choices to make? Decisions that are going to potentially affect more than your armpits?
Not knowing what to do when faced with a choice was one of my biggest hang-ups and when I say hang-up I mean it used to hang-me-up. Stop me moving. Prevent my flow. Halt me or sometimes simply turn me back in the other direction.
So convinced was I that there was a right and a wrong decision and I had to make one of them, that I often found myself paralysed into not choosing at all. I'd then beat myself up because I’d done, well, nothing.
At times I wondered, if there was this supposed right and wrong decision then why would I choose to make the wrong one? Surely I’d only voluntarily make the right one wouldn’t I? Or that would make me stupid…Wouldn’t it? It would all begin to feel a bit confusing at this point so I’d put it down for later.
There was a nagging sense though, because I didn’t feel like I was particularly stupid. I saw other people managing and big decisions being made around me all the time, so what was my problem? It just seemed like a real possibility that I might be capable of making a wrong decision and I didn’t like this feeling at all. So befuddling was this at times that no decision at all seemed like the easier option and so there I'd stay, hung up and feeling stuck.
There were times when avoidance just wasn’t an option so I’d force myself to make a decision, any decision, and stick to it, even if it didn’t feel quite right. Those ones rarely worked out well.
So what’s going on when we're faced with what looks like a decision to make and making one feels almost a matter of life and death even when it's simply, Vindaloo or Madras? How can we navigate our way through the mind maze of this’s and that’s with less fear and stress to settle on something that feels quietly but powerfully right for us?
Back in the day my decision-making process often looked like one of those whiteboards on a TV crime show covered in all the photos of different suspects and timelines with bits of string going from one possible scenario to another linked to one possibility or another. Like the Detective I would keep returning to rearrange and ponder it all until eventually, something began to look as if it fitted, only to discover that the main suspect had an alibi and I'd have to start all over again.
You see this process will always have that outcome and almost never allow us to feel clear and aligned with our decision because it gets its ideas and information solely from our conditioned thinking and all its imaginings that in order to be safe it has to have investigated and squared away all possible outcomes before it can proceed.
If we take a moment we will see that in reality this is impossible and yet we still try when the truth is that at the last minute, there will always be something unforeseen that takes us back to the beginning because that is the nature of infinite possibility. It’s infinite. There is no finite end to it and the limited finite mind isn’t keen on this.
It’s no surprise then that we begin to feel uneasy when faced with the decision-making process because we tend to start out at a place from which we are utterly convinced that there is a right and a wrong answer out there and it’s our job to pick the right one.
A bit like a game show. Pick the right one you win the yacht, pick the wrong one and go home with the tea towel.
The trouble continues when we then begin telling ourselves that if we don’t get it right this also means something about Me. I’ll be stupid, I’ll be wrong, I may be in danger, followed by… Well, you can insert your own apocalypse story.
Basically, when all joking is put aside the question is often ‘What will become of me if I get this wrong?’ Now fear is being generated and this can increase the feeling of challenge as it has some very compelling stories to tell, often bringing with it such unpleasant feelings that we just want to rid ourselves of them.
It was usually around this point that my original stuck place seemed to start looking more and more appealing, simply because it didn’t have those feelings associated with it. So back there I’d go with relief and its accompanying stories of how it’s not so bad here after all and I really ought to be grateful, oughtn’t I?
So we end up in this game of ping-pong between what feels desired in truth and what feels safe in reality.
The content of our thinking is mostly made out of our conditioning, belief systems, perceptions, pasts and futures and all that stuff. All useful stuff for inventing things, knowing what bus to catch and what to have for breakfast but, contrary to popular belief it’s not always so useful when it comes to informing us in the life decision-making department because it has its own agenda, and that is simply it’s own survival, as the leader of the expedition, rather than any particular investment in our happiness.
So how do we get wise and become the leader of our own expedition? By looking at what's really going on...
What if there were simply two choices and you could choose either of them and it wouldn’t matter? They were both guaranteed to be safe? Choosing would be easy wouldn’t it? So at some point, we must have an imagined, preferred outcome based on an imagined outcome.
A wonderful example of how we often know the answer to our dilemma is the coin toss. How many times have you flipped a coin to make a decision? Or used some kind of mystical game to determine what you’ll do next because you just can’t decide? If the cat walks past that flower by the time the big hand is on the 3 then I’ll…
How many times did that coin toss turn up the answer you didn’t really want, and you found yourself flipping again until it gave the answer you did?
The truth is that we have a deep connection to our inner knowing that just gets more or less obscured by our conditioned mind, especially when we are pressurising ourselves. If we can direct ourselves towards that place of connection and get quiet enough to hear what's there we find that this is always aligned with who we truly are and when we “choose” from this place it never feels like there could be a big mistake.
It’s in the fear of our “mistaking” rather than the imagined consequence of it that, we often find it so hard to choose. Because after all...
Our thinking mind doesn’t trust this version of the process though because this version doesn’t require the thinking mind so much and when the plotting analysing predicting judging mind (you know, the one that scares you half to death) doesn’t have a job it begins to feel inadequate and redundant, and because we are in large part, identified with that thinking mind as ‘who we are’ it’s redundancy begins to feel personal and unsafe.
If all this sounds a bit confusing or even confronting, stick with me…
If we just take a little time out to go through the process of checking for ourselves, in our own experience, we always find a beautiful and simple truth under the tangled web of our thinking. In the discovery of a deeper part of ourselves that’s already and always connected to our innate wisdom, we eventually find our answers.
It doesn’t mean there are no choices to make. Chinese menus will always be there and big life decisions will always need to be made but what if the making process could hold less angst, more peace and a trust and assurance that whatever we decide could never really be the wrong choice?
What if we began to experience the fact that we are infinite possibility and from this vantage point come to see that choice is our greatest gift rather than what can feel like our greatest burden.
We will always have decisions to make whether we like it or not and if we are going to say yes to life more often, which I can highly recommend, then wasting our creative thinking bandwidth on worrying about whether we are right or wrong simply takes all the joy out of it, blocking our communication channel and having us turning in circles and missing the place where we are always in touch with our values, passions and deep connection with life.
Outcomes always happen with or without our help. Sometimes they’re great, sometimes they aren’t and that will always be so, but the means whereby we reach an outcome is what ultimately influences that outcome and when we allow the process to be informed from the wiser part in ourselves wonderful things tend to happen.
During our decision-making process, if we can take a moment to slow our thinking down and feel into what it is to have the gift of thought and choice, we begin to see the process as an adventure in which we set out with our compass being our 'deeper feeling' and sense of knowing, with our thinking as our bag carrier, rather than our expedition leader. At least then the journey from this to that or here to there might at the least feel less arduous and at best a great deal more fun.
As we understand and begin to experience ourselves as the one who can thrive internally despite the outcome, we become free'd to choose more freely.
Maxine Kemp is a transformative life coach based in East Suffolk UK who is dedicated to simplifying and demystifying the journey to greater peace well-being creativity and empowerment.
"It’s not supposed to be that difficult."
If you would like to find out more about working with me...
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