The Top 3 Reasons We Struggle with Decisions
Good friends of mine just went through a big-life-decision process, and I had a couple of great conversations with them about how they navigated it.
It got me thinking about what trips us up when we face a choice, and the ways we circle around and around in the indecision instead of committing to something and trusting ourselves to create from what happens.
We’re endlessly presented with choices about our health, our passions, our livelihood. Do we stay in or leave challenging jobs or relationships? What’s the best way to maneuver through tricky family dynamics? How do we proceed in difficult, complex life altering situations?
Under all that, we live with the ongoing question of what to believe, in the moment or in general, about ourselves and life. Even when we’re aware that our beliefs aren’t something we’re stuck with—we still have to choose them.
The need for choice is sparked by changing circumstance, and circumstance is constantly changing—so we’re always deciding something. But when we’re overwhelmed, our choices become unconscious and disempowered.
When we understand why we default to confusion and avoidance, we’re more able to shift to clear, intentional choice.
1) Fear
Fear is an unavoidable aspect of every important decision. We’re afraid of making the wrong one. (It’s surprising how often this goes for the small ones as well.)
We don’t want to fail, to make a mistake or to incur a consequence—and if we don’t commit, we can’t get it wrong.
Fear can also show up as a lack of confidence in our creativity, resourcefulness or skills. We want to stay in the ‘known’ because we’re unsure how we’ll navigate a blind situation, or we lack trust that we’re equipped to step into what the decision will ask of us.
I came up against this one in a 10 month long Leadership program I took a few years back. About halfway through the program, after lots of training, they began inviting us to take the leader’s seat at the front of the room. One of my colleagues would leap for the chair, chiming the mantra, “Fail fast and early!” I thought she was off her rocker.
I avoided it as long as I could, fairly confident I’d crack under pressure, but eventually I had to step up. It went well for about a minute, right up until the head on collision with a participant who didn’t like the direction I was taking us. They shot back an angry response, demolishing my false bravado, and as my “fail fast and early” wingman sat frozen like a deer in the headlights in her co-leader seat beside me, my training and innate brilliance failed to materialize any kind of skillful response.
Just sat there mute, desperate to exit the hot seat, 20 sets of expectant eyes awaiting my next move. I had no moves. I put on my best poker face, grappling to appear poised in a chasm of blankness. Waiting, please god now, to be tagged out by the next brave soul. And somehow, I lived to tell about it.
Getting it wrong doesn’t kill us. It teaches us humility and shows us our growing edge. We get to decide what matters most: are we going to create with life as it becomes the next thing, or cling to the safety of the known?
Since that’s never truly an option, we might as well surrender to the aliveness of now and go all in.
We’ll figure it out.
2) Attachment
Choice requires saying no to something in order to say yes to something else.
This is a tough one—we don’t like to give things up or let things go. Our ego plays a big role in this, but we’re also culturally conditioned to feel both a sense of deficiency and a fear of missing out.
If I use my time and energy here, I won’t have any left for there.
If I spend money on this thing, I can’t have that thing.
If I choose to not tolerate this, I’ll disrupt harmony/the status quo.
If I take a stand for this, I’ll lose friends, acceptance, belonging, love.
If I look at, feel, face this, I’ll have to give up something that not seeing it allows me to have.
We’re constantly trying to keep (or get) something we think we need to be okay.
You’re okay right now. Check in. You are. (And when you connect with that, do your best to not leave for someplace in your head where you’re not.)
Another way we attach is by resisting change, we either try to prevent it or deny when it’s happening, which brings us to #3:
3) Not Working with What’s True Now
One of the primary reasons we don’t feel empowered to make a decision is that we’re dealing with out-of-date information. We either don’t want to believe things have changed (living in the past) or we want to know ‘what will happen if’ (living in the future).
Working out of sync with current reality will feel unsafe because we’re not dealing with accurate information.
We have a weird wiring in us that says, “Let me get everything working (home, health, relationship, finances, career) and then make sure it stays that way. For like ever. If I can do that, then I can relax.”
Where’d we come up with this idea? Life is changing in every single moment, we can’t nail it down.
We’re not meant to get it sorted and then hold steady. We’re meant to respond creatively to change, to lean into it, to use it as a challenge to develop the adaptability, flexibility, resourcefulness and untapped strengths that it’s calling for.
John Boyd, a US Air Force fighter pilot and highly respected military strategist (more on him later) says, “Uncertainty abounds because we apply familiar mental models that have worked in the past to try to solve new problems. When these old mental models don’t work, we will often keep trying to make them work — maybe if we just use an old strategy with more gusto, things will pan out.”
Lack of acknowledgement of what has shifted—and what new thing is wanting to happen in response—has us living in avoidance and denial, often because we don’t want to accept what’s true now.
“According to Boyd, ambiguity and uncertainty surround us, and while the randomness of the outside world plays a large role in that uncertainty, Boyd argues that our inability to properly make sense of our changing reality is the bigger hindrance. When our circumstances change, we often fail to shift our perspective and instead continue to try to see the world as we feel it should be.” (source)