Indecision

Indecision. The sister to procrastination. Together, they can ruin your life effortlessly while you’re running around wondering what’s going on. When life gives you choices to pick from, just pick. Don’t try to be the smarty pants. If it’s what you really want, then there is no better choice. So what causes indecision? For some people, it’s been happening so long they don’t remember if their was even a starting point but for some there is.

It begins when you lose your childlike innocence and realize that every decision comes with consequences and now, you want to make the best decision given the choices available. Guess what happens eventually? You pick neither. You become so afraid of picking wrong that you do no pick at all. But here’s the truth you fail to see, no decision is worse. If you were to ask me I’d say that there are two main reasons for this:

• Fear
• Too much analysis / Overly cautious

So, to deal with them one after the other, Fear. When you’re afraid, what do you do? Fear is an illusion. It exists only in our minds. So the best way to tackle is to face it logically. Ask yourself what am I afraid of? Why am I afraid of it? When you tackle fear with this approach, your mind is able to process the information logically and then you realize one of two things.

• There is nothing to fear. Or
• There is something to fear, but you can’t help it, so you’re just worrying.

Being overly cautious is quite interesting. You compute every posssible combination of factors, trying to find the absolute best but because life itself is unpredictable and dynamic, you can’t account for everything and you end up calculating until the time for choosing has elapsed. Forget coulda woulda shouldas. If you only make decisions based on what you think should be done, as per what is right, you might end up rebelling and doing what you really want. Then, you’ll look like you don’t know what you want when the entire time you know. The human mind always wants to make a safe decision. A decision that gives security and guarantees safety of whatever is at stake.

One way to tackle it is to realize that uncertainty is a part of life and you cannot have everything under your control. If there’s a chance that something bad can happen, then there’s a chance that something good can happen. Many times we focus on only the bad and ignore the good. WE call this being ‘realistic’ or ‘keeping it real’ when in fact all we’re being is pessimistic. We end up missing out completely on life and with this comes regret. The worst kind of regret being the regret of ‘I could have’. For really big problems, if you have the time to wait, don’t rush into it, but don’t procrastinate either. There’s a fine line.

Remember to do this as an exercise. Just like everything else, it takes time to learn and grow but never give up or think you’re not making progress. At the end, you’ll become a better decision making individual than you were yesterday.