How do you make big decisions?
I fret.
At first I ignore my immediate gut reaction and try to talk myself out of changing.
I look at all of the bad things that could happen.
I make pro/con lists. I look over those lists and think about where those items come from.
Are they things I want or things society or my family or my friends have told be I should want?
When that doesn’t get me anywhere I try to think big picture.
How will this decision affect my life overall? How will it affect my career? What do I actually want?
This is the point where I either cry, get a drink or go for a walk because I realize that I don’t know what I want and I don’t really have any concrete goals or plans for my future.
In my final semester of university, I had a small breakdown because I was fretting about the future.
Before January 2015, I hadn’t thought about what I wanted after university.
My high school daydreams didn’t extend that far and suddenly I had to move and find a job, I had to start making a life for myself.
And for the first time I didn’t know what I wanted.
I had only applied for one program at one university after high school. I knew what I wanted.
Four years later and I had no idea.
Four years since then and I still don’t have a plan.
But am I directionless? Most of the previous decisions I have made have been looking for growth and saying yes to opportunities.
Growth is a good direction to go.
Maybe I don’t have an ‘in five years I will be here’ picture in my head, but I know I want to continue challenging myself, I want to grow and play and travel and laugh.
I want to write. I want to meet people. I want to volunteer and be a part of something bigger.
So it turns out I don’t have a plan, but I have direction.
Where does that leave me? It means no matter what I decide it will be the right decision. Which makes deciding both less and more stressful.
My dad once had the opportunity to go work abroad but chose to go back to his hometown and farm.
Had he chosen to leave he probably wouldn’t have met my mom and I wouldn’t be here.
I can remember talking with him about it and him wishing he could have lived a little bit of that life, just to see what it would have been like and then gone back in time and continued living this life.
“That’s a good idea for a book,” he said at the time.
It is. But I don’t wish for that in real life.
It’s hard enough choosing between two things that you think will be good, let alone if you actually knew how everything would turn out.
Plus, it would take a long time to make any progress.
Not that me fretting about decisions is efficient…
Any advice? How do you make potentially life changing decisions? Let me know at jocelyn.doll@revelstokereview.com