Choices
If you’re anything like me, indecisiveness is your middle name. From food, to plans, to workouts, I just can’t decide. Lately, my choices have been a little bigger than if I'm going to eat a salad or a burger for dinner. They seem.. Permanent? Undoable if I choose the wrong choice. They keep me up at night going back and forth asking the universe which choice is the “right” choice. Until now, even my big life decisions like what college I'm going to attend, or what job I wanted came easy. So, I started studying this art of choosing and realized that maybe it's not all black and white.
Hard choices can be easy, and easy choices can be hard. So, what's the difference?
An easy choice = one option is clearly better than the other.
A hard choice = One option is good in one way, the other option good in other ways. But there's no clear cut answer. They're not equal, but one option also doesn’t outweigh the other.
When I started to think about this idea about choices, I realized that life choices aren’t always quantitative because we are qualitative beings. Stay with me here; we might be choosing between two jobs- one that will make us happy, or another where we make more money.
As stated, one is good in one way, the other is good in another way. But you can’t measure “happy”. Is giving up this much happiness worth this amount of money? Well what if you get even more money? Now does it make this job better? We’re human. We don't work in greater, lesser, equal.
So what are humans most likely to do? We go with the option that that speaks to our safety instead of it promoting our growth. The one with "less risk involved". For example, we would rather stay in that job we hate but pays the bills, stay with the person who treats us "fine" but we know isn't our person.. versus finding a job that makes us happy, breaking up with them and starting over. The “safe” decision is always fear-based. Lets be honest, growth is hard. It’s uncomfortable, and sometimes hurts. But look back at those really tough parts of your life for a moment. Do you honestly look at any of them and say, "Wow I wish that didn't happen?" For me, I look back at all the difficult periods of my life and say, I've grown so much, and I wouldn't change them because they've molded who I am today.
The thing about choosing the option that's less scary is, we base this decision off our past experiences. Did that person grow up always struggling with money? Then they will probably take the job where they make more money. Or maybe they grew up in wealthy, but dysfunctional family. Thenthey will probably pick the option that makes them happier.
What if we made our decisions looking forward and not back? No right or wrong or black or white. But by asking, does this next decision I’m making speak to who I want to be in this next moment? When we look at decisions as being the author of our story rather than the editor of our past life, we tap back into who we really are from a place of love and not fear. Instead of saying I'm sick of being poor, you'll say the “future me” chooses happiness. From that place of love, you are able to give yourself the power to create your dream life one decision at a time.
So, the next time you have to make a difficult choice, stop looking for the “best option”. Here's a secret: there no best option. Stop looking externally to gain validation that your choice is indeed, the “right choice”. Look internally, and ask yourself, does this option align with who i want to become?