It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you get off on
sometimes. What matters most is getting off.
You cannot make progress without making decisions.
Jim Rohn
Some decisions are cut and dried. There’s little doubt that one particular course of action is the right one and that makes the decision easy. If only all decisions were like that. More often than not there isn’t an obvious answer — several solutions seem plausible and it’s easy to become paralysed by the fear of making the wrong decision.
If you’re faced with a tough decision and no one way is clear, a strategy I often recommend is to try on each of the options. Make the decision in your mind, and then act as if you’re going to go through with it and see how it feels. This way you don’t have to burn any bridges, but you get the opportunity of living with the decision for a while to see what it feels like.
Not too long ago I had to make the difficult decision to have our much-loved cat put to sleep. I’d wrestled with it for a long time, but eventually more and more evidence was stacking up and I was feeling under increasing pressure to act. On Monday I called the vet’s office to make the appointment for Wednesday. I was trying it on to see how it felt and with each passing hour I became more certain that the decision was the right one. I could have changed my mind at any time and walked away from that choice if it really hadn’t felt right.
Now, even though we miss him terribly I know I did, in the end, make the right decision and I do believe that it helped to ‘live it’ for a couple of days first.
Once you make a decision,
the universe conspires to make it happen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be
continually fearing you will make one.
Elbert Hubbard