Our doubts are our traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
William Shakespeare
Many people battle with a powerful fear of making a wrong choice or a poor decision—so they make no decision at all! They remain in indecision. They mentally go over and over their options, yet never find one that they can settle on. They want a guarantee of perfection before they are willing to take action, but sadly, unless we take risks we will never decide anything at all. Multitudes of people are inactive and frozen in fear simply because they are unwilling to make a mistake.
Like most fears, the fear of making mistakes has a name, and it is called “decidophobia.” It is an overwhelming, irrational fear of making decisions. People with this phobia do not make decisions. Of course, not everyone has “decidophobia,” but many people are double-minded and they find decision making difficult. The good news is that there is a cure for decidophobia and it is called “doing it afraid”! Feel the fear and do it anyway!
Wasted time, or even a wasted life, is somehow not as fearful to the indecisive person as making a mistake! Individuals with a “perfectionist” bent can be especially prone to this fear. At the foundation of their temperament is a driving desire to be perfect, and they often spend many agonizing years coming to grips with the reality that we all make mistakes. A mistake is an event, not a person. We may make mistakes, but we are not mistakes!
God invites us to an adventurous life of boldness and creativity, of exploration and variety, but we will miss it if we live in the fear of making mistakes. Do you want a narrow life with no adventure, or a broad one filled with adventure and new things?
There is certainly nothing wrong with structure, and in fact, we all need it. Structure is a good thing and there is safety in it, but when our lives must be so structured that we never veer away from sameness into newness, then we are closing the door to the best life that God wants us to have. God is a God of order and structure, but He also loves and invites us into passionate creativity. Although God is a God of order, I have found that when I follow the leadership of the Holy Spirit on a daily basis, my life is filled with twists and turns that I didn’t plan or expect. They make life exciting. It is quite impossible to remain enthusiastic about eternal sameness.
Sameness is safe, but it is also very boring, and when people are bored they often get themselves into trouble. When people are bored with life they may blame their unhappiness on the people they are the closest to. It becomes the fault of the person they are married to, or their job, or their church, or whatever else they can find to blame it on. A person may feel unfulfilled in their marriage, so they get a divorce and try someone else. They quit a good job and spend their lives going from job to job and never excelling at anything. Maybe instead of a divorce, what they really need is adding some spice to the marriage they already have. Do something new! Go somewhere! Work at your marriage, and instead of passively waiting for your partner to make some changes, do something that is a bit on the edge yourself. Plan a surprise vacation, or get tickets to a play or musical. Do something you wouldn’t ordinarily do and add some spice to life. A food can be boringly plain and taste bland, but if we add a little of the right spice it changes the taste and we may love it.
If you’re bored with your job, why not apply for a transfer to another department or a promotion within the company where you will have more responsibility? If you’re bored with yourself, then why not try a new haircut, or maybe an “out of the box” clothing style once in a while? Maybe you won’t even end up liking it, but then it will help you appreciate what you have. The fear of making mistakes is the only thing that prevents people from living more aggressively. We think, What if I take a new position at work and end up not liking it? Or, What if I plan a surprise for my spouse and he or she doesn’t want to do it? The “what ifs” in life can steal all of the enthusiasm from it, and they can even derail our destiny.
When we are unhappy and dissatisfied, the first place we should look is at ourselves. We can ask ourselves if our relationship with God is in good condition and whether or not we are following the leadership of the Holy Spirit. I believe the Holy Spirit always leads us to “abundant life,” and if that is not what we are experiencing we should seek to know why.
Many people love God, but they remain fearful of making decisions that will lead them into new things. They might be afraid to teach the Sunday school class they have been feeling prompted by the Holy Spirit to lead. They might be afraid to make a commitment to a small-group Bible study. They are not sure they want to get that involved with other people, so they remain lonely and bored. The thing that stands between where we are and where we want to be is always doing the thing we don’t want to do.
The thing that stands between where we are and where we want to be is always doing the thing we don’t want to do.
God has sent His Holy Spirit to live in our hearts, to lead, guide, and direct us into all truth and the best life that we can have. But He cannot lead us anywhere if we are not willing to follow. The apostle Paul had an amazing life and ministry, and we can see in his writings that he followed the leadership of the Holy Spirit to the best of his ability. Yet there were times when he made mistakes… Yes, I said the apostle Paul made mistakes! His missionary journeys included many stops, and at one time we see that he tried to go to Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not permit him to go (see Acts 16:17).
Paul tried to go somewhere to minister that wasn’t the right place for him to be, and God simply stopped him. The Bible doesn’t tell us how he was stopped, but somehow he got the message that it wasn’t what God wanted him to do. Paul didn’t get depressed, go hide somewhere, and feel insecure because he had made a mistake, but he simply went to the next town. If you are immobile right now due to a mistake you have made, why not shake it off and get moving again?
We can learn a lot from this account of Paul’s journeys and apply the principle we see here to our own life situations. I believe in having an aggressive attitude that says, “I would rather try to do something than be satisfied with doing nothing.” Paul knew that the Gospel needed to be preached, and he was busy preaching it. He was more successful some places than others, but he kept moving. He did not let the fear of being wrong or making a mistake paralyze him and prevent from doing anything at all.
This is an attitude we can adopt in our lives. We can say: “This may not be the best day I’ve ever had… but I’m going to keep moving.” “I’m not sure if this is going to work or not… but I’m going to keep moving.” “I know that the Lord has promised never to leave me… so I’m going to keep moving!”
Most of us know someone in life whom we admire. We are in awe of their accomplishments and we wish it could have been us who did what they did. The thing we may not realize is that they took risks to get where they are. I recently heard someone say, “If you’re not failing occasionally, then you’re not taking risks.” This is so true! It is virtually impossible to do great things without taking risks. We should do what we do based on biblical principles of wisdom, but it is not biblical to do absolutely nothing. Wayne Gretzky said it this way: “You’ll always miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.”
The parable of the talents shared in God’s Word teaches us this same lesson. Three men were given three different amounts of talents (money) from their master, each according to his ability. The master told them to take care of the talents while he was on a long journey. When he returned he asked the servants for an accounting of the talents. The one who had received five talents had invested his and gained five more, and now had 10. The one who had received two talents had invested his also and gained two more. But the servant who had received one talent was afraid, and he buried his in the ground and returned to his master only the one he had been given. His master called that man wicked, lazy, and idle, and the master took his talent away from him and gave it to another (see Matthew 25:14–28). Wow! Was he a harsh master? After all, the poor man was afraid! I have come to realize that when we are afraid we can easily expect people to make special concessions for our fear, but the master didn’t do that with his servants, and I don’t think God does it for His servants either. He expects us to trust Him and live boldly! Even when we feel fear, He expects us to do it afraid.
We may admire the courage of the apostle Peter, who preached in the streets of Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost and added 3,000 people to the church. But let us remember that Peter showed fear prior to that. He denied Christ at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion because of fear. Thomas was filled with doubt, which is merely another expression of fear. The disciples were concerned because they had failed to bring lunch even though they had seen Jesus feed thousands with a little boy’s lunch. But after the death and resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, we see changed men! They were now filled with the Holy Spirit and His presence within filled them with courage like they had not known prior to that.
Every believer has the privilege of being filled with, guided, taught, and counseled by the Holy Spirit. He will lead us, and even if we miss His leading initially, He will help us get redirected. If we get off on the wrong track, God will steer us back to safety.
Your own ears will hear him. Right behind you a voice will say, “This is the way you should go,” whether to the right or to the left.
Isaiah 30:21 (NLT)
We need not be frozen in the fear of making mistakes. God has provided a win-win plan for His people. Trust God and live boldly, and when you do make mistakes, trust God to get you back on track and use your mistake to your advantage.
Seeing what others have done, and how they have overcome mistakes, should let us know that we are capable of doing something amazing too without living in fear. I believe we are created for greatness. Everyone who has received Jesus into their lives has a seed of greatness in them. They have a desire to stretch, reach, climb, soar, and go beyond the “normal range” of living. Whatever we do, we should excel at it. We should desire to be the best we can be and do the most we can do to make the world a better place.
Everyone who has received Jesus into their lives has a seed of greatness in them. They have a desire to stretch, reach, climb, soar, and go beyond the “normal range” of living.
Being indecisive can be a huge problem if we don’t conquer it. It can be caused from the fear of making mistakes, but it can also be caused due to the monumental number of choices we have facing us.
A friend who is a missionary in Africa told me a story about him and his wife that makes a good point. They seldom come to America now, but the last time they did, they wanted to get some cereal because there is only one cereal available where they live. My friend pulled up in front of the store and his wife went in but returned after over 30 minutes empty-handed. When he asked where the cereal was, she replied, “There were so many choices that I got confused and didn’t get anything.”
In America we like options, but we have become so excessive that it has gotten confusing. We have so many clothes that we stand in our closet for long periods feeling that we have nothing to wear. We go to restaurants with a massive menu and cannot decide what to eat. We have literally hundreds of channels on our televisions and we can spend hours flipping from one to another and never settling on any one program. Our large variety of choices has become a hindrance instead of a help to us, and at the root of it is greed! We want more and more, and in the pursuit of it all, we have become more and more confused, and often less and less satisfied.
I think we may have to aggressively practice just making a decision instead of wasting too much time trying to make one and possibly never doing so. We can focus on a few choices and then decide. You might think, What if I missed the best one? But you could have spent another hour trying to decide and still ended up with the choice you made. By the way, that hour is one that you will never get back. Once we use our time, whether wisely or unwisely, it is gone forever. I think it is best not to waste it!
In a California gourmet market, Professor Lyengar and her research assistants set up a booth of samples of Wilkin and Sons jams. Every few hours they switched from offering a selection of 24 jams to a group of six jams. On average, customers tasted two jams, regardless of the size of the assortment, and each one received a coupon good for $1 off one Wilkin and Sons jam.
Here is the interesting part. Sixty percent of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only 40 percent stopped by the small one. But 30 percent of the people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to buy jam, while only 3 percent of those confronted with the two dozen jams purchased a jar. The presence of many choices may be appealing, but it seems to also be debilitating.1
The term “analysis paralysis” refers to overanalyzing or overthinking a situation. This complicates the decision-making process. When we seek the one decision that will assure us that perfection will be reached, we can rarely make any decision at all. I happen to be quite aggressive when it comes to making decisions, and if anything, I might make a few of them too quickly, but at least I make them.
I feel sorry for people who labor over every decision. Sometimes I feel that I can see them suffering. Quite often they know that other people are waiting for them to decide and that adds more pressure to the pressure they are already under. It takes courage for them to finally say, “I want this,” and even when they do, they are usually still not sure they have made the right choice.
I often say that we can think a thing to death. What I mean is that we can suck all the enjoyment out of a thing by overanalyzing it. What could have been a joy turns into an irritation because we are playing mental hockey with it, knocking it all over the place and never making a goal. If you tend to be indecisive and excessively analytical, why not declare war on indecision and bravely go forward with a brand-new decisive attitude? Perhaps a new attitude toward mistakes would help!
Focus on these things:
• Everyone makes mistakes and it is no big deal.
• There are very few mistakes that we cannot recover from. Take longer with the really big decisions, but don’t stress over all the small stuff.
• Just because you may make a mistake doesn’t mean YOU are a mistake.
• God sent Jesus for people who make mistakes.
• You don’t have to be perfect to be accepted.
• If you don’t take risks, you will live a boring life.
• You cannot make progress without making decisions.
• Most of the mistakes you make bother YOU more than they bother anyone else.
• All of your mistakes are merely a lesson in progress.
• Think more about the many things you do right than the few things you do wrong.
Having a healthy attitude toward things is vital if we want to enjoy life. Whether it is regarding mistakes, failures, problems, or losses, the right attitude can change everything. It can turn tragedy into triumph, pain into gain, and mistakes into miracles. You own your attitude and it is the one thing that nobody can take away from you. You and you alone can decide what kind of an attitude you will have in every situation in life, and the attitude you choose determines your level of enjoyment of life. Decide today to live boldly and no longer be afraid of making mistakes.