We all have it: The sickness of indecisiveness (It does sound like one, doesn’t it?). And the main symptom? How we most elegantly manage to push aside the fact that it costs us dear.
Imagine a day in your life. It comes with a myriad of half-unconscious decisions we long since gave up on making actively. Just as an example – for me, it begins in the evening: After all, how we end a day significantly affects the next one. Do I decide to stay up late and either be tired the next day, or shorten it considerably and fall out of my rhythm again? Do I create something exciting that keeps me awake? Or do I take the time to properly finish, wrap up and be ok with the fact that I might not fall asleep asap? You can conjure up at least twenty possibilities at pretty much any given time during a day. Our lives have become incredibly complex, thought-through and seemingly “free”. We have so many options and deciding is though stuff. The thing that most often happens instead? We let the circumstances decide. To take it back to the evening: Great read? Stay up. Total workflow going on? Stay up. Amazing conversations? Stay up. Never consciously deciding whether I want to live with the consequences.
The thing is, if we let circumstances take over, it usually isn’t the life we would consciously create. Instead, it’s a haphazard mixture of things that just happen. Which is completely fine, but also very constricted and unfree. We considerably limit the options in our lives.
What’s the alternative? Conscious trade-offs. I admit, they can suck like hell, but also: Bring you much closer to what you really want. Imagine you’ve got a dream of a life which seems impossible, because, well, circumstances. Imagine you took every minute of your day, looked at it and would consciously think about (and decide on) how to spend it with regard to your dream. You would probably have to give up stuff you love – for stuff you love even more. Sometimes you even have to give up stuff you love for a wild idea you think you will love more, but there is no guarantee.
You don’t have to do this. But before you say: “If only I were able to, but…” next time – think twice. Because all you might do is to become aware on the trade-offs and begin to act differently.