Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Decisions, decisions, decisions – our life is a never-ending array of them.  From the minute your feet hit the floor in the morning to the second you fall asleep, you are an elaborate engineer orchestrating those little decisions that help you navigate effectively, or sometimes not effectively, throughout the day.  Should I  hit the snooze button?  Should I walk the dog?  Exercise before work?  Eat a bagel or fruit?  Coffee now or at Starbucks? Should I take the bus or just walk to work?  What projects do I focus on at work all day? What sounds good for lunch?  Should we go out for dinner or stay in?

Life is really a myriad of non-stop decisions  – one after another after another.  The simple daily tasks are the easy choices to make, so easy that we don’t even realize we are making them.  It is when decisions involve possible risk, uncertainty, danger and more importantly, fear, that the going gets tough.  This is the time when we run from making a decision, and just kick the can down the road.   We ignore, don’t accept, or don’t face the fact that by remaining in our current circumstances, whatever they may be, is actually a decision to stay there – digest that one!

WHAT YOU ARE NOT DOING YOU ARE CHOOSING.

So many people are unhappy in their professional lives, and choose to stay there.  Trying to lose weight but just don’t do anything about it – that’s a choice. Putting up with nasty co-workers comments that are demeaning to you and not addressing it – you are choosing to be dumped on.  Ah – how wonderful it is to just continue to be miserable than to choose a different approach.  We all have the capability to choose to change any situation we find ourselves in, or any behavior for that matter. There is no pawning this off on anyone – it’s up to us.  So why do we remain stuck?

Fear of failure.   What if I leave my comfort zone where I am clearly miserable and land in an even worse situation?  What if I leave my disastrous relationship to try to find happiness and I don’t find it?  Harry Potter author JK Rowling’s commencement speech at Harvard University in 2008 speaks volumes to facing failures head on:

So I think it fair to say… I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

She puts so eloquently that failure can allow you to move forward, that making a decision to do something with fear is empowering.  This is the only way we can grow and move forward – don’t accept something that isn’t right for you – take action!  Make the decision to move forward living with the fear, or choose to do nothing and continue to sit on the fence, watching the world go by and feeling like a victim.

Just like the line in the movie Risky Business – sometimes you have to say “what the f*!*”  What’s the worst that can happen?  If you fail, at least you will have tried.  I have a very small analogy to this point – I cut my hair and I cut it short.  I have always wanted short and spiky hair, but was worried that it would look terrible on me, and more importantly, worried as to what others would think of me.    So I stuck with my decision (not realizing it was a decision), to stick with a hair style that I really wanted to change.  Last week I went in for just a trim,  looked in the mirror and realized how much I did not like the length of my hair  -so I told my stylist to chop it – right then and there.  I got off the fence and chose to do what I wanted and throw the fear factor out the window.  It felt amazing.

I know – not as drastic as the crisis that JK Rowling faced, but it is baby steps for me – and this first tiny one felt good.