It’s not often when we are facing decisions, what we consider as “hard to make”. Our daily decisions are often rather small. Such as what to eat, what to watch or what to wear. Even if those things can be easily fixed with some help and pros and cons, we can often make the decisions without any guided questions.
Therefore, sometimes we face decisions, where we don’t know what to do. It’s easy to feel helpless when we need to make important decisions but we are unsure. The ground gets shaky and often we start to look for advice from others. That can often turn into noise, which leads us even further away from the right decision to make. Our heart often knows the right answers and to be able to hear that, we need to eliminate the noisy factors and get more centred with ourselves. Here are some helpful exercises to help you to make your next decisions.
1. How would you advise someone else?
As we often search for help from people around us, instead of that, try to pretend that you are advising someone else with the same problem as you are facing. What advice would you give to someone else? It is often easier to give advice away than to find it in ourselves. Once when you are giving "neutral" advice to your imaginary friend, notice why you said what you said and what holds you back to do the same?
2. Imagine both scenarios
Take a piece of paper and imagine all the possible scenarios of how your life would be if either decision would come true. How would it look like? How would you feel about it? What are the risks of both decisions? Is it something you maybe have faced before and already know how to handle perhaps? Write down as clearly as you can, how your life would look like. That gives you a rather clearer idea of your possibilities and dangers. Therefore, be aware of the fact, that the scenarios are still just a possibility, not a reality.
3. Try not to overthink
When we don't know what to do, it gets rather noisy around us. People start giving advice and their point of views, we are imagining and taking in a lot of information and at one point that can get a lot. Try to understand where the line between reality and your fears. Also, notice the advice around you- often those people who give us a worry thoughts, are the ones who have never done anything like that, what we wanna do. People who have done (either successfully or failed) still often courage others to follow whatever they wanna do, maybe just to warn us a little, but not to give us extra worry to carry.
4. Sit down with a piece paper
To get everything out of your head, the best way is to write it down. It is scientifically proven, that writing down brings us clearer ideas and overviews about our current situations. That’s why planning and journaling are really healthy habits to train.
If you are lost in your head, take a piece of paper and sit down with it. Start writing down all the pros and cons, imagine both scenarios, rate how happy or sad would you feel if one of the plans wouldn't work out and so on. Try not to be judgemental about what you want or not want. Be honest with yourself and write down everything really honestly, because there is no point to be dishonest with yourself.
We will add a PDF file with this article for you to print out, to help you make your further hard decisions just a little bit easier!
