When people are real, actual grown-ups, how do they go about making life decisions?
I'm serious. I apparently have no freaking clue how this is supposed to work.
I'm 30 years old and have no idea how to appropriately run my own life.
How do you do it? How do you know what's right for you and your family? How do you make choices when large chunks of every decision are up in the air? How do you know when it's the right time? How do you choose among several unpalatable options? How do you make yourself take that first step? How do you stop
rethinking and rehashing every choice you made in the past that got
you to where you are now? How do you know you're making the right decision? More importantly, how do you let go of the notion of a "right" decision when every decision is wrong?
If any of you have managed to figure any of this out, could you clue me in? It's high time I learned how to be an adult.
5 comments:
Ha. No one knows. Some people think they know, but they are overly confident. (It's okay. It works as well as any other decision-making concept.) Some people dither so long the decision gets made for them. (That too works as well as any other.) Some people take a breath and pick what seems most likely. Some people say, "Huh. All these options suck. Which one seems to suck LEAST?"
Oh. I thought of another method I've heard of. It's from business classes, and it's supposed to help managers get past the sunk costs issue (where they've invested so much in a bad plan, they feel like they have to keep going with it). What they're supposed to do is pretend they were just hired that day, to fix the problems the last guy left. So then they're supposed to see their sunk-cost bad-plan and say, "Yeah, THAT'S gotta go."
So I've found this occasionally helpful in household/family applications, too: "If I were coming into this situation TODAY, with no responsibility for previous decisions/mistakes----what would I say was the best decision at THIS point?"
I like Swistle's business class method. My general approach varies from stressing and over-analyzing and beating myself up (most common and least useful approach since I end up feeling paralyzed) to just picking the option with the fewest OBJECTIVELY negative consequences (it is important to separate the objective vs subjective consequences here) and throwing myself fully into that (this method actually accomplishes things, but it's hard and scary and sometimes not ideal to let go of all of my subjective feelings on an issue, even when one option is obviously objectively better).
Love that Swistle! What a great way to look at it. My thought is that if you're living in the past and the "what if" of it all, you can't be focused on going forward. It's impossible to do both, so you have to learn to let go. And that is hard as fuck sometimes.
Swistle, I love the business school thing! I'd never heard of that (probably because I haven't taken a business class in my entire life. Ick).
I'm feeling more rational and less woe-and-despair today, so I might actually be able to put some of these ideas into practice. Thanks, ladies!
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