How To Stop Worrying!

You’ll Never Know The Alternative:

There are millions of billions of choices that we have to make across our lifetimes. Whether they are big decisions, like if you will marry or not, to the smaller choices like what you will have for breakfast. A very natural thing that humans do when it comes to making big decisions, is that we procrastinate. We dwell and think and think till we come up with a choice. Whether you blame it on indecisiveness or just having to make a difficult decision, the process leading up to finally making that decision can be excruciatingly annoying.

You may be so proud of the decision you made or, you might regret what you chose and wish you could go back to change it. But, just like a coin toss, once it’s landed on heads/tails, you can’t go back and change your original answer. Decisions can come very easily or they can be extremely difficult. I wanted to spend this time delving into what makes a decision so hard and why actually, whatever you choose will be the only choice there ever was. I’ll explain to you what I mean by that later in this blog.

The Idea:

Imagine, you are desperate to go travelling. It’s been on your mind for a long time and you’ve been saving up in your current job so that you could go. Your job is decent, you enjoy it but you know that this thirst to travel isn’t just going to go away. You made the decision to go travelling. The day comes when you are about to hand your notice in. You go up to your manager and ask for a chat to which she takes you into a room to discuss something. You explain your thoughts, why you are going to leave and express that you have still really enjoyed the role.

Your manager listens intently to everything you say but what you hear next sends your head into a spiral. She explains that a job opening came up and that she was going to offer it to you. It’s a job you’ve been interested in applying for in the past and on top of that, there is a significant increase in salary and benefits. With this type of money, you’d be able to put that deposit on the house you wanted, buy the car you’ve been eying up, could book plenty of holidays throughout the year to any country you wanted to go.

Only issue is, you obviously have been desperate to travel for a significant amount of time. You wanted to live in a van and drive around Australia, sail around the Philippines, experience the vibrant rainforests in Brazil.

What do you decide? Do you accept the promotion, guaranteeing a significant salary increase and benefits, or, do you follow what your gut originally told you to do. Do you go off experiencing the world whilst you are young with little responsibility. 

How do you choose between the two when both seem so lucrative.

One suggests financial success, the other gives you life changing memories & experiences...

The Conclusion:

In this scenario, it’s not a horrible decision to have to make; whichever you choose you would end up doing what you loved. The benefits to both are outstanding, the only thing you have to think about is opportunity cost. If you choose, will you be able to do the other after? If you chose the job promotion, you would be giving yourself financial responsibilities and limiting the younger years you had left to go travelling (not that you couldn’t do it when you were older). If you chose travelling, when you get back someone will have taken that promotion and you’d have to hope for another opportunity.

This is why people hesitate.

They run an in-depth analysis on the pros and cons of each decision. Which will be best for me financially, personally, socially, which will I enjoy the most? What if I don’t enjoy it? The questions we ask demand a great deal of thought.

I want to refocus your attention to the difficulty in deciding which decision is best. The questions at the back of you mind asking what if you’ll regret it? I want you to think about the timeline of life. The intricate pathways that span the entirety of time as we know it. If each pathway was a different choice/decision we made, there would be trillions and trillions and trillions of different paths we took. The one key thing you need to remember is…

The Unknown:

You will NEVER know what the alternative could’ve been like. This can create fear in some people, whilst creating comfort for others. What if you chose the job promotion in this example. You thought it would be the right decision so you went with it. After choosing this decision, you walk into the office for your first day in the new role. You have a fantastic day, it’s everything you imagined it to be and you leave the office feeling so proud of yourself....

You're walking to your car on the street, just about to get there when suddenly, your lights go out. You’ve been hit by a truck that lost control. You have passed away. 

This is one very dramatic example of what a decision could lead to. Please don’t be scared of making choices based on if you will get hit by a truck or not because that is very unlikely. 

Point being, what if you’d chosen the travelling option, you would have never known your impending doom if you had picked the promotion. Just because you choose something and you wish you could've chosen the other option, it doesn't mean you chose wrong.

Everything happens for a reason.

Trust in the process.

Hope you enjoyed the read! Next time you have to make a choice, think about what will make you happy and never be afraid of that choice. You will never know the alternative.

SunTide