In this episode of Lessons from a Quitter, we explore the liberating idea: What if you couldn’t make the wrong decision? So many professionals stay stuck, paralyzed by fear of regret and perfectionism. But what if every choice—whether it works out or not—is just part of the journey to becoming who you’re meant to be? We dig into the truth that experience, not perfection, builds resilience and clarity. You’ll learn how indecision is often more damaging than “wrong” decisions, and how to trust yourself to take action—even when the path ahead is uncertain. It’s time to redefine what it means to choose.
Ep.352: What if you couldn't make a wrong decision?
Ep. 352
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Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. This is like, apparently my series of what ifs last week. It was, um, what if there's nothing wrong with the way that you process things? And this week I have another question for you. What if you couldn't make the wrong decision? I want you to just think about that for a second. What if the decision that you made, how would you move forward if you knew that no matter what you chose, not only was it gonna be okay, but it was going to take you on the path that you needed to be on. It was going to be the journey that you needed to go, regardless of how it turns out it was going to be the thing that you needed to do in order to get to where you wanted to go. How would that change how you approach your decision if you are grappling with something, um, that you've been grappling with for a long time? I want you to think about this. How would it be different?
Because we've talked about this, um, a couple times on the podcast, but I think it just bears repeating, is this fear of making the wrong decision keeps so many people paralyzed in their lives and stuck in inaction for year after year after year. And I wanna talk about kind of three points that I want you to really think about. If you are struggling with a big decision, and I know like on this podcast, the people I help is often making kind of really big career choices. Am I gonna quit? Am I gonna completely change it? And this can be applied to any big life choice, right? If you wanna end a relationship, if you want to end a marriage, if you want to move states, if you want to do things that seem kind of like big life moments, that it's almost a crossroads, right?
And you're gonna completely veer one way or another, which I've already talked about. Like, I don't think anything is as, I think 99% of the stuff that we do is reversible, is not as high stakes as we think it is. We're just very dramatic in our brain. And we think like there's no turning back. There's most of the time there's turning back or there's turning another way. But just for the sake of your brain being dramatic, let's give it to it like you're at a crossroads and you're gonna make a big decision. I want you to ask yourself this question. What if there couldn't be a wrong choice here?
What if no matter what I picked, I knew I'd be okay and I knew it was what, like the path that I needed to be on? How would I make this decision? Here's the thing that I want you to understand. Number one, there is nobody that makes a hundred percent of the right choices. There's nobody that starts life and is like, you know what? Everything I've done has always worked out exactly the way I wanted, and everything worked out better than I could have expected for me. And it led me exactly to where I wanted to be. Like, we already know that. I think inherently, um, we get that that's not how life works. And yet we expect ourselves to that, to Have that level of perfection that every decision I make, I have to know is gonna be the right thing, right?
And putting that level of pressure on yourself is insane and is not helpful because you won't make the decision. And again, you'll stay stuck. And we have to really let go of this idea that we have to constantly make a quote unquote right decision. Because in a lot of decisions that we make, there is no one right decision. It's just not like that. Life isn't like, oh, if you, you know, behind door number one is all of the happiness in the world and it's rainbows and butterflies and everything in your life is gonna be great. And then behind door number two is eternal contamination. And you're gonna ruin your life and you're gonna regret it for the rest of your life. It doesn't work that way.
It's like behind door number one is gonna be some really good things and some awful things. And you're gonna learn a lot and you're gonna wish some things were different and there's still gonna be stress. There's still gonna be doubt, and there's gonna be a lot of love, and there's gonna be a lot of like happiness and joy. And behind door door number two, it's gonna be kind of the same. It's gonna be a little different experiences. There's gonna still be joy, there's still gonna be stress, there's still gonna be anxiety. Some are things are gonna go the way you want. Some things aren't. And that's really the choice. And that's why it's so hard because it's like, who knows? How do I know which one? How do I know how it's gonna turn out? I don't, there's no way for me to know how it's gonna turn out.
So how can I make that decision when I don't know that, right? And so I want you to really think about like when you get let yourself get paralyzed in this fake idea that there is some right decision, there isn't. And you are gonna make decisions that aren't gonna turn out the way that you want. That is called life, right? One of the things that I really think about also is that you are not meant to make all the right decisions. That is how we learn like human beings. And actually most animals really learn best from experience. They talk about this like with kids a lot, where you can try to lecture your kids on all the things to do or all the right things to do. You can try to protect them, which you're not helping them because they have to learn through experience.
They have to fail. They have to feel what that feels like. In order to learn to take something more seriously or to put more effort in or to practice more, you can keep telling them like, oh, if you practice more, then you'll be better at baseball or soccer. But when they lose or when they go up to bat and they can't hit the ball, that feeling is what will drive them better than you telling them what they need to do. Right? Similarly, you can try to coach them and tell them how to ride a bike, but they are going to have to fall so that they can understand what balance is, right? They can understand what gravity does and they have to keep doing it until they learn how to ride that bike. Like there is some instruction you can give and then they have to learn on their own.
And they talk about this a lot of, like psychologists now, uh, child psychologists really talk about the importance of this, the importance of letting them even in semi dangerous. Not like, like obviously the safety of your children is important, but that mammals, um, learn through a little bit of risk and fear. And so we have sort of coddled our children to the point where they are not actually growing anymore. A lot of them are not growing into adulthood because they are not in situations where, you know, they're crossing the street by themselves or whatnot where they have to really kind of be paying attention and whatnot. And a lot of psychologists now, um, really recommend that like you allow them again, like if they're cutting with a kid's knife that's not sharp and you keep telling them they're getting their finger close to it, um, they don't learn.
But if they hit it on their finger and it hurts a little bit, it's not gonna cause a big, you know, it's not like a super sharp knife. They will learn quickly because they're like, oh, this hurts. I need to move my fingers, right? It's the same concept. I want you to think about your life. Like imagine everything that you've learned, everything that has made you into the person you are, everything that you have learned from relationships and, um, your career and just life lessons and in community and loyalty. And, you know, friendship and joy has all come from hard fought lessons, right? Things that didn't go the way you wanted. Friendships that were hurtful, um, breakups, heartbreak, um, failures not getting what you wanted. Like that is what turned you into a resilient badass. That is what's turned you into somebody that is driven, that wants to go after things.
Like we've all actually seen this sometimes with people who don't have a lot of, um, like all of the problems are taken care of. Like when, again, going back to children, there's this, um, now a lot of studies about helicopter parents. Parents that try to solve every problem for their kids and make sure that they never have an obstacle, basically hamstring their children. These children grow up to not be able to deal with any anxiety, not be able to deal, they can't call and make a doctor's appointment. They can't do anything because they've never had to feel those uncomfortable feelings. They've never had to learn from like being embarrassed or trying something and failing. It's like their parents are calling, you know, emailing the college professor about their grade. Like, it's an absurd thing. But we think somehow that it's better. Like we don't want this our children to ever suffer from anything.
We want them to everything to go the way that they want it to go. And we want them to constantly be happy and then we are ruining their lives because they become more anxious and they become less resilient and they become more fragile and they can't handle what life brings. And I want you to think about this for your own decisions too as you move forward, is that like, sometimes you just have to experience it. Sometimes you just have to learn. And that's going to come from maybe making what you would consider the quote unquote wrong decision, right? Like, how could you know without doing something and seeing how it feels and seeing if you like it and then figuring it out from there. And so I really, I think that we discount or we don't take into consideration. So how, how, like oftentimes making, labeling a decision right or wrong takes away so much from it.
Because what if that is the decision you need on that path to learn that lesson? One of the sayings I love the most is I either got the result I wanted or the lesson I needed. And I think when you look at your decisions like that, it takes off so much of the pressure because yes, I would love to get the result I want. Obviously that's why I'm taking, making that decision. I want to learn how to grow my business, or I want to learn how to make more money, or I want whatever I want to get in the best shape of my life. I might not get that result. Okay? So what was the lesson? If I take the time to actually learn that, instead of beating myself up, moving on to the next thing, hating myself for, you know, like shaming myself thinking I should have made a better decision.
If I really look at like, what, what did I learn here? How can I apply this to the next thing? Then it might be the thing that actually gets me to where I wanna go, which is the other thing that I want to talk about is like, I think again, we have this mistaken belief that there's some linear path, which we know is not like nobody is like, I, you know, wanted to start a business and I had no problems and it was completely linear growth and everything went well, or I got married, we've never had an issue. Everything has always been on the up and up. That's just not the way anything in life works. And yet I think that we think like, well if it's not, if it kind of does go up and down, if there are these, um, trials and tribulations, then something is wrong.
And I think if you look back at your life, you know, there's a reason we have the saying blessing in disguise. 'cause this happens a lot of times where something that we thought was terrible happens. And that in and of itself is the thing that kind of leads us on this path. And so I think of that often. Like even the decisions I have is like, yeah, I'm not saying this is the end all be all, but what if this is the thing that builds me into who I'm supposed to be or teaches me a lesson I needed or was the thing I needed that puts me on that path. I know from my story, and I've told you guys this story a a lot of times and it's, if you go back to the beginning of this podcast, I did like a hundred interviews, the first a hundred episodes, and I swear in every single interview, it was a similar kind of story.
When I left the law, I had no idea what I wanted to do. And I started that photo booth company. And I mean, even through that process, I'd started other things. But each thing really led me to where I am today. Had I not started that photo booth company, which by all accounts I could count as a failure, like it didn't turn out to be the business I wanted, but I didn't know what I wanted to do.
And making that decision to start that business was still one of the best decisions because it led me to learn about online business and it led me to find mindset work and it brought me to this podcast and this business. And if I hadn't taken those years to do that, I would not be here. I would probably have gotten another job doing something else and that would've led me on a hold other journey. So I can, you know, look at that and think like, oh, that was the wrong choice to start a photo booth business. Or that was the choice that got me on this path, right to where I need to go.
And I think when You look at your life in that way of like, what if this is just the next step that takes me to the next step? What if this is the blessing in disguise that I started? Or, you know, I get, I quit my job or I got laid off or I got divorced, which is like what leads me to the thing to where I'm supposed to be, to the person I'm supposed to be with, to the career I'm supposed to have. Um, the second thing I wanna think, I want you to think about when you think about this whole right and wrong choice is regret is a thought. It's not like a fact. It's simply a thought of I shouldn't have done this. And it's a lie. I think that our brain creates this lie where we believe that had I done something else, it would have turned out better.
So a lot of us do this where it's like, if I didn't open this door and I went in this door, everything would've been better. But you have no idea how that would've turned out. And so it's a lie to tell yourself and make yourself feel worse to say that it, your life would've been substantially better if you'd done X, Y, and Z. Maybe it would've been worse. I've thought about this a lot. Like people used to ask me, they don't ask me anymore, but like, when I was first leaving, people would ask me a lot if I regretted going to law school and I didn't because I grew so much, I learned so much. I actually loved law school. I made some really lifelong friends ever, a lot of it was great. But I really thought about it. I'm like, well, in order to regret this decision, there has to be this idea that had I not gone to law school, then you know, I would be ahead now.
I would've picked something else and that would've worked out better and I would've, you know, um, you know, been, I know living happily ever after, but I have no idea what would've happened. Maybe I would've floated around lost and confused for another 10 years. Maybe I would've tanked my self-confidence 'cause I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do. Maybe I would've picked another career and I hate, would've hated that more than law and I would've still ended up here. How can I know what it was gonna happen, right? Like, if I made a completely different life, maybe it would've turned out better. Maybe it would've turned out worse. Maybe it would've turned out in tragedy. Maybe I would've been somewhere and god forbid something bad would've happened to me because I wasn't where I, you know, ended up. I don't know. But I'm not gonna waste my life spending this wife game.
And so I think you have to really understand that. Like you don't, it's not like a given that like, if this doesn't turn out the way that I think it should, then, then I'm gonna regret this decision. Again. If you go back to that motto of like, I either got the result I wanted or the lesson I needed, it really helps to kind of understand that like, maybe this is just the path I need to go on. Even if it doesn't turn out the way that I think it should. This is my journey. And I don't have time to sit around and think about what if I did something else? 'cause I have no idea how that would've played out. What I do know is that this is the choice that I made, and I can make a choice from here. I can make another choice and another choice, and I can keep changing it until I get to where I wanna go, right? And so I want you to really understand that like I don't have to regret my decisions.
I can decide I made the best decision that I could with the information I had at the time
With the, my nervous system, with the way my traumas with, you know, my peer pressure and cultural conditioning with all of the things that I had at that age, the way that my brain was developed. I made that best decision and then I realized it wasn't a good decision for me anymore. And so I'm making another one now. Right now I have more information and I'm gonna make a different decision. So you don't necessarily have to make decisions with this fear that like one day you're gonna regret it because you can decide that you're not gonna regret it. You can decide that you're gonna have your own back and you're gonna see where this life takes you and you're gonna enjoy this journey and you're gonna learn from it either way. And finally, I will say this, indecision is a decision and it causes way more problems than actually making it the wrong decision.
Does, like we've already covered why the wrong decision could actually be really helpful because of all you learn, because the experience, because of where it takes you. But I think that we don't realize how much indecision, um, harms us. There are tons of studies that show how much indecision lowers your confidence because you stop trusting yourself, you stop trusting yourself to be able to make those decisions. You're constantly afraid of the negative emotion you're gonna feel, but then you feel so much negative emotion feeling stuck and paralyzed all the time, right? You don't learn how to figure it out. You don't learn resilience, you don't learn that like when things go wrong, which they inevitably will, that you are capable of figuring out the next step. And so you hamstring yourself, you're sort of the helicopter parent to yourself, right? You're like, I don't want anything to ever go wrong, so I'm gonna wrap myself a bubble wrap and I'm gonna stay here because better to the devil I know than the devil I don't. But that type of thinking has led to many a people that are deeply unhappy in their life, deeply unfulfilled, deeply, uh, stuck, right, deeply stuck in a life that they know is not for them.
And so I want you to understand, like it does take courage to make hard decisions to make these kind of crossroad decisions. Of course it does. And courage doesn't feel good because it is a lot of fear you have to overcome, right? Courage feels like fear. It feels like there's a lot of fear and you just have to bite down and do it. But I want you to really like, think about what you have to gain, not by making the right decision, by simply being out there and living your life, by making a decision and figuring it out, by having your own back and allowing it to move you forward and allowing it to get to the next thing and pivoting and get to the next thing. And going from there, instead of staying stagnant and paralyzed and in the same position year after year, decade after decade.
We all know those people. I hear from those people all the time where it's like, I was supposed to be in this job for a year. I've now been in here for 10 years, 15 years because they're too scared to make a decision.
And I feel like that is a worse fate than making the wrong decision and learning from it. Um, and so if you are avoiding a decision right now because you're afraid of making the wrong one, I want you to just write it down and write all of the thoughts that you are scared about, that you're gonna have to think about yourself if you get it wrong. Like what are all of the things that are gonna happen? And I want you to really think through like what would you do to fix those things, to deal with those things so that you can see that it may not be as scary as you think it is. It may not be as undoable, right? It may not be something that you can't handle. Um, I promise you that whatever happens, you will handle it. You always have, you have up until the snap point and you will from here. And there's so much more on this journey when you learn to just make the freaking decision and get started. All right, my friends, I hope that this was helpful. I'll be back next week with another special episode.
Because we've talked about this, um, a couple times on the podcast, but I think it just bears repeating, is this fear of making the wrong decision keeps so many people paralyzed in their lives and stuck in inaction for year after year after year. And I wanna talk about kind of three points that I want you to really think about. If you are struggling with a big decision, and I know like on this podcast, the people I help is often making kind of really big career choices. Am I gonna quit? Am I gonna completely change it? And this can be applied to any big life choice, right? If you wanna end a relationship, if you want to end a marriage, if you want to move states, if you want to do things that seem kind of like big life moments, that it's almost a crossroads, right?
And you're gonna completely veer one way or another, which I've already talked about. Like, I don't think anything is as, I think 99% of the stuff that we do is reversible, is not as high stakes as we think it is. We're just very dramatic in our brain. And we think like there's no turning back. There's most of the time there's turning back or there's turning another way. But just for the sake of your brain being dramatic, let's give it to it like you're at a crossroads and you're gonna make a big decision. I want you to ask yourself this question. What if there couldn't be a wrong choice here?
What if no matter what I picked, I knew I'd be okay and I knew it was what, like the path that I needed to be on? How would I make this decision? Here's the thing that I want you to understand. Number one, there is nobody that makes a hundred percent of the right choices. There's nobody that starts life and is like, you know what? Everything I've done has always worked out exactly the way I wanted, and everything worked out better than I could have expected for me. And it led me exactly to where I wanted to be. Like, we already know that. I think inherently, um, we get that that's not how life works. And yet we expect ourselves to that, to Have that level of perfection that every decision I make, I have to know is gonna be the right thing, right?
And putting that level of pressure on yourself is insane and is not helpful because you won't make the decision. And again, you'll stay stuck. And we have to really let go of this idea that we have to constantly make a quote unquote right decision. Because in a lot of decisions that we make, there is no one right decision. It's just not like that. Life isn't like, oh, if you, you know, behind door number one is all of the happiness in the world and it's rainbows and butterflies and everything in your life is gonna be great. And then behind door number two is eternal contamination. And you're gonna ruin your life and you're gonna regret it for the rest of your life. It doesn't work that way.
It's like behind door number one is gonna be some really good things and some awful things. And you're gonna learn a lot and you're gonna wish some things were different and there's still gonna be stress. There's still gonna be doubt, and there's gonna be a lot of love, and there's gonna be a lot of like happiness and joy. And behind door door number two, it's gonna be kind of the same. It's gonna be a little different experiences. There's gonna still be joy, there's still gonna be stress, there's still gonna be anxiety. Some are things are gonna go the way you want. Some things aren't. And that's really the choice. And that's why it's so hard because it's like, who knows? How do I know which one? How do I know how it's gonna turn out? I don't, there's no way for me to know how it's gonna turn out.
So how can I make that decision when I don't know that, right? And so I want you to really think about like when you get let yourself get paralyzed in this fake idea that there is some right decision, there isn't. And you are gonna make decisions that aren't gonna turn out the way that you want. That is called life, right? One of the things that I really think about also is that you are not meant to make all the right decisions. That is how we learn like human beings. And actually most animals really learn best from experience. They talk about this like with kids a lot, where you can try to lecture your kids on all the things to do or all the right things to do. You can try to protect them, which you're not helping them because they have to learn through experience.
They have to fail. They have to feel what that feels like. In order to learn to take something more seriously or to put more effort in or to practice more, you can keep telling them like, oh, if you practice more, then you'll be better at baseball or soccer. But when they lose or when they go up to bat and they can't hit the ball, that feeling is what will drive them better than you telling them what they need to do. Right? Similarly, you can try to coach them and tell them how to ride a bike, but they are going to have to fall so that they can understand what balance is, right? They can understand what gravity does and they have to keep doing it until they learn how to ride that bike. Like there is some instruction you can give and then they have to learn on their own.
And they talk about this a lot of, like psychologists now, uh, child psychologists really talk about the importance of this, the importance of letting them even in semi dangerous. Not like, like obviously the safety of your children is important, but that mammals, um, learn through a little bit of risk and fear. And so we have sort of coddled our children to the point where they are not actually growing anymore. A lot of them are not growing into adulthood because they are not in situations where, you know, they're crossing the street by themselves or whatnot where they have to really kind of be paying attention and whatnot. And a lot of psychologists now, um, really recommend that like you allow them again, like if they're cutting with a kid's knife that's not sharp and you keep telling them they're getting their finger close to it, um, they don't learn.
But if they hit it on their finger and it hurts a little bit, it's not gonna cause a big, you know, it's not like a super sharp knife. They will learn quickly because they're like, oh, this hurts. I need to move my fingers, right? It's the same concept. I want you to think about your life. Like imagine everything that you've learned, everything that has made you into the person you are, everything that you have learned from relationships and, um, your career and just life lessons and in community and loyalty. And, you know, friendship and joy has all come from hard fought lessons, right? Things that didn't go the way you wanted. Friendships that were hurtful, um, breakups, heartbreak, um, failures not getting what you wanted. Like that is what turned you into a resilient badass. That is what's turned you into somebody that is driven, that wants to go after things.
Like we've all actually seen this sometimes with people who don't have a lot of, um, like all of the problems are taken care of. Like when, again, going back to children, there's this, um, now a lot of studies about helicopter parents. Parents that try to solve every problem for their kids and make sure that they never have an obstacle, basically hamstring their children. These children grow up to not be able to deal with any anxiety, not be able to deal, they can't call and make a doctor's appointment. They can't do anything because they've never had to feel those uncomfortable feelings. They've never had to learn from like being embarrassed or trying something and failing. It's like their parents are calling, you know, emailing the college professor about their grade. Like, it's an absurd thing. But we think somehow that it's better. Like we don't want this our children to ever suffer from anything.
We want them to everything to go the way that they want it to go. And we want them to constantly be happy and then we are ruining their lives because they become more anxious and they become less resilient and they become more fragile and they can't handle what life brings. And I want you to think about this for your own decisions too as you move forward, is that like, sometimes you just have to experience it. Sometimes you just have to learn. And that's going to come from maybe making what you would consider the quote unquote wrong decision, right? Like, how could you know without doing something and seeing how it feels and seeing if you like it and then figuring it out from there. And so I really, I think that we discount or we don't take into consideration. So how, how, like oftentimes making, labeling a decision right or wrong takes away so much from it.
Because what if that is the decision you need on that path to learn that lesson? One of the sayings I love the most is I either got the result I wanted or the lesson I needed. And I think when you look at your decisions like that, it takes off so much of the pressure because yes, I would love to get the result I want. Obviously that's why I'm taking, making that decision. I want to learn how to grow my business, or I want to learn how to make more money, or I want whatever I want to get in the best shape of my life. I might not get that result. Okay? So what was the lesson? If I take the time to actually learn that, instead of beating myself up, moving on to the next thing, hating myself for, you know, like shaming myself thinking I should have made a better decision.
If I really look at like, what, what did I learn here? How can I apply this to the next thing? Then it might be the thing that actually gets me to where I wanna go, which is the other thing that I want to talk about is like, I think again, we have this mistaken belief that there's some linear path, which we know is not like nobody is like, I, you know, wanted to start a business and I had no problems and it was completely linear growth and everything went well, or I got married, we've never had an issue. Everything has always been on the up and up. That's just not the way anything in life works. And yet I think that we think like, well if it's not, if it kind of does go up and down, if there are these, um, trials and tribulations, then something is wrong.
And I think if you look back at your life, you know, there's a reason we have the saying blessing in disguise. 'cause this happens a lot of times where something that we thought was terrible happens. And that in and of itself is the thing that kind of leads us on this path. And so I think of that often. Like even the decisions I have is like, yeah, I'm not saying this is the end all be all, but what if this is the thing that builds me into who I'm supposed to be or teaches me a lesson I needed or was the thing I needed that puts me on that path. I know from my story, and I've told you guys this story a a lot of times and it's, if you go back to the beginning of this podcast, I did like a hundred interviews, the first a hundred episodes, and I swear in every single interview, it was a similar kind of story.
When I left the law, I had no idea what I wanted to do. And I started that photo booth company. And I mean, even through that process, I'd started other things. But each thing really led me to where I am today. Had I not started that photo booth company, which by all accounts I could count as a failure, like it didn't turn out to be the business I wanted, but I didn't know what I wanted to do.
And making that decision to start that business was still one of the best decisions because it led me to learn about online business and it led me to find mindset work and it brought me to this podcast and this business. And if I hadn't taken those years to do that, I would not be here. I would probably have gotten another job doing something else and that would've led me on a hold other journey. So I can, you know, look at that and think like, oh, that was the wrong choice to start a photo booth business. Or that was the choice that got me on this path, right to where I need to go.
And I think when You look at your life in that way of like, what if this is just the next step that takes me to the next step? What if this is the blessing in disguise that I started? Or, you know, I get, I quit my job or I got laid off or I got divorced, which is like what leads me to the thing to where I'm supposed to be, to the person I'm supposed to be with, to the career I'm supposed to have. Um, the second thing I wanna think, I want you to think about when you think about this whole right and wrong choice is regret is a thought. It's not like a fact. It's simply a thought of I shouldn't have done this. And it's a lie. I think that our brain creates this lie where we believe that had I done something else, it would have turned out better.
So a lot of us do this where it's like, if I didn't open this door and I went in this door, everything would've been better. But you have no idea how that would've turned out. And so it's a lie to tell yourself and make yourself feel worse to say that it, your life would've been substantially better if you'd done X, Y, and Z. Maybe it would've been worse. I've thought about this a lot. Like people used to ask me, they don't ask me anymore, but like, when I was first leaving, people would ask me a lot if I regretted going to law school and I didn't because I grew so much, I learned so much. I actually loved law school. I made some really lifelong friends ever, a lot of it was great. But I really thought about it. I'm like, well, in order to regret this decision, there has to be this idea that had I not gone to law school, then you know, I would be ahead now.
I would've picked something else and that would've worked out better and I would've, you know, um, you know, been, I know living happily ever after, but I have no idea what would've happened. Maybe I would've floated around lost and confused for another 10 years. Maybe I would've tanked my self-confidence 'cause I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do. Maybe I would've picked another career and I hate, would've hated that more than law and I would've still ended up here. How can I know what it was gonna happen, right? Like, if I made a completely different life, maybe it would've turned out better. Maybe it would've turned out worse. Maybe it would've turned out in tragedy. Maybe I would've been somewhere and god forbid something bad would've happened to me because I wasn't where I, you know, ended up. I don't know. But I'm not gonna waste my life spending this wife game.
And so I think you have to really understand that. Like you don't, it's not like a given that like, if this doesn't turn out the way that I think it should, then, then I'm gonna regret this decision. Again. If you go back to that motto of like, I either got the result I wanted or the lesson I needed, it really helps to kind of understand that like, maybe this is just the path I need to go on. Even if it doesn't turn out the way that I think it should. This is my journey. And I don't have time to sit around and think about what if I did something else? 'cause I have no idea how that would've played out. What I do know is that this is the choice that I made, and I can make a choice from here. I can make another choice and another choice, and I can keep changing it until I get to where I wanna go, right? And so I want you to really understand that like I don't have to regret my decisions.
I can decide I made the best decision that I could with the information I had at the time
With the, my nervous system, with the way my traumas with, you know, my peer pressure and cultural conditioning with all of the things that I had at that age, the way that my brain was developed. I made that best decision and then I realized it wasn't a good decision for me anymore. And so I'm making another one now. Right now I have more information and I'm gonna make a different decision. So you don't necessarily have to make decisions with this fear that like one day you're gonna regret it because you can decide that you're not gonna regret it. You can decide that you're gonna have your own back and you're gonna see where this life takes you and you're gonna enjoy this journey and you're gonna learn from it either way. And finally, I will say this, indecision is a decision and it causes way more problems than actually making it the wrong decision.
Does, like we've already covered why the wrong decision could actually be really helpful because of all you learn, because the experience, because of where it takes you. But I think that we don't realize how much indecision, um, harms us. There are tons of studies that show how much indecision lowers your confidence because you stop trusting yourself, you stop trusting yourself to be able to make those decisions. You're constantly afraid of the negative emotion you're gonna feel, but then you feel so much negative emotion feeling stuck and paralyzed all the time, right? You don't learn how to figure it out. You don't learn resilience, you don't learn that like when things go wrong, which they inevitably will, that you are capable of figuring out the next step. And so you hamstring yourself, you're sort of the helicopter parent to yourself, right? You're like, I don't want anything to ever go wrong, so I'm gonna wrap myself a bubble wrap and I'm gonna stay here because better to the devil I know than the devil I don't. But that type of thinking has led to many a people that are deeply unhappy in their life, deeply unfulfilled, deeply, uh, stuck, right, deeply stuck in a life that they know is not for them.
And so I want you to understand, like it does take courage to make hard decisions to make these kind of crossroad decisions. Of course it does. And courage doesn't feel good because it is a lot of fear you have to overcome, right? Courage feels like fear. It feels like there's a lot of fear and you just have to bite down and do it. But I want you to really like, think about what you have to gain, not by making the right decision, by simply being out there and living your life, by making a decision and figuring it out, by having your own back and allowing it to move you forward and allowing it to get to the next thing and pivoting and get to the next thing. And going from there, instead of staying stagnant and paralyzed and in the same position year after year, decade after decade.
We all know those people. I hear from those people all the time where it's like, I was supposed to be in this job for a year. I've now been in here for 10 years, 15 years because they're too scared to make a decision.
And I feel like that is a worse fate than making the wrong decision and learning from it. Um, and so if you are avoiding a decision right now because you're afraid of making the wrong one, I want you to just write it down and write all of the thoughts that you are scared about, that you're gonna have to think about yourself if you get it wrong. Like what are all of the things that are gonna happen? And I want you to really think through like what would you do to fix those things, to deal with those things so that you can see that it may not be as scary as you think it is. It may not be as undoable, right? It may not be something that you can't handle. Um, I promise you that whatever happens, you will handle it. You always have, you have up until the snap point and you will from here. And there's so much more on this journey when you learn to just make the freaking decision and get started. All right, my friends, I hope that this was helpful. I'll be back next week with another special episode.
