What Causes Indecision?

One of the things I’ve been wrestling with lately is indecision. That’s it in a nutshell. Full of options and lacking the clarity or confidence to know which path to walk.

Indecision leads to paralysis; decision fatigue and analysis paralysis from thinking too much and not taking action. It’s draining. It feels physically painful at times, too.

What leads to indecision?Overanalysing your options

This is what I’ve been doing. I’ve done many pros and cons lists. I’ve done spreadsheets. I’ve done notion pages. I’ve spoken to family and friends. And yet I still feel unsure and afraid. This over-analysis leads to fatigue and not seeing clearly. It’s like staring so intensely at a dot on a page that you miss the bigger picture and the other options around you. Or you consider too many things that it all gets jumbled up and overwhelming, over complicating things unnecessarily.

Not trusting yourself

If you are struggling to make a decision, it’s often because you don’t trust yourself to make the right decision. I know this is true for me. I feel like I can screw up my life at any moment with the wrong choice! This causes paralysis. It’s sad to not trust ourselves. We need to realise that we aren’t psychic and we can’t know for sure if something will work out so at some point, we have to take a leap and trust our first instinct.

Letting external factors make your decisions

Sometimes indecision comes down to trusting other people more than yourself. Or asking so many people that you have conflicting advice to wrestle with. Getting advice isn’t a bad thing, in fact it can help sway you a lot. However, the decision in the end needs to be yours otherwise you’ll blame other people for what’s happened or never build trust with yourself. The problem with advice is you (the person giving the advice) never need to suffer the consequences and you don’t know what it’s like to be the person asking for advice (even if your circumstances are similar). So at the end of the day, the person giving you advice can’t be the one to choose for you.

Not knowing yourself well enough

Sometimes it comes down to not knowing what we truly want. Not knowing ourselves and our values enough to know what would be the best choice for us. When you really know yourself and you know what you want, making decisions shouldn’t be too difficult because you know whether something aligns with your needs, beliefs, or desires or not.

Fear of failure or mistakes

This is a big one that leads to indecision. Being scared of what will happen if things don’t work out is normal. I’m facing that at the moment.

What if I leap and I lose the comfort I had and hate what I leapt into? What if it was a mistake?

It’s truly difficult and the reality is that it sucks. However, we must remember that we are not trees. In most situations, we can fix a mistake. Changed jobs and you hate it? Maybe you can go back to your old one, provided you didn’t burn bridges and your position hasn’t been filled. You can look for another job. You can speak to your new employer about your struggles to see what can be done. Not much will equal the end of the world or a no going back situation. It will be tough. It was sting. But the strong will prevail and at least you can say you were brave enough to try and that means something way more than “failure” ever will.

Lessons learned are not mistakes.

Not trusting that you can handle hard things

Lastly, indecision can come from not trusting your abilities. This is a big one for me. For some reason, I have a very real belief that I can’t do hard things. That everyone else is braver, smarter, and more experienced than I am. I can’t do a job with high responsibilities. I can’t publish a book. I can’t raise a child! But I’ve done things before that I thought I couldn’t do, so who’s to say I can’t do hard things? I’ve literally proven to myself time and again that I can. And you can too.

Sincerely,

S. xx