Oh, I haven’t introduced you? How rude of me.
Sometimes you are well and truly stuck on making a decision because
every option you’ve considered has downsides you don’t want to
experience.
You don’t want to risk making a decision you’ll regret, so you’re
stuck.
That tends to make you sit at the crossroads for the forseeable
future and ask yourself “Should I do X or Y? What’s the RIGHT
choice?”, because both options seem painful.
When you ask these questions, you are secretly trying to summon the
Guarantee Fairy.
This particular fairy’s job is to magically appear and give you an
option that gives you maximum upside with none of those pesky
downsides.
What’s the best product to launch next?
Would it be better to change my branding to something else?
What’s the best frequency to blog at?
Would it be better to raise my prices?
What’s the best way to become a big deal on social media?
Would it be better to do this job myself, or hire it out?
The Guarantee Fairy, when she appears, will wave her wand and
reveal the answer.
And that answer, miracle of miracles, will be the best possible
choice for you to make, and will give you exactly what you were
hoping to get.
WHEN she appears.
I’ve yet to see it happen, but if it does, you go and tell me, ok?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Nothing in life – or business – has a guarantee, and the chances of
things going your way from start to finish are virtually zero.
This is hard to accept.
Again, we don’t want to make the wrong choice and regret it later.
We desperately want to believe that there are choices and
strategies out there that will turn out to be the “right” choice,
and by “right” we mean that nothing will go wrong.
We desperately want to believe that we can know – really KNOW –
whether one choice is objectively better than another.
But EVERYTHING goes wrong at some point.
And very little in life – or business – is actually predictable up
front.
It can be really hard to choose when you have so many questions and
so many things you won’t ever know about the road not taken.
If you launch product X, you won’t know if product Y would have
done better. Or worse.
If you change your branding, you won’t know if the old branding
would have done better if you stuck with it.
If you start blogging more, you won’t know whether the extra work
was worth it or it could have paid off better elsewhere.
If your decision goes badly, you’ll think you did the wrong thing.
If your decision goes “okay”, you’ll wonder if the other path would
have done really well.
That kind of wondering will drive you crazy, and you know it. And
so you stay stuck.
Really stuck.
And hoping the Guarantee Fairy will hurry up and get here already.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Every decision comes with downsides.
Every outcome is impossible to predict.
Nothing is guaranteed.
No matter how bad things are going now, they may end up pretty
great six months from now.
No matter how good things are going now, the tide can change in an
instant (or maybe so slowly you don’t notice until you have a
problem).
We all like to believe in the Guarantee Fairy.
But I don’t think I’d put money on her coming around very soon.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
But! There is SOMETHING you can do in the meantime.
Remember that the world will not actually end if you make a
mistake.
Remember that life and business is a long game, and you can recover
if it doesn’t go as planned.
Remember just how much of your CURRENT life hasn’t gone
as planned, and how you’ve managed to survive so far.
Remember how when you actually had to deal with something scary,
the dealing wasn’t nearly as scary as the worry that it would
happen in the first place.
The upside is that once you’re dealing with something difficult,
you don’t have to be afraid it *might* happen anymore. That frees
up a lot of internal resources to do the dealing.
When things don’t go your way in life, you figure out how to manage.
When you have to deal with the hard stuff, you figure out how to
manage.
So far, you’ve been pretty damned resilient. Life hasn’t killed
you yet.
So when you’re faced with a choice, and both options have downsides
you don’t like, remember that EVERYTHING has downsides you don’t
like.
And you can manage.
It’s one thing to not make a choice because the downside of a
particular path will destroy you.
But experiencing very uncomfortable downsides won’t destroy you.
There’s a lot you CAN handle, even if the process ends up being
brutal.
Be as intelligent as you can about making decisions.
But don’t for a minute forget that you’ve been pretty resilient so far.
I’d put my money on you.
xx
ND
PS – You should also take a look at the last post on the blog.
Just saying.
SHOULD you jump? WILL the net appear?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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This is great for recovering perfectionists like myself. Excellent point on the power of letting of the need to please, perform, and perfect. I especially like the choice of the phrase: “So far, you’ve been pretty damned resilient. Life hasn’t killed
you yet.” Resiliency is a topic I am trying to learn a lot more about lately.
oh, this one does my heart good! Thank you!!!
Lots of great points in this. Thanks for posting this.