No bad decisions

Like most of my subjects I have a wave of inspiration and spend an hour writing in my head, trying to drop off to sleep but too involved in my narrative to sleep, too invested in bedtime to get up and put it to paper. And then the next day it’s gone. Vague wisps of the story will drift around me like smoke but I can’t quite grasp it. So I’ll just start again and hope that the beautiful narrative I crafted so perfectly in my near sleep can weave its way through my conscious writing.

I don’t want to indulge in mother bashing because I’ve done enough of that in my lifetime, but to understand why I struggle so much with trusting myself I have to remind myself that we grew up in an environment completely devoid of any nurturing. Technically I was well cared for but emotionally it was a vacuum. We had two parents completely unable to nurture. Dad because he was such a damaged broken man himself he was simply unable to acknowledge or express emotion. I have no doubt our father loved us more than life itself, but he had no tools to express love, and he remained emotionally (and often physically) absent or withdrawn from our lives. Mum, well Mum was.. well, Mum. Mum treated both of us differently, but the effect has been much the same. With me she rejected any effort I made to do anything as not enough, antagonised and bullied me, shamed and ostracised me. I was always in trouble, I never really understood why, and I grew up knowing I was a terrible child, a wicked selfish person. So evil was I that I didn’t even know what I was doing wrong. I was no shrinking violet and I fought robustly with Mum. It took me till the age of about 45 to realise that I was actually an internal mess, completely devoid of any confidence in who I was as a person. As a project manager and a wife, I was smart, intelligent, self-confident, fiercely loyal, ballsy, ruthlessly efficient and strongly opinionated. Beyond that I knew not who I was. About a month before my breakdown, a friend at work who was training to be a counsellor said that all people had self doubt, and I actually laughed at him. Not me I thought smugly.

When you have been systematically punished and shamed for everything you do it’s not surprising that you don’t trust yourself. What does surprise me is just how much work it has taken to get over it. I don’t blame my parents anymore. But the damage is still there.

So why am I trying to unpick this now?

Because the last couple of months I have been facing situations which boil down to me being unable to trust myself. I can’t even remember the details, but essentially I am unable to make a decision about some things. Important things. Napoleon Hill, Bob Proctor and indeed all successful business people say the one thing you have to be able to do to be successful is to make a decision. Successful people make decisions quickly and rarely, if ever, change their minds. Abraham Hicks also supports this, “make a decision and get behind it”. Until you make a decision the forces of the Universe cannot support you. I didn’t realise that this was a thing, I never considered myself unable to make decisions, but suddenly it’s showing up all over the place.

If you don’t trust yourself, it can be hard to make a decision. If you fear reprisal for making the wrong decision, it can be hard to make a decision. Not being able to make a decision can then infuse doubt into all areas of life and before you know it you’ve spiralled into a mess.

I realise with the benefit of being beyond the crisis that making a decision has nothing to do with knowing everything or even knowing enough. In my previous work life there were lots of things that engineers would argue over for a life time if you let them. There are pros and cons in every method. People always favour one technical approach over another. If you allowed everybody to debate every nuance of software development, you’d have missed a deadline even before you were bored to death. I soon learned that for every approach there were equally valid supporters and rubbishers. You can always find an expert who supports one side. Or the other. If this we take this and apply it to life in general you realise that there is no one correct way. There is only an opinion. And confidence in that opinion. 

My sister told me one of her physical therapists had asked her ”why do you assume there is only one correct way?” when she agonised over some decision. That really blew me away. Because, because, because I would bluster… I know now that my “because” has nothing to do with the issue I face, but everything to do with me. Because I might make a mistake. Because if I fail at this, people will blame me. Because if I get it wrong I will be letting everybody down. Because if I don’t get it right everybody will hate me. Because if I am not perfect I am unworthy of love.

More often than not, making ANY decision is better than wavering in magnificent indecision. If you make a decision it will soon flush out any other factors you hadn’t considered. If it turns out there might be a better way, you can change direction. That’s something else we forget. Every tiny step forward opens up new opportunities, introduces new energies, attracts new people, reveals new information. If you aren’t moving forward, you can’t benefit from all that variety of stuff out there. You can always turn around – I won’t say go back, because you’re not really, you’re simply reassessing from a slightly different standpoint, a different standpoint that you would not have had the vantage of had you not moved forward a bit.

Taking the fear our of making a decision should make it easier. Recognising the underlying beliefs that we have that paralyse us helps to shift out of that mindset. When you find yourself justifying how important “getting it right” is, it’s time to take a breath and recognise the fear.  We all do this: what if, what if, what if, you don’t understand how important it is, you don’t understand the consequences – that defensive outrage when someone tries to tell you it doesn’t matter, or it’s not our responsibility. We can all hear that spiral into illogical panic when you witness someone else in this mindset and it’s so obvious they are operating from fear, but when it’s us we are lost in it.

Soul Level Intuitive Coaching® helps us recognise these underlying beliefs, but also, teaches us to recognise the behaviours we fall into when we’re acting on them (we call them workarounds). They’re not always obvious, even to those of us skilled at this constant self assessment. I was fortunate enough to have a fellow SLIC colleague to help me recently – I didn’t know what I was dealing with until she said “when did stop trusting yourself” and I found myself inexplicably (as is often the case) in tears. Then her guides gently helped me pick it apart until I understood what was going on. Building trust in my own decisions may take a while but at least I know what’s going on. 

The one thing I can do immediately is recognise that agonising over a decision is simply playing out the negative beliefs of not good enough (I might get it wrong), and not safe, supported and protected (if I get this wrong the world is a hostile place) and that’s OK. But I can get immediate relief if I can actually trust that there is no such thing as a bad decision: that whatever I chose to do will lead somewhere, and it’s never irreversible. Even the “best” decision may have some element of “bad” results and every “bad” decision may have some “good” results. Realising that takes the pressure off.

Best of all, in Googling some ideas for a title I came across this “there is no such thing as a wrong or bad decision. The universe is self-correcting. We just need to trust this.” Meghan Telpner (never heard of her but there you go, www.meghantelpner.com).

I love that. Self-correcting. As Abraham Hicks says, “you’ll never get it done and you can’t get it wrong”.

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