557. How to Form the Decisiveness Habit

How to Form the Decisiveness Habit By Leo Babauta I’ve had several people ask me lately about what they can do about indecisiveness, and it made me realize that this is actually something I’m pretty good at: being decisive. Making decisions can be difficult, especially when there’s no clear choice. But being indecisive, when you’re at the cusp of one of these tough decisions, can come at high costs: Not taking action can cost you an opportunity, or cost money and time as you delay. People waiting on you to make a decision can get frustrated. You can feel stress about your indecisiveness, and stress about how you’re making people wait. People who are plagued with indecisiveness generally know they don’t want to be that way, so I won’t belabor the point. It’s not fun, and I feel compassion for those who have this difficulty. So how can we form the habit of being decisive instead? It’s about recognizing what’s going on when you’re stuck with a decision, as it’s happening. And then deciding to go with a new set of habits around your decision-making. … We can’t get rid of the uncertainty around making a decision. We can do everything we can to research, delay, come up with a decision-making system … and we’ll still be unsure of what choice we should make. We’ll still feel anxious about it. So we might just learn to be OK with that uncertainty, and get into the habit of making decisive decisions. Yes, there will likely be a cost to whatever choice we make. That’s true if we make no choice as well — that’s a choice, and it has costs. Over the long run, the cost of indecision is usually worse than the cost of making a wrong choice, because we stress out about the indecision for a long time. The stress doesn’t make the choice easier, it doesn’t make us happy, it affects our health, it affects our relationships. Instead, let’s just make a decision, and move on. Let go of the stress about whether it’s the right choice (there’s no such thing) and instead deal with whatever consequences we face. And learn to trust that we’ll be OK.