The right choice: how can you know?

The right choice: how can you know?

Overwhelmed by choices

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by too many choices while shopping? When faced with a wall of options, it's easy to freeze, but when there are just a few choices, you suddenly feel more at ease.

"The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less" by Barry Choice provides an interesting exploration into this phenomenon.

Do you wait for others or circumstances to "make the choice" for you?

Isn’t that curious? We could simplify our decision-making by limiting our options ourselves, but we often wait for external forces to do it for us, perhaps trying to escape responsibility believing "we had no choice."

But how much does this need to make the perfect choice hold us back from truly engaging in life? Even though we might not recognize it as such, this indecisiveness is a form of perfectionism.

How can we know what the "right choice" is?

When people struggle with making the right choice, I often ask them,

“Even if you made the right choice, how would you ever know it was right?”

The truth is, you can't, not in any provable sort of way.

Did I make the right choice?

Take my own life, for example:

Did I make the right choice to drop out of college after three years?
Was it the right choice to leave Shelby, North Carolina, and move to New York City at age 22?
Did I make the right decision to marry in 1983?
Was it the right choice to change my career from software engineering to life coaching in 1987?
Was it the right choice to divorce my wife in 1991 that I had married in 1983?
And what about moving from the U.S. to Asia in 1999—was that the right move?
Did I make a mistake in moving from China to Colombia in 2021?

I believe all these choices were right, but I can’t prove it with absolute certainty.

If I knew what I know now when I was facing those choices back then, some of those choice would have been different. But that's a different issue of whether those choices were the best ones to make at that time given what I knew then.

We can weigh the pros and cons of our decisions, especially the big ones, but in the end, we can never truly know if we made the "right" choice.

Making the right choices by declaration

What we can do is choose to live as though we did.

Do you agonize over decisions, replaying every possibility until you're stuck? Consider how this limits your freedom and joy.

The next time indecision strikes, take a deep breath. Honor your courage for making a choice, and declare that it is the right one. Then, move forward with confidence.

AskDwightHow.org 365/24/7

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