They say you can tell a lot about a person from how they interact with the serving staff at a restaurant. I’d add that you can tell a lot about a person from how they interact with the menu.
I can tell how decision making goes in life for someone just by sitting down with them for lunch. How a person relates to a menu is a revealing foray into the way they make choices in general, in my experience.
Years ago, I noticed that one of my very best friends has a really hard time ordering from a menu. She would want to know what everyone else is ordering, then she’d maybe narrow it down, asking her husband to order something she might like, in case she didn’t like what she ordered, so that she’d be able to switch if/when she was disappointed in her meal.
When the server would arrive at our table to take everyone’s order, she’d spiral into a sort of frenzied panic, asking to go last, then sort of blurting out an order, which may or may not even have been one of the original contenders. Then while the discussion resumed at the table, I could see her ruminating on her decision and worrying aloud that she’d made the wrong choice.
I could literally feel the panic emanating from her and I realized that each time she was ordering a meal, she was nearly paralyzed by the fear that she might make the wrong choice. Each meal seemed to become The Last Meal, in terms of the importance of choosing correctly.
That’s a lot of pressure for something you’re going to do roughly three times a day for the rest of your life. Granted, this experience was generally reserved for ordering food while she was out, but it was the same in coffee shops or anywhere else she’d frequent, and that’s still a lot.
Now, it was pretty low stakes, given that it was just dinner, but the thing that really struck me was that I could see this angst was part of how she experienced making any decision. Choosing anything seemed really unenjoyable and made even the simplest of decisions incredibly stressful and unpleasant, for her and, at times, for those around her.
Here’s the nut: I don’t think my best friend actually struggles with making a decision. I think she struggles with empowering the choice she’s made.
This is called Holding Out Hope For a Better Past. In case it’s not explicitly obvious, that’s a futile exercise and a monumental waste of your precious time, unless you have a time machine, which I’m pretty sure you don’t. So…
See, over years and years of endlessly questioning her choices after she’s made them, she’s taught herself that she cannot trust herself to make a right choice.
Repeatedly telling yourself that you always make the wrong choice is likely to have you worry about making the next one, and leave you doubting that you can make the right one ever.
Ironically, the very thing this pattern of behaviour is meant to protect you from—suffering the consequences of making the wrong choice—is keeping you stuck in a loop of continually questioning your decisions and not able to enjoy the outcomes you actually do choose.
Oof. That’s awkward, isn’t it?
My friend is not making the wrong choice, and neither are you, for that matter. She’s just making a choice and then she’s disempowering it after the fact, which leads her to conclude that it was wrong. This has nothing to do with the selection she’s made and everything to do with how she’s relating to it afterward.
Constantly looking for how your choice wasn’t the best one after you’ve made it doesn’t leave you a lot of room to empower your choice, let alone enjoy it. It leaves you constantly looking over fences to see what else might have been better. It leaves you choosing from comparison and not from desire. The problem with this method is that comparison is, as they say, the thief of joy.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the only thing that makes a choice right or wrong is what you’ll decide about it after the fact.
And, whether you tend to decide your choices are right or wrong is simply a function of how you’ve tended to practice making your choices be right or wrong over time.
Put simply: right or wrong, how you feel about your choices is the result of how you’ve practiced relating to your choices over and over again.
This is not a character flaw or a personality defect: it’s simply an overgrown muscle that is acting automatically, because it’s what you’re used to doing.
This is good news. This means you are not genetically predisposed to make poor choices. This means you can practice doing something different, which may lead to a different experience (i.e. the experience you actually want to be having, which I’m guessing is probably not stress and panic and regret).
Now, I’m hoping that it’s obvious, but in order for anything to change, you’re going to need to change something. More good news: you only need to change your thoughts. This might sound tricky; after all, you have all kinds of unhelpful thoughts all the time, right? I know; same here. But, while a bunch of rogue thoughts do go wandering all over our consciousness, we can also choose the ones we empower, as well as create new ones. We have that power. It was inside us all along, after all.
So, when you’ve made a choice, and you catch yourself worrying that you’ve made the wrong one (you’ll know you’re disempowering your choice because you’ll feel stress and regret), all you need to do is catch yourself and recognize that you are disempowering your choice.
What we’re doing here is taking automatic habits and bringing them into the light of your conscious awareness. This is important.
Next up is to get clear about the experience you wish to be having in the moment, with regards to your choice: Is disempowering your choice really what you want to do? Is that really going to provide you with the experience of life you want right now? I’m guessing it’s not.
If you decide that you aren’t actively seeking more stress and regret in your life (I mean, really), then the next step is to remind yourself of the reasons you made the decision you chose. What was appealing about this option? What do you like about it? What makes this option you chose good/fun/tasty/awesome, etc?
Spend more time looking for what you appreciate or enjoy about the choices you’ve made than you spend comparing it to all the other options you didn’t choose, and see if it changes the way you feel about the choice you’ve made (I believe it will).
The long and short of it all is that if you want to feel like you’re making the right choices, all you need to do is stop immediately making your decisions wrong by disempowering it as soon as they’ve been made.
Give yourself the generous gift of empowering and enjoying your choices and you’ll give yourself the generous gift of empowering and enjoying your life.
Leave a Reply