Fear of Making the Wrong Choice

I come across quite a few people who have played the ‘escaping game' many times, i.e. they have ‘escaped' from one wrong job to another without taking time to think through what they really wanted. They're now so burnt out that they have a fear of making yet ‘another wrong move'. Having said this, I have also met people who haven't changed jobs much, but who are also fearful of making the wrong choice. They seem to mostly be fuelled by well-meaning friends and family members who are telling them to stick to what's safe and what they know. Either sound familiar to you?

This is something that also came up at our Kickstart workshop last weekend. We were looking at what were all the job/work ideas various participants had, and then looked at what were all the obstacles that were preventing them from taking these ideas further. The fear of not getting it right or making the wrong choice was the number one obstacle for one of the participants, but it resonated with other participants as well.

I may have shared it with you already, but one of my favourite quotes is by Mark Twain: ‘Courage is not the absence of fear, but the resistance of fear.' We often wait to feel fearlessness in order to move on, but as Susan Jeffers writes in her best-selling book ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway', sitting around waiting for this to happen is the best recipe for not doing anything mildly out of our comfort zones, ever.

So what's the ‘right choice' anyway?

When I started working for myself four years ago I was agonising over my life's purpose. I was really worried about finding the ‘right purpose', to guide my work and my life. Lisa, my coach at the time, said something brilliant to me in one of our sessions. She said that I could either sit on my couch and wait for the right purpose (whatever that was) to appear, or I could live my life connecting with what felt like ‘the most right thing' for me to be working with in every moment. Yes, ‘the thing' might change along the way, and over time it probably would, but at least I could look back and know that I was engaging with the world with what I felt was the best contribution I could be in every moment. It had a profound effect on me - and it got me into action. And it's been pretty much how I've lead my life ever since - I think the thought of sitting on my couch for tens of years waiting just did not hold much of an appeal!

At the workshop we also took some time to brainstorm all the ways we could come up with to overcome this fear. Some of the ideas we came up with included:

• Seeing life as a journey, not a destination - everything we do is part of a process - but we are so programmed to ‘get there' that we don't enjoy and realize that the process is ‘there'.
• Realising that the journey may have some bumps, but that's great - the Japanese have a saying that the difference between a masterful and a poor warrior is that both will get knocked down seven times, but the masterful warrior will still keep getting up after each knock. As one participant phrased it: it's a sin to lie there, it's not a sin to get up again.
• Starting with small steps to be able to make a more informed, less riskier feeling choice - we're also often programmed to think that change is one massive change as opposed to thousands of small steps. If you read through the Escape Stories (http://www.escape-club.org/) I've collected in the past few years of people who have changed careers, rarely was it a case of jumping into an abyss, it usually consisted of a lot of small changes that equalled a big change
• Taking action, any action, as that's the best way, if not the only way, to discover what's right for you - sitting around thinking about it will rarely, on its own, give you an answer of what's right or not

Has this inspired you to take some new actions?