People Pleasers and anxious people make decisions from the “outside in”. They take lots of time looking for all the possible options, all the potential imagined opportunities and threats, and then they try to narrow it down to one clear winner.
It’s like choosing an icecream by first looking at every flavour they’ve got and weighing up how each one might taste before buying. Or spending days researching all the local hotels within 10 miles your holiday beach before booking a room.
This is often why they can’t decide at all, and end up panicking and choosing an awful flavour of icecream or missing out on the best hotels because they took too long to choose.
This “gotta look at all the possibilities first” mentality comes from a fear of missing out, a scarcity mindset. The fear that you might overlook the best option means you have no choice but to look at all of them.
It also comes from a lack of self-respect and self-trust; it’s the idea that you can’t be trusted to just know the right choice without first being exposed to all possibilities.
Confident people do it from the “inside out”.
They start with a clear idea of specifically what they want, what they prefer, what their ideal is, and then they go expanding out to try and find the closest thing to that as soon as possible. And when they find that, they take it.
They go to the icecream palour already knowing they want salted caramel. Before they go to choose a hotel, they already know the price they’re willing to pay and how far from the beach they’re willing to tolerate.
They end up looking at the least amount of options needed to find a reasonably close match to their ideal, so it takes them much less time to make a decision.
Their decisions are often higher quality than indecisive people, and even if they make mistakes their quick decision making abilities means those mistakes are resolved promptly.
So if you want to become confident in your decision making, start by validating your preferences rather than trying to avoid missing out on imagined possibilities.
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One Response
I find it’s also really helpful to have a strict time limit by which the decision must be made, i.e. have a default choice that you must go to if you can’t think of a better one within the timeframe. And often the default choice is no choice, e.g. “If I can’t find a pair of shoes I love within 10min at this store, I’m not buying new shoes today”.