119. Making Confident Decisions
Do you find yourself struggling to make decisions or defaulting to the opinions of others? This is a really common habit that all types of people fall into, but especially those of us in public health. We don’t want to be judged for our decisions and we want to make sure everyone else is happy with them.
There are likely several reasons why you are not confident in your decision-making ability, from doubt and fretting over right and wrong to the fear of finality. I'm showing you why these reasons hold you back and how to confront your anxiety toward uncertainty.
This week, I begin my confidence series by strengthening your decision-making skills. Learn what confidence is, what it feels like, and why having confidence in your decisions will bring more time and energy into your life.
Subscribe to the Podcast to follow August’s Confidence Series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you listen!
What You Will Discover:
Three types of indecision.
Why indecision drains your energy.
What confidence is.
Three reasons why you aren't confident in your decision-making.
Why there’s no perfect time to make a decision.
What decision-making brings into your life.
Resources:
Sign up for a Curiosity Call to find out if individual coaching can help you!
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey you all, I’m Marissa McKool, and you’re listening to the Redefining Rest Podcast for Public Health Professionals. Here we believe rest is your right. You don’t have to earn it, you just have to learn how to take it and I’m going to teach you. Ready? Come along.
Hello, everyone, happy Monday. I have to tell you, I'm recording this towards the end of the day and I was actually planning to record this tomorrow. But the thing I was working on today, I've been working on a kind of bigger project, something that I've never done before. And not only did I finish it, which I was so beyond proud of myself, truly that I figured it out. It's something I've never done for my business. But I figured it out earlier.
And also I was thinking if I would have been working on this, doing this project a year ago, two years ago, it would have been so much more stressful. I started working on it last week and I noticed about, I don't know, four hours in that I really needed to take a break. I could tell by my brain fog. I could just tell by my concentration. And in the past I would have just tried to push through to get it done and now I don't do that, at least not as often. And so I said, “I'm going to work on it, finish it another day, have a day off in between.” And it made such a big difference.
I had wrote down where I was at and the next steps I needed to do so I didn't have to figure that out today. I looked at my list and I knew exactly the next things I needed to do even though I stopped in the middle and I got it done and it didn't take me as long and it was super easy and I felt so proud of myself. And sometimes when this happens, when I finish my work early, I just take the rest of the day off, which I 100% support. But I kind of have this let's go energy, so proud of myself. You know what that's like?
So I was like, “You know what? Let me just record this podcast now and then tomorrow I'll either end work a little early or work on something else.” So here we are. I'm sitting in my office, which is a mess. I think sometimes people think because I'm a rest coach and I have a very, what's the word, kind of sustainable rest practice, very fluid. And I also coach on productivity and I'm really efficient and really effective at getting my shit done that my house would be super clean and my office would be really ‘organized’, but it's not.
I have piles of dirty laundry in my office because I was doing laundry yesterday and I didn't finish. And I know myself, I'm not going to do laundry during a work day because if I try to, I forget it and it ends up getting all moldy in the washer because I forget to move it to the dryer. So this will be here until my next day off to finish the laundry, but it's okay, you all. Having a rest centered life, being productive isn't necessarily about looking like a Pinterest photo or an Instagram ad. That's not what it's about.
So anyways, thought I'd share a little life update of what's going on with me. I hope you all are doing well. I hope you had a great weekend. Can you believe it's August? I can't. So if you're new here, if you aren't a subscriber, if you haven't subscribed to this podcast, I really want to encourage you to, because the next couple weeks we are having a confidence series. Today we're talking about making confident decisions.
And next week my coaching client, Sarah Han, who is a youth health center designer, early career professional is joining me to talk about how she's created more confidence as an early career professional, what that looks like and what an impact that's had.
And then the week after that, one of my former coaching clients, Michelle Barbieri, who is in a leadership role, who's a little farther along in her career. And she works in government, is going to come on and talk about how she's created confidence in her leadership skills, in supervising others, in leading initiatives. So we're talking all about confidence in August. So make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on those amazing episodes, especially with these amazing, amazing women in public health.
So let's talk about decision making. Everyone struggles with decision making. We kind of label people as decisive or indecisive. And I also would have labeled myself that way for years. I always thought I was just an indecisive person, it was a personality trait I was born with. I am a. Libra, I am a middle child, so that should tell you something if you believe in those kind of theories. But the truth is, everyone struggles with decision making in small and big ways.
Whether you prefer to let others make a decision, especially in social settings, so that they are happy and you tell yourself, well, if they're happy, I'll be happy. Because if you made the decision then you'd constantly be worried about if they were enjoying the restaurant you decided on or the movie you selected. And trying to analyze how they feel about it and feeling bad if they don't and feeling like it's your fault.
Or maybe when you're making a decision, you worry so much about if other people are going to think you're selfish or rude or don't care. So then you make decisions based on what you think other people need. Or perhaps you stand in the grocery store in an aisle looking at 10 different options for ice-cream going back and forth in your head, should I buy the cheaper one? Or what about the one with the flavor I know I like? Well, maybe I should try this new one I haven't tried, but what if I don't like it?
Maybe I should get the bigger one because my partner might want some. But maybe I should get the smaller one, so then I don't eat as much, that ping pong. Maybe you ask 10 people, you ask everyone important in your life their opinion on big decisions like if you should buy a car and which one. And if you should move into your partner and when. A decision is simply selecting an option, making a choice or even taking an action depending on what the decision is.
But a decision happens in your mind, first, that choice, that selection happens in your mind. Now, I'm not going to go too much into indecision today, but I do want to do a bit of an overview. Indecision is really where you don't make a choice. And I'm going to highlight two different ways this shows up.
The first one is when you just leave something up in the air undecided. This is different than making a maybe choice, which I'll talk about in a second. But when you leave something up in the air, here's an example of what that could look like. Maybe you've been thinking about getting a back massage. You think it would feel nice and be good for you but you actually never take the step of booking a massage. You don't make an intentional choice to say, “Yes, I'm going to get this. I'm going to find somewhere. I'm going to book it.”
But you also don't make an active choice of, no, I'm not going to get a massage right now. And the decision just floats around in your mind. It's also not a maybe. You're not like, maybe, it's just an idea you're letting float around, taking up space, taking up mental energy. That space, that mental energy could be dedicated to something else. And you don't realize how much energy this is draining from you. It feels so inconsequential, but every time you passively think of that idea, that takes up more space and energy from something else.
The second example of indecision is when you defer a decision to someone else. So this could look like you and your coworkers are deciding where to go out for lunch and you tell them, “I don't care, you just decide.” And I'm not talking about when you truly do not give two fucks about it. I'm talking about when you do have a preference or you do have opinions.
You know you don't like sushi or you know you've tried a certain restaurant, it wasn't very good. But you don't share those opinions with your coworkers because you're worried if you pick the spot, they won't like it or they'll think it's too expensive or they'll think it's too far or they will fill in the blank. And again you think this is innocent. This used to be me all the time. And this still comes up for me and I try to work on it continually. But you just think, I'll be so much happier and I'll have so much more relief and I won't feel anxious if they just decide.
And I know that they are good because it's more stressful for me to decide and then the whole experience, be questioning myself. But here's the truth. When you do that, you end up only being happy if they happen to choose the choice you would have chosen. For example, if they choose a restaurant that you know you don't like, you're not happy at that lunch, even though they are.
If they choose a coffee shop that you can't get any food at because they don't have any gluten free options. You're not going to be happy. You're going to pretend you are because they are, but you're not because you didn't say anything, you didn't speak up.
And then there is a third example of indecision, which I'm not going to talk about today in detail. It's when you are selecting maybe. I have a whole podcast episode on this, but as an overview, essentially it's when your answer, you're not deferring to someone else, it's not a floating option. You tell yourself maybe. And you get stuck in that maybe option, that maybe choice for so long. It happens in career decisions and big life decisions, things that have to do with personal goals.
You can check out episode number 94, The Maybe Hole, which I highly, highly, highly recommend all of you do. So many people have reached out saying how helpful it is. It gives you a visual tool to think about this and why it's a problem. So many of my clients actually have used this in their own self-coaching, so I encourage you to check it out. But part of the reason I wanted to share some examples of indecision is to illustrate that indecision is mentally draining. It wastes your energy. It wastes your time. It's not restful.
When you do not make a clear decision on purpose, your brain is still processing what decision to make, it's on the backburner, consciously or not. Your brain is trying to work out what to do, why or why not. What happens if you decide x over y and spinning its wheels? And if someone else decides and it's not a decision you would really like. That same thing happens just with a different flavor.
In order to not drain all that energy, which, by the way, is what’s creating your anxiety and your stress and your dread and your overwhelm when it comes to decision making. You have to be able to make a conscious decision on purpose with confidence. I would say 95% of indecision comes from the absence of having confidence in decision making, and this comes from a recovering maybe hole dweller. I used to live in the maybe hole. But really, that indecision comes from not having confidence in yourself and in your ability to decide.
Recently I was being interviewed on a podcast and the host was talking about their definition of confidence. And they shared, they believe confidence is an outcome of courage and they have a military background and different lived experience than me. And I could kind of see why they had that belief. But I actually disagree, through my work on myself and coaching so many people. And I shared with them why. Because I think confidence is an outcome of self-trust.
We think confidence means you have all the right answers, you have all the knowledge. But that's not what confidence is, especially when it comes to decision making. Confidence is trusting yourself to make a choice in the absence of having all the knowledge, having all the information. I think we often conflate confidence and certainty and sometimes confidence and arrogance but if you're certain you have no need for confidence.
When I have data that tells me something very specific and concrete I don't need to rely on my self-confidence to share that data out. I feel certain in that data. But when I have data that's not very clear and I need to make a hypothesis, I need to have trust to myself to use my critical thinking and my interpretation to develop a hypothesis.
When you don't have certainty, when you don't have the answers, when you don't have all that information, when you aren't 100% sure, that's when you need confidence. Not necessarily confidence in the choice, but confidence in you as the decision maker. And this is going to come up in my future discussions in the next two weeks when Sarah and Chelle come and join me, my coaching clients, who also work in public health are joining me on the podcast. You'll hear their experience with this in their settings. And I think that will be really helpful.
But for now what I want to talk about is why you don't have confidence in your decision making, why you don't trust yourself to make decisions. And there's three reasons I'm going to outline here. The first is you believe in order to make a decision, in order to feel confident about making a decision, you can't have any doubts. That's not true. Feeling the emotion of doubt, having that come up does not mean you can't make a decision. Confidence in decision making isn't about having certainty in your choice. If you have certainty you don't really need confidence.
And also of course you feel doubt when making a decision, whether the decision is who to hire for your team or what new TV show to start. Because in most of the decisions you're making, the ones where you're lacking confidence there are unknown factors. There are things you won't know until you actually move forward with that choice. There's knowledge you don't have. There's experience you might not have, so of course you're going to have some doubt.
Doubt is not an indicator, you're making the wrong choice. Doubt is just an emotion. Doubt is an outcome of your brain recognizing uncertainty, your brain recognizing unknown factors, your brain recognizing a gap in knowledge or information. Of course, of course, that brings up doubt, totally normal. You can make a confident decision, even with doubt.
Number two. You believe there is a right or wrong choice. Now, I can't tell you how many times this has come up in coaching sessions about a spectrum of topics from dating to parenting to career to finances, everything. We have been taught that there must be a right or wrong choice, that it's always black and white. First, most often when we're making a choice that we really need to generate confidence to make, we don't have all the information to ‘make a right or wrong choice’. Let me give you an example.
There is a client that I've been coaching who has plans to move to another country. And as they have been working on all the things they need to get into place to do this move and they've never lived in this place before. There is a lot of uncertainty coming up and a lot of questioning whether or not this was the ‘right decision’. And one of the things we talked about was, if you've never lived in this country, you aren’t going to know what it's like until you get there. You won't know what it's like to actually live there until you live there.
There's no way to get certainty of whether or not it's exactly what you want, living there is going to be exactly how you want it, how you imagine until you actually do it. You have to make the choice and then experience that choice to get more information. But also and more importantly right and wrong is 100% subjective.
You could be a public health director who decides to reduce funding for the teen pregnancy prevention program. And half of your staff might think it's ‘the right decision’ and half might think it's ‘the wrong decision’. You could decide to make lasagna for dinner and one of your children thinks oh, my gosh, I'm so excited, I love lasagna and the other throws it on the floor because they think it's disgusting. There is the decision you make and then there are thoughts about it. Those are two separate things.
The thoughts, those are subjective opinions and that's where we're inserting the right or wrong. And we all know this is true because you have past decisions in your life, where at the time where you made that decision, you thought it was the right one. And now looking back, you have a different opinion or vice versa.
The third piece is consciously or not, you have this belief that the decision is final. So you have to know it's the right one because it's final and you can't change it. Decisions are never really final. I mean, there might be some exceptions, but most of the decisions you all are struggling with aren't because life is just a series of decisions, seriously, decision after decision after decision. What time to wake up. What to wear. What to eat for breakfast. What project to start on first for my work day. All day long, we're making decisions.
You make a decision today, you can make a different one tomorrow. If you decide you want to make an appointment for a pedicure, you can make it, and then if you decide you want to cancel it, you can cancel it. If you decide you want to buy a house today, tomorrow you can decide you don't want to buy a house, the same with any decision, almost 98% of decisions probably. I'm sure there are exceptions, but really, for the ones you all are struggling with, it's not final.
Now, does that mean if you make a decision today and then make a different decision tomorrow that the effects or outcomes of that decision are going to be the same? No. If I go into a contract to buy a house and then I decide during [inaudible] I don't want to buy it and I pull out. I might have to deal with some stuff. Maybe I lose some money. Maybe we have to go into negotiations, things will happen, but it doesn't mean I can't make that choice. People make those choices all the time.
Don't tell yourself you can't make a different decision later or you can't make another decision later because that isn't true, you can. And when you believe your decision is final and it can't change, or you can't make a different one. This is really when you can get stuck in indecision. And the truth about making confident decisions is it's not all sunshine and rainbows. We kind of have this picture that if we feel confident about a decision it should feel really good but that actually isn't really the case.
When I'm talking about making a confident decision, it's not about being confident necessarily in your choice in the actual option you're choosing, it's about being confident in yourself. Trusting that no matter what you decide or what comes of that decision you can figure out the next steps. Trusting that even if others disagree, you're going to stand in the truth that you made the best decision you could.
Trusting that even if your brain is a big old asshole to you and trying to keep you second guessing yourself, you will still believe in yourself. Trusting that if you make this decision and then afterwards you don't really like the outcome, you can make a different decision. It's not about making the right decision. It's not about being certain. It's about believing you are doing the best you can. It’s about being willing to decide, get out of indecision and move forward because staying in indecision wastes so much of your time, energy and does not help you make a decision.
And actually, Sarah, who's coming on next week, she talks about in the context of decision making around travel, how much money she was wasting in indecision, not deciding on flights or Airbnb, and then the prices would go up. There's so many ways staying in indecision is having a negative impact on your life, money, time, energy, your goals moving forward.
We think if we sit in indecision long enough suddenly the answer will appear from the heavens and we’ll feel confident or if we get enough information, then we’ll feel confident or if we talk to enough people then we'll feel confident. That's not the way confidence works. A decision is a thought, a subjective one, whether it's ‘right or wrong’ is also subjective. Becoming more confident in yourself to make decisions is one of the best career skills you can build.
Sorry, you all, I just had to get up, but it's starting to thunder and my dog’s really scared of thunder and she jumped up and opened my office door, which she never does. So I had to let her in because she's really scared, but we're almost done here anyways and then I can give her some cuddles.
But becoming more confident in your ability to make decisions truly is a skill. Confident decision making is a skill. Trusting in yourself to make a decision is a skill. And building the skill helps you make quicker decisions, not from a reactive place, not from a just get it over so I don't feel anxious place. It helps you get your work done more effectively and efficiently, not sitting idly trying to figure it out, stuck in overwhelm. It helps you reduce your stress and retain your mental emotional energy to redirect that to something else, something more important.
It also helps with setting and achieving your goals and moving forward towards those goals in your career and personal life. When you don't build this skill, you get stuck, stuck in stress, stuck in having to work late because you're wasting time in indecision, stuck in a job you don't love, stuck leading a committee you don't want to lead anymore. Stuck eating at a restaurant where you don't like the food, so many other places.
When you trust yourself to make confident decisions, you move forward more efficiently and effectively in your day and in your job, in your career, in your personal life, in your goals.
Lastly, and maybe most importantly, when you build the skill, you deepen your relationship with yourself. Nothing takes you further from knowing, trusting, connecting with yourself than being stuck in indecision, from outsourcing the decision to others, relying on others rather than your internal knowing or your internal figuring it out, or your internal trust. When you have the skill to trust yourself and to make decisions you build integrity with yourself, you build connection with yourself, you build knowing with yourself.
And listen, it doesn't mean you will never second guess. Doubt will still be there. I still have doubt. It doesn't mean you'll never feel anxious about decision. Doesn't mean you'll never feel regret. That's very human. Trust isn't just this picturesque perfect experience. That's not what trusting yourself is about. Building the skill of trust and practicing it is such an important and powerful piece of personal growth and it helps you create a life you truly want to live, from what movie to see, to how many kids to have and every other decision in your life, no matter how big or small.
We make thousands of decisions a day. And being able to trust yourself and make confident decisions and not get stuck in indecision is so important for your mental and emotional health, for the design of your life, for your happiness, for your rest, and so much more.
Alright, you all, with that I’m going to let you go for the week. I hope to see you next week when I'm talking to Sarah about how she's become more confident in her early stage of her career. And after that talking to Chelle about becoming a competent leader. Make sure to hit that subscribe button and I'll see you all next week. Bye everyone.
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
Hello, everyone, happy Monday. I have to tell you, I'm recording this towards the end of the day and I was actually planning to record this tomorrow. But the thing I was working on today, I've been working on a kind of bigger project, something that I've never done before. And not only did I finish it, which I was so beyond proud of myself, truly that I figured it out. It's something I've never done for my business. But I figured it out earlier.
And also I was thinking if I would have been working on this, doing this project a year ago, two years ago, it would have been so much more stressful. I started working on it last week and I noticed about, I don't know, four hours in that I really needed to take a break. I could tell by my brain fog. I could just tell by my concentration. And in the past I would have just tried to push through to get it done and now I don't do that, at least not as often. And so I said, “I'm going to work on it, finish it another day, have a day off in between.” And it made such a big difference.
I had wrote down where I was at and the next steps I needed to do so I didn't have to figure that out today. I looked at my list and I knew exactly the next things I needed to do even though I stopped in the middle and I got it done and it didn't take me as long and it was super easy and I felt so proud of myself. And sometimes when this happens, when I finish my work early, I just take the rest of the day off, which I 100% support. But I kind of have this let's go energy, so proud of myself. You know what that's like?
So I was like, “You know what? Let me just record this podcast now and then tomorrow I'll either end work a little early or work on something else.” So here we are. I'm sitting in my office, which is a mess. I think sometimes people think because I'm a rest coach and I have a very, what's the word, kind of sustainable rest practice, very fluid. And I also coach on productivity and I'm really efficient and really effective at getting my shit done that my house would be super clean and my office would be really ‘organized’, but it's not.
I have piles of dirty laundry in my office because I was doing laundry yesterday and I didn't finish. And I know myself, I'm not going to do laundry during a work day because if I try to, I forget it and it ends up getting all moldy in the washer because I forget to move it to the dryer. So this will be here until my next day off to finish the laundry, but it's okay, you all. Having a rest centered life, being productive isn't necessarily about looking like a Pinterest photo or an Instagram ad. That's not what it's about.
So anyways, thought I'd share a little life update of what's going on with me. I hope you all are doing well. I hope you had a great weekend. Can you believe it's August? I can't. So if you're new here, if you aren't a subscriber, if you haven't subscribed to this podcast, I really want to encourage you to, because the next couple weeks we are having a confidence series. Today we're talking about making confident decisions.
And next week my coaching client, Sarah Han, who is a youth health center designer, early career professional is joining me to talk about how she's created more confidence as an early career professional, what that looks like and what an impact that's had.
And then the week after that, one of my former coaching clients, Michelle Barbieri, who is in a leadership role, who's a little farther along in her career. And she works in government, is going to come on and talk about how she's created confidence in her leadership skills, in supervising others, in leading initiatives. So we're talking all about confidence in August. So make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on those amazing episodes, especially with these amazing, amazing women in public health.
So let's talk about decision making. Everyone struggles with decision making. We kind of label people as decisive or indecisive. And I also would have labeled myself that way for years. I always thought I was just an indecisive person, it was a personality trait I was born with. I am a. Libra, I am a middle child, so that should tell you something if you believe in those kind of theories. But the truth is, everyone struggles with decision making in small and big ways.
Whether you prefer to let others make a decision, especially in social settings, so that they are happy and you tell yourself, well, if they're happy, I'll be happy. Because if you made the decision then you'd constantly be worried about if they were enjoying the restaurant you decided on or the movie you selected. And trying to analyze how they feel about it and feeling bad if they don't and feeling like it's your fault.
Or maybe when you're making a decision, you worry so much about if other people are going to think you're selfish or rude or don't care. So then you make decisions based on what you think other people need. Or perhaps you stand in the grocery store in an aisle looking at 10 different options for ice-cream going back and forth in your head, should I buy the cheaper one? Or what about the one with the flavor I know I like? Well, maybe I should try this new one I haven't tried, but what if I don't like it?
Maybe I should get the bigger one because my partner might want some. But maybe I should get the smaller one, so then I don't eat as much, that ping pong. Maybe you ask 10 people, you ask everyone important in your life their opinion on big decisions like if you should buy a car and which one. And if you should move into your partner and when. A decision is simply selecting an option, making a choice or even taking an action depending on what the decision is.
But a decision happens in your mind, first, that choice, that selection happens in your mind. Now, I'm not going to go too much into indecision today, but I do want to do a bit of an overview. Indecision is really where you don't make a choice. And I'm going to highlight two different ways this shows up.
The first one is when you just leave something up in the air undecided. This is different than making a maybe choice, which I'll talk about in a second. But when you leave something up in the air, here's an example of what that could look like. Maybe you've been thinking about getting a back massage. You think it would feel nice and be good for you but you actually never take the step of booking a massage. You don't make an intentional choice to say, “Yes, I'm going to get this. I'm going to find somewhere. I'm going to book it.”
But you also don't make an active choice of, no, I'm not going to get a massage right now. And the decision just floats around in your mind. It's also not a maybe. You're not like, maybe, it's just an idea you're letting float around, taking up space, taking up mental energy. That space, that mental energy could be dedicated to something else. And you don't realize how much energy this is draining from you. It feels so inconsequential, but every time you passively think of that idea, that takes up more space and energy from something else.
The second example of indecision is when you defer a decision to someone else. So this could look like you and your coworkers are deciding where to go out for lunch and you tell them, “I don't care, you just decide.” And I'm not talking about when you truly do not give two fucks about it. I'm talking about when you do have a preference or you do have opinions.
You know you don't like sushi or you know you've tried a certain restaurant, it wasn't very good. But you don't share those opinions with your coworkers because you're worried if you pick the spot, they won't like it or they'll think it's too expensive or they'll think it's too far or they will fill in the blank. And again you think this is innocent. This used to be me all the time. And this still comes up for me and I try to work on it continually. But you just think, I'll be so much happier and I'll have so much more relief and I won't feel anxious if they just decide.
And I know that they are good because it's more stressful for me to decide and then the whole experience, be questioning myself. But here's the truth. When you do that, you end up only being happy if they happen to choose the choice you would have chosen. For example, if they choose a restaurant that you know you don't like, you're not happy at that lunch, even though they are.
If they choose a coffee shop that you can't get any food at because they don't have any gluten free options. You're not going to be happy. You're going to pretend you are because they are, but you're not because you didn't say anything, you didn't speak up.
And then there is a third example of indecision, which I'm not going to talk about today in detail. It's when you are selecting maybe. I have a whole podcast episode on this, but as an overview, essentially it's when your answer, you're not deferring to someone else, it's not a floating option. You tell yourself maybe. And you get stuck in that maybe option, that maybe choice for so long. It happens in career decisions and big life decisions, things that have to do with personal goals.
You can check out episode number 94, The Maybe Hole, which I highly, highly, highly recommend all of you do. So many people have reached out saying how helpful it is. It gives you a visual tool to think about this and why it's a problem. So many of my clients actually have used this in their own self-coaching, so I encourage you to check it out. But part of the reason I wanted to share some examples of indecision is to illustrate that indecision is mentally draining. It wastes your energy. It wastes your time. It's not restful.
When you do not make a clear decision on purpose, your brain is still processing what decision to make, it's on the backburner, consciously or not. Your brain is trying to work out what to do, why or why not. What happens if you decide x over y and spinning its wheels? And if someone else decides and it's not a decision you would really like. That same thing happens just with a different flavor.
In order to not drain all that energy, which, by the way, is what’s creating your anxiety and your stress and your dread and your overwhelm when it comes to decision making. You have to be able to make a conscious decision on purpose with confidence. I would say 95% of indecision comes from the absence of having confidence in decision making, and this comes from a recovering maybe hole dweller. I used to live in the maybe hole. But really, that indecision comes from not having confidence in yourself and in your ability to decide.
Recently I was being interviewed on a podcast and the host was talking about their definition of confidence. And they shared, they believe confidence is an outcome of courage and they have a military background and different lived experience than me. And I could kind of see why they had that belief. But I actually disagree, through my work on myself and coaching so many people. And I shared with them why. Because I think confidence is an outcome of self-trust.
We think confidence means you have all the right answers, you have all the knowledge. But that's not what confidence is, especially when it comes to decision making. Confidence is trusting yourself to make a choice in the absence of having all the knowledge, having all the information. I think we often conflate confidence and certainty and sometimes confidence and arrogance but if you're certain you have no need for confidence.
When I have data that tells me something very specific and concrete I don't need to rely on my self-confidence to share that data out. I feel certain in that data. But when I have data that's not very clear and I need to make a hypothesis, I need to have trust to myself to use my critical thinking and my interpretation to develop a hypothesis.
When you don't have certainty, when you don't have the answers, when you don't have all that information, when you aren't 100% sure, that's when you need confidence. Not necessarily confidence in the choice, but confidence in you as the decision maker. And this is going to come up in my future discussions in the next two weeks when Sarah and Chelle come and join me, my coaching clients, who also work in public health are joining me on the podcast. You'll hear their experience with this in their settings. And I think that will be really helpful.
But for now what I want to talk about is why you don't have confidence in your decision making, why you don't trust yourself to make decisions. And there's three reasons I'm going to outline here. The first is you believe in order to make a decision, in order to feel confident about making a decision, you can't have any doubts. That's not true. Feeling the emotion of doubt, having that come up does not mean you can't make a decision. Confidence in decision making isn't about having certainty in your choice. If you have certainty you don't really need confidence.
And also of course you feel doubt when making a decision, whether the decision is who to hire for your team or what new TV show to start. Because in most of the decisions you're making, the ones where you're lacking confidence there are unknown factors. There are things you won't know until you actually move forward with that choice. There's knowledge you don't have. There's experience you might not have, so of course you're going to have some doubt.
Doubt is not an indicator, you're making the wrong choice. Doubt is just an emotion. Doubt is an outcome of your brain recognizing uncertainty, your brain recognizing unknown factors, your brain recognizing a gap in knowledge or information. Of course, of course, that brings up doubt, totally normal. You can make a confident decision, even with doubt.
Number two. You believe there is a right or wrong choice. Now, I can't tell you how many times this has come up in coaching sessions about a spectrum of topics from dating to parenting to career to finances, everything. We have been taught that there must be a right or wrong choice, that it's always black and white. First, most often when we're making a choice that we really need to generate confidence to make, we don't have all the information to ‘make a right or wrong choice’. Let me give you an example.
There is a client that I've been coaching who has plans to move to another country. And as they have been working on all the things they need to get into place to do this move and they've never lived in this place before. There is a lot of uncertainty coming up and a lot of questioning whether or not this was the ‘right decision’. And one of the things we talked about was, if you've never lived in this country, you aren’t going to know what it's like until you get there. You won't know what it's like to actually live there until you live there.
There's no way to get certainty of whether or not it's exactly what you want, living there is going to be exactly how you want it, how you imagine until you actually do it. You have to make the choice and then experience that choice to get more information. But also and more importantly right and wrong is 100% subjective.
You could be a public health director who decides to reduce funding for the teen pregnancy prevention program. And half of your staff might think it's ‘the right decision’ and half might think it's ‘the wrong decision’. You could decide to make lasagna for dinner and one of your children thinks oh, my gosh, I'm so excited, I love lasagna and the other throws it on the floor because they think it's disgusting. There is the decision you make and then there are thoughts about it. Those are two separate things.
The thoughts, those are subjective opinions and that's where we're inserting the right or wrong. And we all know this is true because you have past decisions in your life, where at the time where you made that decision, you thought it was the right one. And now looking back, you have a different opinion or vice versa.
The third piece is consciously or not, you have this belief that the decision is final. So you have to know it's the right one because it's final and you can't change it. Decisions are never really final. I mean, there might be some exceptions, but most of the decisions you all are struggling with aren't because life is just a series of decisions, seriously, decision after decision after decision. What time to wake up. What to wear. What to eat for breakfast. What project to start on first for my work day. All day long, we're making decisions.
You make a decision today, you can make a different one tomorrow. If you decide you want to make an appointment for a pedicure, you can make it, and then if you decide you want to cancel it, you can cancel it. If you decide you want to buy a house today, tomorrow you can decide you don't want to buy a house, the same with any decision, almost 98% of decisions probably. I'm sure there are exceptions, but really, for the ones you all are struggling with, it's not final.
Now, does that mean if you make a decision today and then make a different decision tomorrow that the effects or outcomes of that decision are going to be the same? No. If I go into a contract to buy a house and then I decide during [inaudible] I don't want to buy it and I pull out. I might have to deal with some stuff. Maybe I lose some money. Maybe we have to go into negotiations, things will happen, but it doesn't mean I can't make that choice. People make those choices all the time.
Don't tell yourself you can't make a different decision later or you can't make another decision later because that isn't true, you can. And when you believe your decision is final and it can't change, or you can't make a different one. This is really when you can get stuck in indecision. And the truth about making confident decisions is it's not all sunshine and rainbows. We kind of have this picture that if we feel confident about a decision it should feel really good but that actually isn't really the case.
When I'm talking about making a confident decision, it's not about being confident necessarily in your choice in the actual option you're choosing, it's about being confident in yourself. Trusting that no matter what you decide or what comes of that decision you can figure out the next steps. Trusting that even if others disagree, you're going to stand in the truth that you made the best decision you could.
Trusting that even if your brain is a big old asshole to you and trying to keep you second guessing yourself, you will still believe in yourself. Trusting that if you make this decision and then afterwards you don't really like the outcome, you can make a different decision. It's not about making the right decision. It's not about being certain. It's about believing you are doing the best you can. It’s about being willing to decide, get out of indecision and move forward because staying in indecision wastes so much of your time, energy and does not help you make a decision.
And actually, Sarah, who's coming on next week, she talks about in the context of decision making around travel, how much money she was wasting in indecision, not deciding on flights or Airbnb, and then the prices would go up. There's so many ways staying in indecision is having a negative impact on your life, money, time, energy, your goals moving forward.
We think if we sit in indecision long enough suddenly the answer will appear from the heavens and we’ll feel confident or if we get enough information, then we’ll feel confident or if we talk to enough people then we'll feel confident. That's not the way confidence works. A decision is a thought, a subjective one, whether it's ‘right or wrong’ is also subjective. Becoming more confident in yourself to make decisions is one of the best career skills you can build.
Sorry, you all, I just had to get up, but it's starting to thunder and my dog’s really scared of thunder and she jumped up and opened my office door, which she never does. So I had to let her in because she's really scared, but we're almost done here anyways and then I can give her some cuddles.
But becoming more confident in your ability to make decisions truly is a skill. Confident decision making is a skill. Trusting in yourself to make a decision is a skill. And building the skill helps you make quicker decisions, not from a reactive place, not from a just get it over so I don't feel anxious place. It helps you get your work done more effectively and efficiently, not sitting idly trying to figure it out, stuck in overwhelm. It helps you reduce your stress and retain your mental emotional energy to redirect that to something else, something more important.
It also helps with setting and achieving your goals and moving forward towards those goals in your career and personal life. When you don't build this skill, you get stuck, stuck in stress, stuck in having to work late because you're wasting time in indecision, stuck in a job you don't love, stuck leading a committee you don't want to lead anymore. Stuck eating at a restaurant where you don't like the food, so many other places.
When you trust yourself to make confident decisions, you move forward more efficiently and effectively in your day and in your job, in your career, in your personal life, in your goals.
Lastly, and maybe most importantly, when you build the skill, you deepen your relationship with yourself. Nothing takes you further from knowing, trusting, connecting with yourself than being stuck in indecision, from outsourcing the decision to others, relying on others rather than your internal knowing or your internal figuring it out, or your internal trust. When you have the skill to trust yourself and to make decisions you build integrity with yourself, you build connection with yourself, you build knowing with yourself.
And listen, it doesn't mean you will never second guess. Doubt will still be there. I still have doubt. It doesn't mean you'll never feel anxious about decision. Doesn't mean you'll never feel regret. That's very human. Trust isn't just this picturesque perfect experience. That's not what trusting yourself is about. Building the skill of trust and practicing it is such an important and powerful piece of personal growth and it helps you create a life you truly want to live, from what movie to see, to how many kids to have and every other decision in your life, no matter how big or small.
We make thousands of decisions a day. And being able to trust yourself and make confident decisions and not get stuck in indecision is so important for your mental and emotional health, for the design of your life, for your happiness, for your rest, and so much more.
Alright, you all, with that I’m going to let you go for the week. I hope to see you next week when I'm talking to Sarah about how she's become more confident in her early stage of her career. And after that talking to Chelle about becoming a competent leader. Make sure to hit that subscribe button and I'll see you all next week. Bye everyone.
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
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120. Having Confidence in Yourself with Youth-Centered Health Designer Sarah Han
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