Imagine you’re at a crossroads. You have to make a decision about which way to go, but you have a hard time being decisive. The two options look either equally wonderful or equally miserable. You ask everyone for advice and scour the internet for reassurance, both to no avail. How do you decide which way to go?
As Yogi Berra said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” I think what he meant by that was that action was more important than perfection.
But some people get paralyzed by indecision when they get to the fork in the road, especially people who are in the obsessive wing of the obsessive-compulsive party, the thinking/planning type, and those who have not just OCPD, but also OCD. (Click here to read about the difference.)
For many of the obsessive-compulsive people I work with, decisions are doubly disturbing because they crave resolution, and at the same time they feel they need the perfect answer. A match made in hell.
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The Crossroads
In folklore and mythology, crossroads are soaked with significance, the supernatural and mortality. This is where you make deals with the devil, make sacrifices to the gods, punish criminals and bury suicides. It’s rife with possibility and danger. Spooky things happen here.
I trot out this somewhat arcane piece of lore because it describes the state of mind you enter when you struggle with decisions. Even when you aren’t aware of it, crossroad decisions can feel like the consequences go far beyond the ordinary, and that the stakes are higher than they really are, as if something horrific could happen if you get it wrong.
The crossroads can make decisions feel dangerous rather than just uncomfortable.
This is not to deny the significance some decisions have in our lives—especially those about career and partners. The effects of these decisions are long-lasting and not to be taken lightly. But the pressure and feeling of finality that we bring to these decisions are deceptive and distracting, making it only more difficult to choose.
As a result, many people procrastinate until the decision is made for them. This takes it out of your hands, and perhaps with it the fear of feeling shame or guilt for making the “wrong” decision.
This is not how to get what you want in life.
My Own Experience
One of the changes I’ve noticed in myself since I began studying the obsessive-compulsive personality (OCP) and cultivating its constructive aspects for myself, is that I have much less trouble making decisions, and I feel good about being decisive.
Being decisive was never my weakest function, but it could delay my progress. Since I’m more in the compulsive (doing) wing of the obsessive-compulsive party, I don’t obsess or procrastinate too much. But I can labor over which books to bring on vacation, whether or not to serve on that gawd-awful but very meaningful committee, and which paragraph goes where in a blog post.
Even though obsessing about decisions was not my worst trait, I could see that it caused me distress at times. More importantly, it became clear to me that it was a waste of my time, and wasting time is a cardinal sin for me. Being productive is a priority for me.
I’ve learned that for my own well-being, making the decision is more important than getting it perfectly right. I can deal with whatever comes up, but I can’t deal with doing nothing.
My improvement with decisions seems to have happened over time as a side effect of other work I’ve done to try to harness my compulsive traits in a healthy way. In retrospect I can see which ideas and shifts have helped me become more decisive, and I want to share them with those of you for whom decisions have been difficult.
Five Steps to Becoming More Decisive
Once you’ve done the basic work of listing pros and cons, the main step to become more decisive is to focus on your thought process, not the content of what you’re trying to decide.
Here are five steps to help you do that and to become more decisive. I’ll describe each one in more detail after the list.
1. Question the efficacy of prolonged comparing.
2. Recognize the feeling of being indecisive in both small and large decisions.
3. Unveil your motivation. Identify what you had unconsciously hoped obsessing would do for you.
4. Personify the parts of you that are not cooperating with each other in making decisions.
5. Clarify your priorities.
1. Question the Efficacy of Obsessing
Weighing the pros and cons of a decision with a list can be helpful. Go for it. But because it’s hard to tell how much each pro and each con weighs, it may not get you past the crossroads.
Accept that mistakes are inevitable, and that trying too hard to prevent them is an even worse mistake. Consider that it is not the choices you make that affect your life so much as what you make out of those choices.
One of the things that’s helped me with this are the studies on affective forecasting that show that we’re really bad at predicting what’s going to make us happy or miserable down the line. These things change over time. So, our efforts to make perfect decisions, and thereby control our lives, are relatively unproductive because we don’t have enough data to make informed decisions about the future.
Our reactions to triumphs and disasters tend to even out after a few months, and we return to our baseline of happiness or misery. What improves that baseline has more to do with our inner process than our outer decisions and circumstances.
If you’re at the crossroads on your way to the top of the mountain, don’t worry, there are lots of trails to get to the top. Don’t get stuck on choosing the right one. You can stand there and stare at the map, or you can get moving and learn as you go.
2. Identify Your Crossroads State.
What does it feel like when you have a difficult decision to make? Does your body tense up? Do you fear getting in trouble?
And how do you usually handle that feeling? The tendency for many people to is to get stuck in thinking mode, trying to think their way out of a problem, rather than be aware of the feelings that drive them.
It can be beneficial to recognize this state when you approach it, and bring consciousness to it by saying to yourself: “OK. Here I am at the crossroads again. I’m anxious. I want to do it differently this time. What’s going on inside that’s making it hard for me?”
This shifts the inquiry from content to your inner process, which is how you’ll get unstuck.
3. Motivation: What Purpose Had You Hoped Obsessing Would Serve for You?
Let’s explore what those feelings might be about and how you have been trying to deal with them. I’m going to focus on anxiety here because that’s what we are most often trying to avoid, but you might also be avoiding anger or depression in your need to make the perfect decision.
We do not operate randomly. We do operate unconsciously. There is a reason you obsess to the point of paralysis whenever you come to the crossroads, but you may not be aware of it. Is it because you want to:
• Prevent mistakes?
• Protect your sense of worth?
• Prevent you from feeling shame?
• Avoid anxiety?
These are like ghosts that hang out at the crossroads. We can’t always see them, but they frequently freak us out enough so that we don’t move ahead. In most cases, we’re trying to avoid a feeling by obsessing—as if we could think our way out of it.
What do you fear most?
Just as examples, here are five of the most common core fears as outlined by Todd Pressman in his book Deconstructing Anxiety:
1. Abandonment, loss of love, and fear of being alone
2. Loss of identity
3. Loss of meaning
4. Loss of purpose
5. Death, illness and pain
And these are the three methods he suggests for uncovering them. Ask:
1. Why is that upsetting you?
2. What are you afraid will happen next?
3. What are you afraid you will miss or lose?
Your core fear may be different. But once you identify it, sit with it. Cradle it with compassion rather than try to avoid it with obsessing. In effect this is like identifying your worst case scenario, but taking it a level deeper by exploring the feelings that would come up in that worst case scenario.
As I write about in my book, once you can see the strategy (such as obsessing) you use to avoid anxiety and insecurity, and you realize that there is a different way of dealing with it, life becomes a lot easier.
True confidence is not confidence that you’ll get the decision right and everything will work out just fine and dandy, but that you’ll be able to handle whatever comes up—including your anxiety.
4. Personify the Parts of You That Are at Odds
Let’s go back to that imaginary crossroad. Who do you see? If you don’t see anyone, that just means someone is hiding and we need to find out just who that is and what they want from you.
The healthy psyche, like the healthy body, is a paragon of cooperation. Trillions of cells function in their different roles and usually don’t fight each other. On the other hand, lack of cooperation among these cells is a defining characteristic of disease. One type of cell becomes confused, sees other cells as foreign, and attacks them. This causes cancer and auto-immune diseases.
Your psychology operates the same way. When you can’t make a decision, it’s often because two parts of you are at odds and they have fought to a standstill.
And you may not be aware of all the parties involved.
So, for instance, part of you fancies that fancy television, and is ready to sprint down one side of the fork to that big box store and score a screen so big you can have shouting matches with it and feel like it’s real. What fun you’ll have!
Instead, you freeze. You tell yourself it’s because you’re not sure this is the right television. The remote is shaped real funny. You’re not sure you like the material they’ve framed the screen with. And besides, you’re not sure it matches the living room.
While all that might be true, there is something else going on here that’s probably causing your ambivalence. Even while on sale, that device is going to set you back more than Dad would ever have approved. This is the part that fancies financial security, and is afraid both of running out of money and of feeling deep shame for such an indulgence.
This part has been hiding behind a tree whispering that if you go down that road you’re headed for not only abject poverty, but also abject guilt. It’s not ambivalence about this particular television that has frozen you, it’s really your fear of feeling guilty for buying it.
By the time you come to a decision through compromise (buy the television but forego calling Uber Eats for three months), and decide to go for it, the sale is over.
And you’re stuck at the crossroads again.
We could label the two parts that have fought to a standstill: the “child” part that wants to get mesmerized by the big screen while eating Buffalo Wild Wings, and the “parental” part that feels it would be childish and dangerous to spend the money. These two characters have a time-honored history of scorch and burn battles, leaving neither side satisfied. Ideally you also have an “adult” part that helps to settle differences between the two so you’re not endlessly staring at the Best Buy website as life passes you by.
It can be difficult to move past the crossroads because there are many parts of you that you need to get in line—and some of them may not show themselves, but still cause trouble. For example, the part that wants adventure and novelty, and the part that wants security are often at odds. You need to get to know as many parts of you as possible and begin to broker compromises between them.
5. Clarify your priorities
If you’re clear about what’s truly most important to you, decisions will flow more easily. Family? Success? Security? Well-being? Status? As I’ve written before, people at the unhealthy end of the obsessive-compulsive spectrum too often lose track of their priorities. Perfection, order and control become rulers rather than servants. The means to the ends become the ends. And the original ends, the things you used to value, get stuffed away in the back of a closet.
To honor your values, you’ll need to replace avoidance motivation with approach motivation. Perfection is often enlisted to avoid getting in trouble. Approach motivation instead pursues the priorities that indecisiveness prevents you from pursuing. Consider placing decisiveness above perfection in your list of priorities.
Practice with small decisions. Make a game of it. How fast can you decide between garlic ice cream and spaghetti ice cream? (Yes, these are real things.) Bigger decisions may require more reflection on your fears (e.g., Why does this scare me?).
When you’re at the crossroads you have an opportunity to honor your values and pursue your passions. And each time you do it it becomes easier. It’s a place of possibility.
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