Decisions such as whether to do something or not, whether to choose this or that can be very anxiety provoking. It’s hard! How do you know what the right decision is? If you make the wrong choice, how badly will it affect your future – how much harder will it make your life? Should you/shouldn’t you?

If you’re having this conundrum, I think it’s a good thing. You care about the decision you’re making, the impact it has: you appreciate your current situation and realise just what you could be giving up. Change is risky and scary – and it can also be exciting and exhilarating.

For some reason, it’s the risk and scariness that we focus on and this makes us anxious. Our anxiety builds, particularly when we know the window of opportunity within which we need to make a decision is quickly closing in. It can come to the point where even the experience of this dragged out process of decision-making feels more painful than making any decision at all.

Not all decisions have to be all in or all out; not all decisions are 100% final; not all decisions need to be made right now; and if you make a decision, it doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind later on down the track (even if it might be tricky). We won’t and can’t know the future. No one knows what the outcome might have been if you’d have made a different decision. The only thing you can know is what the right decision for you is right now and in your current context – and forgive yourself for the rest of the things that had you known now, might have led you to make a different decision. Of course you would have! Or maybe you wouldn’t have, regardless. Maybe you wouldn’t even have changed a thing had you the opportunity to go back. Maybe you were glad you made that decision then.

Bravery is trusting in who you are and your ability to make the right choice for yourself, no matter what others may think. You may decide to stay where you are or to make a change but whatever it is, let it be something you can put your whole heart into and the risk and scariness will be managed with greater ease.

“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.” ~ Jean-Luc Godard (French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic).