In my last post I talked about choices, and at the heart of that is a sense of control. It's natural to want to control where you are going, and to do that you need to have a sense of which direction you are heading. If you start your journey with what you want you will always feel far off from your destination, but if you start with where you are now and what you have, you can gradually monitor progress.
There are plenty of things you can control, but it's also important to realise that there may be some things you can't. Change constantly happens around you, sometimes things will happen that you don't understand and have no say over. It's possible to save yourself a lot of suffering if you accept this inevitability and learn from it as you go.
You do have a say over how the future unfolds and how you react to things you didn't anticipate. Even if it doesn't seem like it, you choose the things you do every day, how you will interpret situations, and how you will react to them. You can also decide at any time that you don't need to have all the answers, and you don't have to know and control everything. It's important to have realistic expectations - sometimes life is unfair and things will go wrong, but situations are only stressful if you allow them to be. You just have to trust that you know enough to take responsibility for now.
The other day I was at the supermarket, I needed some laundry detergent but my usual brand wasn't there. Suddenly I was confronted with a miriad of choices and felt quite overwhelmed, I stood there for far longer than should have been necessary trying to make a decision which should have been relatively easy, except it wasn't. When I got home I wondered why it was so difficult and I remembered an article I came accross last year called 'the problems with too much choice'.
In the article the author argues that while no choice can be constraining and make you feel powerless, too many choices result in paralysis, regret and unrealsitic expectations - it simply overwhelms your potential to make a decision and can lead to you giving up and not making a decision at all. The constant decisions we make every day are paralysing, distracting us from our lives.
Life is about choices, but it's not the decision itself that causes the problem, it's the perceived consequences. The consequences that arise when choosing a washing power are much less significant than when it comes to making important life decisions, so no wonder it's difficult when it comes to the more significant choices. It's hardly surprising that making decisions is a common cause of stress on a day to day basis. Logic can go out of the window and you get caught up in what you will miss out on if you choose one over the other, going over and over it so that you can't move forward. The consequences seem more severe than they actually are and it can stop you from making decisions for fear of getting it wrong.
This has an effect in business, it's important to give customers control over their experience, but not so much that it overwhelms them. Personally it helps to understand how the mind works when it is making decisions, if you gather all the information possible and accept that whatever choice you make will have consequences, including those if you don't make the choice at all. If you get some perspective and try to remove the emotion it becomes easier, especially if you accept that you can deal with the consequences.
Life is full of choices, every moment of every day. But not only do you make choices about day to day acivities, you also make a choice about your mindset and your attitude. If you are in a situation you would like to change, then you have to make that choice to do so, no-one else can do that for you.
The consequences of not making that choice can be just as significant.
Further reading
http://linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130918095617-284615-the-problems-with-too-much-choice
