I was with a friend recently who was looking at perfumes. For one hour. And bought exactly…nothing.
I asked her why and she couldn’t answer but I think she, like many others, is stuck in “over-choice” mode. We are so inundated with choices these days. For everything. It’s not one colour it’s ten shades of black. It’s not one ice-cream, there’s hundreds of flavors. There’s not one type of sauce, there’s, literally, hundreds.
Is all this choice a good thing?
Some researchers took this question to a supermarket and offered jams. They offered six jams one day and over twenty-four types another day. The crowds were there for the twenty-four choices, but the sales were there for the six choices. It seems with too many choices people can’t decide. Decision paralysis sets in. Nothing happens. Nothing changes.
People don’t have jam.
Okay, that last part was for the cheap laugh. But where else do we freeze and not make a decision because of over-choice? Life partner? How many choices do we have to sample before we choose?
Work? How many jobs do we do before we before we commit to a career?
Shopping around has become the euphemism for “I have too many choices, I’m worried about getting it wrong so I’ll wait… I don’t know what for, but I’ll wait anyway, and maybe inspiration will hit me”.
Yup, that’ll work.
The solution? And it works, so only do this if you want to get more decisive and have less procrastination… Is to know your criteria for choosing BEFORE you start looking. It’s the only way to avoid throwing your arms up in horror at the complete overwhelm that can occur. The pain of indecisiveness seems to occur to people who go into the decision with no set criteria for what they want or need. Someone wants a new career. They know they want ‘different’ and ‘more variety’. That’s not criteria, that’s emotion. And yes, we do make decisions on how we want to feel, but to get the feeling we want, it’s going to take a couple of steps.
What gives you the feeling of ‘different’ and ‘more variety’?. What actual activities cause those feelings for you?
Get clear on that and you empower yourself, rather than leaving the responsibility for your variety to the employer who certainly has no idea of how to fulfill that need for you.
The second the thing to do is to give yourself a time limit. I know someone who took five years to choose a coaching program. Five years. How much criteria and new data do they need? In that time wars have been fought, Presidents have been elected. Oceans have been sailed. Mountains climbed. Inventions made. Lives changed.
Sigh.
I think the less we know about the specifics of what we want, the less decisions we’re capable of making. So then we get less confident about ourselves. Self-doubt sets in inertia becomes our natural, painful state. And it starts taking years to make a decision that should have taken two weeks.
And I’ll go further and say the less decisions we make, the less empowered we feel.
Confident people who believe in themselves seem to know how to make great decisions. And great decision makers seem to have confidence and self esteem. The whole thing starts with us, and our willingness to think about what we actually want.
But then, it always did.
Go on, I dare you… Stop looking endlessly at all the options and choose.
The holiday destination.
The dinner reservation.
The crockery set.
Whatever’s next on the task list.
Whatever’s going to give you a buzz.
Something that’s going to teach you something useful, rock your world, shake up your status quo.
Double dare.
