About a week ago I found myself really struggling with a decision. It wasn’t life-altering, but it was still a pretty big one with potentially good and bad outcomes if I decided the answer was yes. There were also potentially good and bad outcomes if I decided the answer was no. I realized while I was struggling with this decision that this is a common thing that we all have difficulty with from time to time. I decided to do a little searching for recommendations to help me and then to share the results. First of all, indecisiveness** can be compounded for folks who have ADHD, depression, PTSD, etc. It can also result from growing up in overly-critical homes in which people learn to associate an incorrect decision with being a personal failure. Mental health problems and a history of harsh responses aren’t the only reasons why decisions can be so hard, though. Plenty of people who do not have a mental health diagnosis and come from supportive families still struggle to make the right decisions from time to time simply because the right answer isn’t always easy to find.

If you were a psychic it would always be easy to find the right answer. You would know exactly what would happen with every possible choice. Often this is the hard part about pulling the trigger on a given decision. We can account for as many variables as possible, but we can’t control everything, so there may be things that we don’t know to take into consideration. One of the tried and true methods of making a decision is to keep one’s core values* in mind and choose accordingly. However, some decisions will create situations in which one of our values conflicts with another. These situations are particularly difficult because some degree of discomfort is inevitable regardless of what we choose.

Psychology Today recommends the following considerations* when making decisions:

Instead of dividing the choice into the right and wrong decisions, try to think which one is the better choice. Also try to remember that the consequences of our choices are typically not as dire as we might imagine them to be.
Really consider your values and rank them in order of importance if two or more values seem to be in conflict while making a choice.
Some degree of pain and discomfort may be inevitable while making a big decision, but what is the discomfort that you can actually live with?
There is value in emotional decision making as well as logical decision making. Most people are drawn more to one than the other, which means that it may be helpful to do the hard work of exploring the one with which you are less comfortable.
Stop and ask what else you should take into consideration, perhaps beyond our own values and principles. Sometimes it helps to gain insight from someone that you trust.
Consider making a list of pros and cons, and even look at which decision has more of each of them.

Psych Central** also has a set of recommendations:

Make decisions for yourself (instead of trying to please others) and trust your intuition.
Work on building your confidence to reduce second-guessing yourself.
Let go of your mistakes. You aren’t perfect, and you will make mistakes. These are opportunities to learn and grow.
Choose one person to really help you with your decision. In the case of my decision, I was stumped until I talked it through with my wife, and she helped me to consider things that I wasn’t thinking of.
Narrow down multiple choices to 2 or 3 decisions and throw out the rest.
Practice making small decisions with a flip of a coin in order to start showing yourself that sometimes the “wrong” decision actually isn’t so bad.
Embrace the decision that you choose, move on, and celebrate your choice.

There are many big decisions in life: marriage, college, career, kids, major purchases, etc. As I look back on a few of my choices I see situations in which I would’ve made drastically different choices now that I know the outcomes. My first home had a leaky basement that the previous owner had lied about and I had to pay to repair. It was also difficult and stressful to sell. However, even though I would do something differently if I went back in time, I don’t consider it to actually be a mistake. We had a lot of laughs starting our adult lives in that home, and there are more good memories from it than bad. We do our best, and we make the best decisions that we can with the information in front of us. Hindsight may be 20/20, but learning from our decisions improves our ability to be smart about the ones that are yet to be made.

*https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/being-your-best-self/202103/6-tips-making-difficult-decisions

**https://psychcentral.com/health/coping-with-indecision#causes

“I’m only human.” This common cliche acknowledges something very important: Since we’re human, we’re going to screw up. Unfortunately, many of us tend to be perfectionists. Even more unfortunately, it seems that this is a growing* trend, especially in young people. More young people now say that others are too demanding of them, they’re more demanding of others, and they’re more demanding of themselves. In many ways, our culture glorifies** perfectionism. Striving to be perfect is seen by many as a sign of hard work. This even shows up in youth sports. Expensive travel teams are seen as necessary to be able to play sports, and the anger from some of the parents in the stands about a call or an error can be shocking. In reality, perfectionism is incredibly fragile because when one’s goal is perfection, everything that falls outside of that can be viewed as failure. When people fall short of perfection (and they inevitably do) they end up viewing themselves, not just their efforts, as failures. The sad thing is that this means that their attempts may be successful or good enough to please others, but the perfectionist only sees failure.

There can be a variety of paths*** that lead to perfectionism. The first path starts with parents. As a parent, I don’t mention this to suggest that we’re responsible for all of our kids’ troubles. However, it is important, especially if we’re still in the process of raising children, to acknowledge that putting too much pressure on them affects the way they see themselves. The message we intend isn’t always the message that is received. Kids who frequently receive the message that they’re not trying hard enough end up also feeling that they, themselves, aren’t enough. Perfectionism can also be because of anxiety. In this instance perfectionism is an attempt to control things and lower anxiety. Unfortunately, this backfires because falling short of perfect feels like failure and reinforces the anxiety they were trying to control in the first place. Low self-esteem can also be a path to perfectionism in that the attempts at perfection may be an attempt to achieve praise to feel better about oneself. The problem here is that we can’t guarantee praise from anyone, and even if others do praise the perfectionist’s hard work they may soon start to see the hard work and results as something to expect, which may cause the praise to cease. After all, when we see the results we expect, they don’t really stand out anymore.

Some perfectionist fear letting go** because they fear they’ll lose their edge. They think that perfectionism has helped them to get far in their lives and they don’t want to risk losing their drive. The reality is that they’ve become successful in spite of perfectionism, not because of it. In fact, the weight of their unrealistic expectations have probably been holding them back from their true potential. Many perfectionists tend to play it safe. They don’t take risks or reach for new opportunities because trying something new means risking failure. It is hard to actually be exceptional inside of one’s comfort zone. They can be passed up by the people who make mistakes, learn from them, and keep growing toward true mastery.

The Positive Psychology* article that I’ve listed as a reference gives a great example of an experiment that a clinician used with a teacher who had been telling herself that she must spend exhausting hours of time working on end of the year reports for her students. The process looked like this:

Identify the belief–she had told herself that unless she spent 5 hours on each student’s report, parents would complain.
Experiment–half of the reports would be written in this 5-hour method, while the other half of reports would be limited to a total of 30 minutes of work.
Specific predictions–the teacher predicted that she was 95% certain that she would receive many complaints from parents who received the 30 minute reports and few complaints from parents who received the 5 hour reports.
Results–the teacher received no complaints from any parents.
Re-rate–the teacher changed her original prediction from 95% certainty to 60% certainty that future experiments would result in many parents complaining about the 30 minute reports vs. fewer parents complaining about the 5 hour reports. (This is important to note because it shows that this experiment reduced her level of worry about perfectionism and successfully challenged those beliefs, but the experiment did not erase the beliefs altogether).
Conclusion–the teacher realized she could spend less time on the reports and parents would likely still be happy.

Just like in the experiment above suggests, clients don’t fully shake their perfectionist fears in one counseling session. Very likely, these tendencies are based on beliefs that have been in place for a long time. This is where counseling can help. Counseling offers an opportunity to examine unhelpful thinking patterns and to learn to challenge them. Over time, working on challenging these beliefs and bravely making choices that go against these thoughts can help people to set themselves free from perfectionism. A great book by Adam Grant called, Hidden Potential, has a chapter specifically devoted to ditching perfectionism as a critical piece of unlocking greatness. I highly recommend this book, and I also highly recommend reaching out to a counselor for help if this topic is interfering in your life.

*https://positivepsychology.com/how-to-overcome-perfectionism/

**https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anxiety-in-high-achievers/202109/three-practical-tips-to-overcome-perfectionism

***https://psychcentral.com/health/steps-to-conquer-perfectionism