It seems to be a period of transition for many people around me. Sometimes it is a welcome change, sometimes less so, but it often comes with a crossroad and a choice that needs to be made.
Choices are great, they give us agency. But they can also be tricky to navigate. It can be really difficult to decide which way to go, and this is a theme that many of my clients bring to our sessions. They’ve gone around the pros and cons of each option, and they are still stuck.
There will be many avenues we can explore around this theme of making a choice: we can tune in to what different parts of our body tell us (our brain versus our heart versus our gut for example), we can examine what our value and belief systems might be influencing, or we might shift perspective to what a best friend might recommend we do.
Alongside all of this, I would also suggest stepping away from the binary view of choice A or choice B. We can so easily get stuck in a dilemma of picking between two options, and be blind to the myriad other possibilities that also exist. So here are a few alternatives to give some thought to in order to broaden our picture:
- we can do either A or B
- we can do both
- we can do neither
- we can do something completely different that we haven’t thought of yet
- we can run little experiments to test things out before settling on a choice
- or we can do nothing. Sometimes that is also a good option, because timing is so very important and it might simply not be the right time just now.
In any case, it can be difficult to brainstorm options by ourselves, especially some that might stretch us, seem at first out of character or require us to be bold. To get unstuck from a back and forth thought process between choice A or B, it can be useful to talk to someone you trust, and ideally someone who doesn’t have an agenda for you or an opinion around what they think you should be doing. Do listen to their input, but don’t forget you will be the one living with that choice.
And to finish, see what approaching your thinking with light-heartedness might feel like. We often forget that things can also be fun! So enjoy the process and see what many other options become possible when you create space for them to appear.