How I eliminated 90% of my doubt when making a life-changing choice

I set up a timeline and specific conditions of success.

I tend to make a catastrophe out of a possible wrong choice. When I am faced with several options, sometimes I might doubt any choice that I make. I observed that throughout my life, the doubt that I might experience out of fear that I might have made the wrong choice, could cripple my progress, and sabotage me.

A job not a passion

I am a big believer in the idea that you should know what is your why. More exactly to know where you want to end up in life. I think this could serve as a central value to determine your orientation and based on what you should make your choices.

Determining how you should offer value to other people, and what you would enjoy most is not easy at all. You can’t know exactly what could be what offers you meaning in life.

The education in Romania, the country I was born in, doesn’t particularly value focusing on your passions. It fosters conformity and pushes you towards trying to become a brilliant employee.

Nonetheless, you have passions and you can start being confronted with internal struggles. A part of you wants to follow something you are told you shouldn’t.

This creates a lot of doubt when trying something riskier.

When I thought about becoming a psychologist, because that is what used my innate capacities, I thought it might be a mistake.

A mistake because is a high-risk domain from the perspective of chances to make it. Nevertheless, that is what I decided to do.

My doubts came from the fact that in my country is encouraged, especially in low-income families, to go for a real, secure job. A doctor, a policeman, or something within the IT domain.

Having the idea that I like psychology but I should go for a more secure job, created a lot of doubt in my heart. I tried to simply try to ignore the doubt but it seemed impossible.

Little by little I was starting to want to go back to a safer option as I was sabotaging my chances with psychology. When you have that sort of doubt in your heart that your choice can put you on a path that might ruin your life, it seems that every little thing is of giant importance.

I tried to study psychology on my own beside a class that I had at school, to know whether I had the chance of obtaining a degree and every little struggle that I had, transformed into a moment where I doubted the choice of going for a psychology career. I was feeling that I might ruin my whole life with a bad career choice.

Eliminating doubt

After several similar moments of doubt, I concluded that I need to do something about it and I come up with a timeline and several conditions for determining whether attempting to follow my passion for psychology was a bad choice.

I decided that if in one year by now, I got to the point where I passed my college exam for psychology, and I am eligible for a scholarship it means that this should continue what I am doing. If not I should try something else.

These automatically eliminated any sort of doubt because I was no longer thinking that I was ruining my whole life for going for psychology, rather that I might lose a year of my life with something that I think was good for me.

It didn’t matter exactly that I would qualify exactly based on my conditions, but that I would make my best attempt to try to do it. If I got there and I completely failed, in my mind there was still room for a discussion. The difference would be that I could have real data for my thought process, not simply wondering what would be like to try it.

This story had a happy ending because eliminating my doubt gave me the confidence to fully commit to the tasks related to pursuing a psychology degree and I succeded exactly based on my established success conditions.

I used that method later for life-changing options. Things like should I continue with this relationship? Is this the place I should live? Is this the best job for me right now?

The method that I used was as follows:

Conditions:

You have a tough choice with long-term consequences

You are very unsure about what choice you should take.

The solution to diminish anxiety:

Determine a timeline and conditions for your choice to be a good one

This method is not unique in its construction. By creating conditions of failure and accepting to challenge fear, you put your anxiety behind you as a motiving factor rather than an unknown factor that creates a fog around your situation.

It is used in a popular program created by Jordan Peterson a Canadian clinical psychologist and professor. In his future authoring program, you talk about a good future and a bad one. This creates a situation where you transform the bad future into a bad thing you are running from and the good future into something you ran towards.

It is using the same principle as the method I developed in my younger days, having a timeline with conditions that determine your success, brings clarity within the unknown.

Before you didn’t know whether this was a good choice or a bad one because you didn’t specify exactly what a good choice should look like. Using this method creates a clear path for pursuing the success you are looking for with the choice.

This helped me create some sort of peace with regards to the choices where I felt conflicted inside and let me follow something with my whole heart.