#3 When decisions stop us in our tracks

Why not knowing the answer can be a good thing.

This month I’ve been deliberating about taking a new job.

The decision was one that I thought would be easy. The role felt like a step in the right direction and the offer had been almost four months in the making. Hours of writing my CV and cover letter. Days preparing for and sweating through interviews. Weeks sitting in self-doubt and nervous anticipation.

With every successful interview, my excitement grew. But when the offer finally came, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. The salary was a decent cut from my current one. And no matter how I spun things in my head, the number tainted what I thought would feel like an achievement.

Congratulations! You should be so proud of yourself, my friends and family said. But beneath my smile and thank you was an inescapable feeling that something wasn’t right. I sat with the discomfort overnight before getting back on the phone to try and negotiate the salary. They listened and were very understanding but unfortunately, there was no wriggle room.

By the time I’d gotten off the call, I’d made up my mind. I fired off a text to my sister - my gut says no.

Decisions are something we make every day, but there are some decisions that stop us in our tracks. I find these moments very difficult to sit in. I pride myself on being quite a decisive person: attuned to my gut instinct and able to make tough calls quickly. I don’t like to admit it but sometimes I can even see it as a weakness when my friends struggle to make up their minds.

While I’d like to say my decisiveness has always served me well, I’ve become increasingly aware (with the help of therapy) that the urge to act quickly is often less about my gut instinct and more about needing to escape a feeling of discomfort. An uneasiness brought on by the uncertainty of not knowing what’s next.

When it comes to low-stake decisions – choosing what to have for dinner or whether I should go to an event – my decisiveness helps me move through the day rarely overthinking my choices or wondering ‘what if’.                                                              

But when it comes to higher stake decisions – around relationships, living situations, and career – I’m realising my resoluteness has led me to shut down potential scenarios before they have a chance to play out.

In relationships, this has looked like breaking things off before giving my partner the chance to prove me wrong. In living situations, it’s meant making the call to leave without properly consulting my housemates. In both cases, I have missed out on staying in connection with people I really care about, to listen and learn from their perspective.

I remember a conversation with my sister when I was talking about leaving a house I really loved, one week after a new person entered the mix and the dynamic shifted. She questioned why I was asking for her opinion when I’d clearly already made up my mind. It’s really difficult to talk to you when you’re in this mode, she said.

I don’t believe I’ve made necessarily wrong or bad decisions, but it doesn’t feel great knowing some decisions have been born out of a knee-jerk stress response, rather than a grounded and authentic place.

In a recent episode of the Imperfects podcast, author and parenthood clarity mentor Ann Davidman speaks on the topic of indecision when it comes to having a child. She says people who are ambivalent or uncertain about having kids are the lucky ones. This is because indecision forces us to explore the beliefs and unresolved issues we carry that play in our unconscious all the time.

“You know what you know, and that is what you can rehash over and over again”, she says. But when we’re uncertain and invite some reactivity to work out what’s going on, we get to learn something about ourselves that we didn’t know. This new information, she concludes, ultimately helps us to make more conscious decisions.

While my initial reaction was to reject the job offer, something – perhaps it was my gut instinct – pushed me to search for another answer. I reached out to my family and friends for advice and with every conversation, I noticed some feelings – some reactivity – coming up.

My sister, who works part-time for herself, suggested I ask to compress the role into a four-day working week so I could focus on my own creative projects (hello Pooch Writes lol). My friend, who works for the same company, reminded me that the team and culture are incredible and the work is challenging and interesting. Another friend, who earns a similar salary, reassured me that with a bit of savviness, I could get by just fine.

While these conversations helped me build a case for taking the job, as I revealed the salary to different people, I experienced the same painful, shrinking feeling. A feeling of shame that I wasn’t on track to career success; that in comparison to the people around me, I was inadequate. I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but it was this shame that nearly drove me to turn down the job in that first conversation.

Brené Brown says that shame is the birthplace of perfectionism – a term that gets thrown around a lot by people these days, myself included. It’s a word I actually enjoy being associated with (which probably says everything), but I think the reality of this belief system can be far more debilitating than I’d like to admit.

Brown defines perfectionism as a “self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: if I look perfect, live perfectly, work perfectly, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimise the painful feelings of shame, judgement and blame”.

Rather than supporting self-improvement, perfectionism sets you on the path to life paralysis. All those opportunities and dreams we don’t follow because of our deep fear of failing, making mistakes and disappointing others.

You can always count on Brené to drive home some cold hard truths.

In the end, I accepted the job offer. I’d like to say that by doing so, I confronted and rejected my perfectionism head-on, but that would be a lie. I know deep down I’m still hopeful that shifting into a new sector and four-day working week will open new and rewarding doors for career development. In other words, I’m still striving for a certain version of ‘success’.

But I know this decision has come from a conscious, more self-aware place, which is more than I can say about some of my decisions in the past. The more I talk vulnerably about salaries and career progression, and the shame I experience around this, the more I realise that no one I care about values me less based on these markers. I’ve learned something about myself, about the people around me, and I’m stepping into riskier territory. For someone with perfectionist tendencies, these are achievements I can decisively celebrate.

Round three, here we are! Hello to my beautiful Poochie Writes subscribers, it’s very special to have you here. I woke up on Sunday morning hungover and anxious, knowing that I wasn’t going to make my self-imposed deadline for Poochie Writes. But what would people think?! The funny thing about setting your own deadlines, and starting your own newsletter, is that no one cares about it anywhere near as much as you think they do. I’m starting to realise this logic can be applied to most things. And so, in theme with this month’s article, I am leaning into imperfection and feeling proud about getting this article out the door.

I hope you can take something out of it.

Like, share, comment, dm me. I’d love to hear your thoughts and reflections.

Emma/Pooch x