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Decision making and commitment

NAS69281

Hello Slight smile

Does anyone else have serious problems with making decisions and committing to those decisions? I'm not just talking about what to have for dinner, which is a daily struggle by the way. I'm talking about big life decisions. I cannot make them. 

I'm now in my mid thirties stuck in a dead end job because I cannot decide what career I actually want to commit to. I've thought about every career under the sun. I've applied for things and been offered things. I had a place to do teacher training a few years ago but backed out before accepting. Yesterday I was hovering over the apply button for an MA law conversion course and today I've changed my mind. I can't carry on like this as I don't earn enough to live in the job that I'm in. I also hate it. I need to commit to something that will pay me a proper wage, especially as a single person with no second income to rely on. But the part of me that makes decisions just seems to be broken. There is absolutely no support out there. I have trawled through the NAS list of therapists and have seen a few different ones none of whom have been able to help me. I feel like I can't be helped and I am just going to continue simple existing until I expire.

Sorry to be such a Debbie downer! 

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  • NAS69281 said:
    I'm talking about big life decisions. I cannot make them.

    The approach I use is to list the options open to me in any given situation where I need to make a decision. For each of these I write a few notes on pros and cons then open a spreadsheet and create a comparison list where each and every option is evaluated using weighted critera.

    For example if you had the choice of doing a MA law conversion course then I would create criteria such as:

    1 - financial
    2 - long term benefit
    3 - short/mid term stressers (eg for the duration of the course)
    4 - impact on current responsibilities
    5 - travel and attendance requirements

    For each of these I would give a weighting based on how important they are, so I would estimate that the long term benefit would be a high value, say 10. Financial is lower so long as it is sustainable so I would give this a 2, travel requirement would be low for me so a 1, and the stressers would also be low for me as I can manage them effectively.

    You will need to adapt the values for your situation.

    Each of these is a positive or negative (if any has both then they need to be calculated in finer detail) and at the end you can add up all the values to see if one option is significantly higher in value than the others.

    Having this list to refer back to helps me a lot when I question if I made the right decision.

    Personally I go into a lot more detail about how much of an issue or benefit each is and use weighting of the importance to multiply the "cost" by the weighting. So if the financial overhead was a big issue and I would go into debt then this would be both a big impact and a big priority for me so it would end up as a much bigger number - sometimes taking a loan or getting a grant can offset this so it is easy to recalculate the totals.

    This process helps me think through all the details around it and feeds into the brainstorming I use for actually planning the thing in question.

    It is a process you need to play with a bit to get the feel for it but helps a lot for quick decision making for major things - at least for me. I use it a lot for buying houses for example so large sums of money are involved and this helps me decide with 10 mins whether or not I make an offer and at what value.

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  • NAS69281 said:
    I'm talking about big life decisions. I cannot make them.

    The approach I use is to list the options open to me in any given situation where I need to make a decision. For each of these I write a few notes on pros and cons then open a spreadsheet and create a comparison list where each and every option is evaluated using weighted critera.

    For example if you had the choice of doing a MA law conversion course then I would create criteria such as:

    1 - financial
    2 - long term benefit
    3 - short/mid term stressers (eg for the duration of the course)
    4 - impact on current responsibilities
    5 - travel and attendance requirements

    For each of these I would give a weighting based on how important they are, so I would estimate that the long term benefit would be a high value, say 10. Financial is lower so long as it is sustainable so I would give this a 2, travel requirement would be low for me so a 1, and the stressers would also be low for me as I can manage them effectively.

    You will need to adapt the values for your situation.

    Each of these is a positive or negative (if any has both then they need to be calculated in finer detail) and at the end you can add up all the values to see if one option is significantly higher in value than the others.

    Having this list to refer back to helps me a lot when I question if I made the right decision.

    Personally I go into a lot more detail about how much of an issue or benefit each is and use weighting of the importance to multiply the "cost" by the weighting. So if the financial overhead was a big issue and I would go into debt then this would be both a big impact and a big priority for me so it would end up as a much bigger number - sometimes taking a loan or getting a grant can offset this so it is easy to recalculate the totals.

    This process helps me think through all the details around it and feeds into the brainstorming I use for actually planning the thing in question.

    It is a process you need to play with a bit to get the feel for it but helps a lot for quick decision making for major things - at least for me. I use it a lot for buying houses for example so large sums of money are involved and this helps me decide with 10 mins whether or not I make an offer and at what value.

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