Does indecision rule your life? Are you stuck in a cycle of self-doubt and fear of failure, causing you to hesitate at every turn? Today I have a powerful episode lined up for you on the massive impact of chronic indecision on success and how it can hamper your productivity, strategic thinking, and even your ability to rest.
In my opinion, indecision is a SYMPTOM, not a root issue- And perfectionism, people-pleasing, self-doubt, overwhelm, and avoiding accountability are all things that contribute to chronic indecision.
Does indecision rule your life? Are you stuck in a cycle of self-doubt and fear of failure, causing you to hesitate at every turn? Today I have a powerful episode lined up for you on the massive impact of chronic indecision on success and how it can hamper your productivity, strategic thinking, and even your ability to rest.
In my opinion, indecision is a SYMPTOM, not a root issue- And perfectionism, people-pleasing, self-doubt, overwhelm, and avoiding accountability are all things that contribute to chronic indecision.
All right, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Today we are talking about indecision. Now, this is something that has come up over and over again in my DMs over the last few years, and I don't know why I haven't recorded an episode about it before, because it's literally been sitting in my notes. I have a little running note on my phone of topics that I want to come back to on the podcast so that I can really have a proper conversation about them and go deeper than I could in an Instagram post, for example. This has been sitting on that list for so long and, ironically, I guess I just haven't decided to do it. So today is the day.
Melissa Rodgers:Today is the day that we are tackling indecision and the habit of indecision that so many of us have, and the title of this podcast is Indecision is Costing you Everything, and that is a little bit clickbaity, but it's very true and I want to talk about why. So I think that indecision is something that we all experience from time to time, but what I observe in a lot of the women that I interact with online, and with a lot of women that come to work with me initially, is what I would term chronic indecision, so it's indecision that is negatively impacting their life. So we all have little habits and idiosyncrasies and character traits and things like that, but the time when it really requires that you pay attention to these things and you start to work on them, on dismantling them, is when you can identify that, yes, this is something that is negatively impacting your life, and I think for many women, for many female founders, this is something that is negatively impacting not just your life but your business, and so today I want to talk about that. So obviously, we all struggle with decisions. Sometimes we all get stuck in that kind of decision paralysis. But I think for a lot of people, chronic indecision is actually a huge barrier to success, and I want to talk about why that is. I want to talk about some of the factors that go into indecision, because it's not just black and white. Indecision is the symptom, it's not the cause. So I want to talk about why that is and I want to talk about why we need to care about this. Like, why does it matter if you're indecisive, right? So first of all, I want to be super clear Decisive shows and I think, anecdotally, if you really think about it your own experience in the world will back this up Decisive people are more successful, so studies have shown that decisive leaders are considered much more affected by their teams, and if we think about that in a real world example, so obviously that's a corporate example, but that's 100% true.
Melissa Rodgers:If you are working under someone, you're working under a manager or director or someone like that and they constantly struggle with indecision and you're watching them waffle about things and you're watching them not trust themselves to make a call. That doesn't inspire much confidence in their leadership, right? And if you are an entrepreneur, a business owner, and even if it's just you, even if there's nobody else working in your business yet, you are the leader, you are the employee, you are the everything right, and practicing indecisiveness is going to erode your self-confidence, even if there's nobody else working under you. And if there is, if you have contractors, employees, whoever working for you, you are going to undermine their confidence in you. If you are chronically indecisive, decisiveness is also linked statistically to higher productivity and achieving goals, and I think that this is primarily because you just move faster, right? So indecisiveness is very paralyzing. The longer it takes you to make a decision, the longer you're not actually taking any action, and so it makes perfect sense to me that people that tend to be more decisive, are more productive, do achieve their goals faster because they're just moving faster. Right, they're going yes, no, bang act, whereas the rest of us are kind of sitting there going, hmm, is it yes, is it no? Do I do this, do I do that? And they're not actually doing anything because they're stuck thinking about whether or not they should do something or which thing they should do. Right? So this makes total sense.
Melissa Rodgers:And the other thing is that decision fatigue is a huge thing, particularly if you are a mother, and this is decision fatigue is shown to affect women more than men, even without the factor of children. But, as you all know, if you are a mother, decision fatigue is such a real thing, and so there is a lot of research to show that if you are able to be more decisive, you actually are freeing up your mental space for other cognitive tasks, right, and that goes for productivity, that goes for like big picture thinking, strategic thinking, like rest, like meditative thought, everything. If you don't have any mental space, you really can't do any of that, and we've talked about that before. We will talk about it again till I am blue in the face. But creating mental space is creating capacity, right? And if you are constantly in a state of indecision about every little thing, like what to have for dinner or what to wear this morning, blah, blah, blah, all of these different things you are using up so much valuable mental space making these piddly little decisions or not making them that you could be using for things that are actually moving you in the direction of your goals. Okay, If you've gotten this far and you're like, yeah, this is me, we're going to talk about it.
Melissa Rodgers:So I want to talk about the things that cause chronic indecision because, as I said, I think that indecision is the symptom. It's not the root cause, like it's not the root issue, right, it's a symptom of some root issues, and these may all apply to you, and or maybe just one applies to you more so. But here are a few of the things that I've identified as really kind of underlying factors when I see someone that is struggling with being chronically indecisive. So they are perfectionism, people pleasing, self-doubt, information overload or overwhelm, essentially, and the last one is avoidance of responsibility or lack of accountability. So I'm going to go through all of those one by one and give you a few examples so that you can kind of identify. You know, maybe maybe they apply to you, maybe they don't. Right, so perfectionism. So I think this is pretty straightforward if you think about it.
Melissa Rodgers:If you are always trying to make the perfect decision instead of the next best decision, you won't be able to decide, because perfect does not exist. The perfectionism tells us deep down in our brain that perfect exists and we should be striving for it, and what it stops us from being able to do is embrace the next best decision. It stops us from being able to embrace good enough and just move forward with our lives. Right, because perfectionism and I want to note as well that perfectionism and high functioning anxiety are very closely linked. So I'm not going to deep dive into that today, but if you're someone that struggles with anxiety or you're more prone to being an anxious person, perfectionism is probably something that you experience in your life, and being a perfectionist does make you indecisive. Right, because it stops you from being able to say yep, this decision is good enough for this option is good enough, I'm going to go with that one. You're always looking to try and create the perfect outcome, which is literally impossible. So you're never able to just pick the next best outcome. Okay, so perfectionism is a really big factor and, as I said, perfectionism is perfectionism and anxiety I often see in high achieving women are going kind of hand in hand, right. I personally think for me perfectionism is like a symptom of high functioning anxiety. But that is something for you to kind of chew on and think about for yourself. That's not something that that I think is necessarily a blanket statement that applies to everybody, but perfectionism is 1000% A huge factor in chronic indecision.
Melissa Rodgers:The next thing is people pleasing. So people pleasing is probably one of the most toxic behaviors that I, over the years, have identified in myself and I now cannot unsee and cannot cannot unsee in other people either, right, so people pleasing at the surface is kind of presented as a fear of disappointing others, but it's actually not. People pleasing is actually trying to manipulate how other people perceive you and how they respond to you. It's a form of self protection, right, and some people are really really bad for it and some people it's just kind of a more low key thing that you know they might slip into here and there. But the more chronic your people pleasing is the harder time you are going to have making decisions, because you have wired yourself whether that's from your childhood or just you know a way you've chosen to to conduct yourself as an adult. But you have wired yourself to rely on what other people want and what other people need as a framework for making decisions. And if that is the only framework you have for making decisions, you are going to really struggle to make them when you are unsure what other people want or when other people will not communicate to you what they want.
Melissa Rodgers:Have you ever been in a situation where you know maybe you're trying to figure out what to have for dinner? Let's just take a silly example. And you know you and your partner, let's say, are what do you want? Oh, I don't know what do you want. I want whatever you want, and you're getting that back and forth. It always makes me think of that meme from years ago. It's like a scene from the notebook, I think it is. It's Ryan Gosling going what do you want, what do you want? And it that's how it sometimes is.
Melissa Rodgers:Making these silly little decisions throughout our day, because so many of us have an external framework for making decisions is based entirely on other people's needs and other people's desires instead of our own. And when you have two people who are doing that back and forth with each other, the indecisiveness becomes just absolutely untenable, right, because you cannot move forward. There's no, if nobody can identify what it is that they actually want and they're just worried about what the other people, the other person wants, and they're unable to make a decision based on themselves. But the other person is unwilling to be forthcoming about what it is that they actually want, or unable to identify what they actually want, then you've reached a stalemate, right? And how often do we experience that in small, insignificant decisions throughout our day? That doesn't just, it's not just confined to those decisions. It's not just confined to what to have for dinner. If that's something that's coming up over and over and over again in your life, then it's very likely that you are using an external framework for decision making in every area of your life.
Melissa Rodgers:Okay, so people pleasing is a huge, huge thing when it comes to chronic indecision, so if that's something that you struggle with, then I really want you to take a minute to sit and think about how those dots connect for you and just sit with that for some time and think about it, because it's really. I think it's really powerful to settle into an awareness and an acceptance of the patterns that you have created in your own life and once you've kind of gracefully accepted them, kind of sat there and said like, yep, that's something I do, okay, that's something I've done, then you can start to take steps to address it. Right, but it's not fun to acknowledge chronic people pleasing in yourself. Once you acknowledge the harsh reality that people pleasing is really just manipulative behavior it's not ill-intentioned manipulative behavior, but you are trying to manipulate how other people perceive you and how they will treat you and respond to you. And the reality is that you cannot control anything about anybody else. You cannot control how they perceive you. You cannot control how they treat you maybe very temporarily, but ultimately you have no control over what goes on between someone else's ears, only what is between yours, only your own brain, right? So people pleasing is a fallacy, it's a dead end and it's something that 100% causes very bad indecisiveness in a lot of women.
Melissa Rodgers:The next one is self-doubt. So I think a lot of these really go hand in hand. So when we get to the under this list, you will probably find that you're some kind of concoction of the five of these things, but self-doubt is the next one that I want to talk about. So many, many people have a complete lack of confidence in their own judgment and again, that comes from a pattern of having an external framework for making decisions, from relying on other people's cues and other people's needs and desires. But also, if you have a chronic lack of confidence, you have a low opinion of your own competency and capability. That self-doubt is going to bleed through into decision making, right? It's impossible to be decisive if you believe fundamentally that you're going to make the wrong decision on your own. So self-doubt is a huge factor here and I think that that, honestly, could be a whole episode on itself and maybe we'll deep dive into that. So make sure you send me a message if you're listening to this and that one really resonates for you. Shoot me a message on Instagram and if enough people kind of raise their hand and say, yeah, I want to hear more about that. We will do a deep dive into self-doubt and confidence in another episode.
Melissa Rodgers:The next factor in chronic indecision is overwhelm or information overload, right? So typically in our day we are exposed to so much stimulus from the moment we open our eyes to the moment we go to sleep at the end of the night. We are exposed to so much different stimulus that in a regular day, even if you weren't, for example, working online which is the next point I'm going to make but even if you weren't working online the amount of decisions that you have to make, the amount of things that your brain has to process, is just massive, right? It's really unimaginable how many different things your brain is pinging off of throughout the day, and for many, everyone has a different threshold right for where they're going to get overwhelmed and where they're going to be overloaded.
Melissa Rodgers:But I think one of the reasons that we get so overwhelmed so easily is our phones. It's working online like it's having social media and the internet at our fingertips 24, seven, right, and be needing to have it at our fingertips for our work. So if you're marketing your business online, chances are you are online a lot. Chances are you are scrolling Instagram or hanging out on TikTok or you know. Whatever your primary platform is, chances are you are wired in to some kind of social media, some kind of online something, pretty much all the time, right, and the amount of input sensory input that your brain is getting and information that your brain is getting from being online is so much more than your brain is designed to handle.
Melissa Rodgers:I have another episode, a few episodes back, where I talk about your brain and I talk about the fact that the brain that we have inside our heads is actually pretty much identical to a prehistoric human's brain Prehistory, meaning like before we were able to write anything down, right, thousands and thousands of years ago. They suspect potentially hundreds of thousands of years ago. As we, you know, develop new scientific techniques for dating and things like that, they're beginning to suspect that the brain that we currently operate with is much, much older than we originally thought and it absolutely was not evolutionarily designed for you to have a goddamn iPhone in your hand 24, seven, right. So all of us are going to experience that information overload, that sensory overload, if we're not really mindful about the amount of sensory input that we're allowing into our lives and the amount of information that we're exposing ourselves to every day, because at some point you are going to overload, at some point you are going to get overwhelmed and once you hit that point of overload, you're not going to have the mental capacity to make decisions. Decision making is a cognitive process, right? You need access to your prefrontal cortex in order to make decisions, and if you are super overloaded and you kick back into your lizard brain because you're overwhelmed, you are not going to be able to access that. You're not going to be able to make decisions. So that information overload, sensory overload, that just general overwhelm is 100 percent a factor in chronic indecision as well.
Melissa Rodgers:The last one that I want to talk about that might be a little bit hard to hear if you identify with it, but I promise I'm saying this with love is that you are avoiding responsibility. So one of the major things that I have learned through my journey of entrepreneurship and through coaching other entrepreneurs is that if you really want to be committed to your own success, if you really want to make things happen for yourself in your life and most of us here, if you're listening to this, chances are you've decided to do that through entrepreneurship. If you are really serious about that, it requires radical accountability. It requires that you take full ownership and responsibility for every aspect of your life, including your inner and outer world, right? Even things that are happening to you that are not within your control, that are not fair, that are maybe awful right. These are. This is the reality of life. Sometimes it's terrible.
Melissa Rodgers:We have to take radical accountability for our own role in if that's appropriate and our own reaction to as far as we are able, right, because if we don't, if we avoid that accountability, then we are essentially resigning control. You were leaving the outcome up to chance. We are saying this has happened to me or life is just happening to me and I'm a victim. And I just want to be very clear here. There are so many situations in life where you are in fact a victim. We're not bypassing that. We're not. I'm in no way suggesting that there is no situation in which you are a victim and it's always your fault. That's not what radical accountability means. Radical accountability means that there are going to be situations in life where you are a victim.
Melissa Rodgers:Currently, I live in Canada. Currently, there are wildfires ravaging the western half of the country. My town right now is full of smoke. We are, thankfully, nowhere near a fire right now, but there are tens of thousands of people being displaced by these fires. There are wildfires currently that have burned entire towns down on Maui. People are displaced, people have lost everything. These are horrific situations where there are genuine victims.
Melissa Rodgers:The fact remains that if we are a victim of something horrific, the only thing that we have in that situation is our own accountability. When you experience, for example, a natural disaster, there's so little within your circle of control that is heavily traumatic and very difficult. All of these things, all of those things are true. The fact remains that you only have what is in your circle of control and what is in your circle of influence. Everything else outside of it might be awful, but you still have that. You may have things taken out of your circle of control. For example, if your house burns down, you no longer have control over your environment. That is massive, that is a huge deal. You are absolutely a victim in that situation, but you still have whatever is inside your circle of control. That's the point I'm trying to make.
Melissa Rodgers:So many of us, natural disasters aside and I got a little bit heavy. I'm sorry, but it's very heavy on my mind at the moment so many of us are so avoidant of that accountability. We're so avoidant of responsibility because we don't want to carry the burden of our own decisions. Many people are indecisive because they fear a consequence of their own decision. That can be the case for many, many reasons that we don't have time to go into today, but I want you to think really carefully, if that is, if that's something that applies to you. Are you avoidant of the responsibility of your own decisions? Are you afraid of committing to your own decisions? Do you want a? Do you want the scapegoat of either not making the decision at all or having someone make it for you so you're not to blame if you don't like the outcome? Because that is a pattern that many, many people fall into without realizing it. And once you identify it and do the work of taking radical accountability for your life, for your choices, for your thoughts, it becomes a lot easier to be decisive.
Melissa Rodgers:So those are the five things. I'll just recap them super quickly. Those were perfectionism, people pleasing, self-doubt, overwhelm or sensory overload, information overload whatever you want to call it and avoidance of responsibility, lack of accountability. Those are the five factors that I see and I believe really go into causing chronic indecision. So let's talk briefly, before we wrap up today, about how to practice decisiveness. If this is something that you struggle with, the only way out is through. The only way to get better at being decisive is to practice decisiveness, and that, as always, means starting small right. So maybe if you are someone that struggles with chronic indecision because you are people pleasing, maybe the next time your husband asks you what you want for dinner, you're going to take a deep breath and you're going to tell him what you actually want and you're not going to ask him what he wants. And if he's not agreeable to that, then you guys can reach an agreement on something else. But chances are Be safe he will just be shocked that you told him if this is a constant thing, right, he'll probably be happy to do whatever it is that you want. But that's an example of a small decision that you can make that has no giant consequence, even though you might feel like it, if you're not used to making decisions, it might feel very happy, but it's absolutely not and you can work yourself up to making those decisions.
Melissa Rodgers:The other thing is reducing decision fatigue in your day as much as possible. So the night before making decisions for the next day. So decide what you're going to wear, decide what time you're going to work out, decide what you're going to eat, decide all of these kind of like non-life changing things the night before and then when you sit down to work, to work on your business, you don't have all that mental space taken up by figuring out what you're going to have for lunch or what you're going to make for dinner, or when you're going to fit your workout in or who's going to pick up so-and-so from school or whatever. It is right. Make those decisions ahead of time. The more decisions you can make for yourself in advance, the more mental space you will have to make harder decisions and bigger decisions. Right, and if you are someone that struggles with chronic indecisiveness, it is actually way easier and gentler on your nervous system to make decisions in advance. Making them under the gun for many people is actually more paralyzing. So I really encourage you to practice making small decisions and practice making them in advance.
Melissa Rodgers:And if you're still struggling, I want you to practice setting decision deadlines. So, for example, let's just use these silly examples because they're the easiest place to start. Right, if you set yourself a decision deadline of 9 pm to decide what everybody is eating all day the next day, or what you are eating all day the next day, depending on how your family operates right by 9 pm. You know what you're eating the next day. You know what you're doing for breakfast. You know what you're doing for lunch. You know what you're doing for dinner. You know where your snacks are, if you're going to pop out to Starbucks and get a latte and a coffee cake or whatever you have decided by 8.30,. You have decided what you're wearing the next day and set your clothes out and you check the weather to make sure. These are little decisions, right, but they allow you to claw back a little bit of control and, again, if you're struggling, set the deadline. Make it a deadline for yourself, literally set a reminder in your phone. Hairfront is the source of much overwhelm in your life, but it's also one of the best keys to organization and mental management that you have, because it's already in your hand and I know that my podcast is not going to be the thing that gets it out of your hand because, lord knows, I am terrible for screen time as well. But let's use what we've got right. We have a phone in our hand that has the ability to send us alerts and reminders. Let's use it so you can make decision deadlines and set them in your phone if you need to.
Melissa Rodgers:The other thing is when you're making bigger decisions is sitting down with a pen and paper, and I make huge decisions this way all the time because I process things by writing and by talking, so I like to write down if I'm making a big decision, what are the must have outcomes of this decision? So what do I absolutely need out of this versus what is the nice to have? What do I want out of this? And then I can evaluate my options and say, okay, which one gives me most of what I need, like what, which one provides the most must have outcomes versus nice to have outcomes, and then I can logically evaluate which one is the best. Call right, as opposed to putting myself under the wire and getting overwhelmed and then making kind of like an emotional decision that I then have to retroactively justify with logic, laying it all out in front of yourself and again, making the decision in advance, not under the gun. This is really important.
Melissa Rodgers:So when you have the option of making decisions in advance and you make them, when you don't have the option, when you're confronted with a decision that you have to make on the fly, when a fire erupts that you have to put out in your business. You know, whatever it is, you actually have the mental capacity to do that. And the last tip that I have for practicing decisiveness is a free frame that I want to offer you. So Often we choose indecisiveness as a way we're consciously choosing it as a way to avoid making a decision for many other reasons that I've just explained. But if you reframe to yourself, being indecisive is a decision. You are choosing not to make the decision, you are choosing inaction, you are choosing paralysis, you are choosing indecision. That is a decision in itself. So you're not actually avoiding making a decision, you're just picking the shittiest option, right? So I want you to reframe that for yourself and if you need to write that on a sticky note and stick it somewhere, do it.
Melissa Rodgers:That was a huge thing for me that choosing indecision is still a choice, and it's the worst choice In every situation. It is the worst choice. Nothing good comes of it ever, right? You're just either prolonging your dread of making the actual decision or you're maybe screwing yourself out of opportunity because you're taking too long to make a decision Right, and I think this is why, ultimately, as we said at the beginning of the episode. Decisive people are more successful Because they're not missing out on anything. They are always moving forward by making decisions as quickly as possible and as powerfully as possible.
Melissa Rodgers:Okay, and this is something that I'm working really hard to embody myself, and I have been working very hard, particularly over the last year or so, and it has made massive differences in my business, in my relationships. My communication is so vastly improved because I have worked, been working hard to embody being a decisive person and it has allowed me to make huge strides in my business. It has allowed me to make, as I said, huge strides in my relationships and my communication and all of the things that enrich my life, and I think that if you're able to put some of these into practice, you will find the same. Okay, so make sure you let me know if you enjoyed this episode or if there's anything that you heard here that you would love a deep dive into. Just DM me on Instagram, tell me you listen to this and I will be sure to add it to my note of topics to talk about. Okay, I'll see you guys next week.