How to make decisions.

Eight years ago, after relocating to Australia, I started my first job in marketing. Having graduated, travelled and moved overseas, I was more than ready to start my career. I was ready to commit, climb and conquer corporate life. A future of important meetings, grand titles, and Louboutin shoes awaited me, or so I hoped.

On arrival in Oz, I immediately found myself struggling to find an entry-level marketing job. My primary problem was that I needed a visa, although my lack of marketing experience and an irrelevant degree (in Politics) wasn’t helping my cause either. Finally, I found a brave woman who’d recruit me for attitude and train me for skill, but the job wasn’t exactly the corporate high life I had hoped for. Working out of a small start-up agency, I spent much of my first year making flyers for discount coffees and pies in Wagga (I know…)

I was a few months into the role when I got a phone call from a very well-known advertising agency in London. I had interviewed for their grad scheme right before I left for Sydney and had been very nearly (but not quite) successful. A spot had come up and they wanted me in London by September. I’d have big clients and juicy budgets and would be creating TV commercials and taglines a stone’s throw from the boutiques of Knightsbridge. I couldn’t believe it; it was the exact job I had pictured myself in. So what did I do?

Spoiler alert: I spent almost 8 years in Australia. I chose the flyer life — or did the flyer life choose me? What I didn’t realise at the time was, that decision was the start of me changing everything I thought I knew about being a grown-up.

Those who know me know that I subscribe to the (widely held) belief that fear or love ultimately underpins each decision, intention and motivation we have. These are the only two distinct emotions and everything else stems from these. Now, you might be thinking that sounds a little hippy or woo-woo, but bear with me.

When I made this life-defining decision, I was falling in love with my life in Australia. I loved my home, my friends and the people I worked with. I was also a little afraid to return to the UK. It felt like somehow that would mean I had failed to make a life for myself in Sydney; though by returning to London I would be securing the job that I had competed with hundreds for only 6 months earlier. That decision turned out to be the best decision of my life. I haven’t regretted it once. Not once.

Finally, almost a decade later, I understand why. Going home would have been a decision made out of fear. It would have been a decision made for fear of my career not reaching the glossy heights I had always dreamed of. Or for fear that by not being in the world’s marketing metropolis, I would fail to create a ceiling-smashing career at all. I didn’t want to leave Australia, but if I had, it would have been for fear of missing out on a shiny opportunity. In the pit of my stomach I knew, that for some reason, Australia was exactly where I needed to be.

The interesting thing is we make choices like this all the time. In any big decision, there is likely to be the presence of fear (we are human after all), but we need not act from fear. In my case, the excitement for the opportunity that I had always dreamed of was overshadowed by the fear of what would happen if I didn’t take it. Had I taken the opportunity in the UK, the fear would have been the basis of my choice, as opposed to the excitement.

And in Australia? Well, naturally the uncertainty of what would come from my humble marketing career scared me. But the prospect of a life in Australia energised me. All the unknowns — how long would I be there, who would I meet, where would I go next, what could my life look like — excited me more than they terrified me.

Yet in the crucial years of young adulting, too many of our decisions are fear-based: fear of missing out, fear of failing, fear of underachieving, fear of what others might think of us. And what’s more, much of the time we don’t even realise that fear is our driver.

When we are young the greatest fear of all is the fear of making the wrong decisions. It paralyses us. We overthink, overanalyse and downright obsess about what may or may not happen in the future. Living the rest of our lives with a burden of ‘shoulda woulda coulda’s’ terrifies us. We then make life-defining choices from this limited space.

The costs are significant. Fear-based living leaves us feeling like we lack purpose, are on the wrong path, or simply have no idea what we are doing with our lives. Not to mention, fear thrives in the company of perpetual comparison. Our incessant need to see and experience everything others are doing and achieving heightens it. Fear limits us. It narrows our vision and lives only in the past (in the form of memories and rumination), or in the future (as anxiety, worry and what if’s).

Stephen Covey says, “I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions”, which implies that the nature of our choices ultimately shapes who we become. I have been making fear-based decisions since I was 15 years old, but I have also spent over a decade building my self-awareness. I realise the costs of my fear-based decisions include unnecessary anxiety and stress, missed opportunities and intermittent breakdowns of confidence.

So how about love? What does making decisions out of love mean?

Even as I write the word ‘love’, it makes me uncomfortable. Why? I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it’s because I feel silly and new-age talking about love. Ironically, it’s likely fear that’s fuelling my resistance to the topic. Yet I know it’s important — life-changing in fact — to make it the driver behind your actions and decisions.

When I say ‘love’, I am referring to a feeling of openness, presence and vulnerability. A feeling which is expansive and full of possibility, yet also peaceful and intuitive. It can also feel a little uncomfortable as an adult. As children, we embrace anything life throws at us, relishing its infinite possibilities. As we get older we learn fear, with its limits, guards and armour. We believe that fear will protect us from making the wrong choices, but in fact, it ends up shielding us from opportunities to grow and evolve.

Acting from a place of love does not mean fear is absent. Nor does it mean ignoring, or refuting fear. It simply means choosing the path of possibility, rather than the road of restriction. Choosing love is not doing something foolish because you’re ‘not scared’; it’s choosing the option that will open you up to experiencing the fullest version of life.

Choosing love means being comfortable with being uncomfortable. It means being ok with not knowing the answers. It means embracing uncertainty, which for a recovering perfectionist, like me, can be excruciating.

Does choosing love mean ‘bad things’ won’t happen? No, of course not. Although it pays to remind yourself that there are no experiences or events in the world that are inherently good or bad, they are simply neutral. It is our interpretation of these events that add these labels and in turn, shapes our experience.

At Lost x Found I write about the immense pressure to make the ‘right’ choices and to create the best lives for ourselves. I muse on how many of us waver between moments of extreme confidence and crippling diffidence, constantly flitting between lost and found. At the heart of this crossroads are these two feelings — love and fear.

Marianne Williamson tells us that our natural disposition is to be governed by love: “Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here.” As young adults, our greatest challenge is unlearning fear, and relearning to steer our lives with love. So, how do we do this?

First, we must recognise that fear and love are intentions. In the words of Gary Zukav:

“Every action, thought and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect.”

Intentions are deeply personal and unique to each of us. Two people could be faced with the same decision and what would be the right choice for one could be different for the other.

Our intention ultimately defines the effect of a decision. We will only ever feel aligned and congruent with the outcomes of decisions made with a love-based intention. Why? Because we inadvertently create our reality based on the motivations that drive us. If fear is at the root of our motivations, we will exist in fear. What does this look like? Well, fear forces us to shrink, retreat and be resistant to change. We will find ourselves desperately seeking control, helplessly holding on to things whilst watching them slip away or change in a way we aren’t prepared for.

When love underpins our intentions, we will find that the impact of our decision feels right. Things may not happen or be as we expect or plan for, yet as the effect of our decision unfolds we are open to the possibilities of where it could take us. We embrace change, eager to see what the uncertainty ahead has in store. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi reinforces that

“almost every situation we encounter in life presents possibilities for growth…But these transformations require that a person be prepared to perceive unexpected opportunities.”

When we choose love, we trust ourselves to survive and overcome whatever is in store for us. We know that we will grow, expand and evolve from the choices we are making, so we don’t shield our eyes or turn around when things don’t go our way; we move forward into the unknown.

To be governed by love, we need to calibrate our internal compass: our intuition. As I described earlier, when faced with a tough decision on whether to return to the UK to pursue my professional dreams, something told me that I needed to stay in Australia. It might not have been the rational choice for a young, ambitious career woman with the seeming ‘opportunity of a lifetime’ on the table, but intuitively I knew it was the right choice.

Intuition is defined as ‘the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning’ and all of us, every single person, was born with this incredible skill. Steven Spielberg famously told a graduating class that who you are and what you should do with your life won’t be something that comes screaming in your face, but that it will sneak up on you. Deep down we already know what our dreams are and what our purpose and way forward are. But,

“the hardest thing to listen to — your instincts, your human personal intuition — always whispers; it never shouts. [It’s] very hard to hear. So you have to every day of your lives be ready to hear what whispers in your ear.”

If our intuition is continually offering us guidance to make love-based decisions, we must strive to increase our awareness of this guidance and prepare ourselves to hear this whisper. But how?

Again in the words of Gary Zukav,

“the first step is to become aware of what you are feeling. Following your feelings will lead you to their source. Only through emotions can you encounter the force field of your own soul.”

Those who know me know that I advocate for a reflection practice designed to cultivate self-awareness and build emotional maturity. The practice enables you to face your feelings at often overlooked, but critical, moments of your everyday life.

Whilst I have many names for it — personal reflection, weekly musings, third place — the intention is always the same. That is, developing an innate understanding of my motivations and intentions so that ultimately I can live a life that’s driven by love, not fear.

The simple act of recognising how you feel when something happens is crucial to understanding yourself. When I got that phone call asking me to go live my dream life in London, I should have felt overjoyed. But, I didn’t. My first thought was ‘What about my life here?’. At that moment, that tiny moment, before I heard the ‘but it’s everything you ever wanted’ voice, was everything I needed to know to make that decision. Although these moments are so fleeting and the voices are so quiet, therein lie the answers to everything you need to know to make the right decision, however terrifying or risky. The biggest challenge is listening.

So with that, I invite you to ask yourself whether at this time in your life you feel lost and fearful in uncertainty, and if so, whether you are living from a place of fear. I encourage you to make your choices with intention, an intention ingrained in love.

And if you’re having trouble hearing the whisper, or knowing what to do next, then start here. Start by taking stock of your feelings. Start the process of cultivating your self-awareness.

Too many of us rely on others to tell us who we are, and who we’re not. To quote Spielberg again, “We are trained to listen to voices that are not our own”. We rely on advice from others who have faced similar decisions, use social media to tell us what we want or how we should behave and make choices based on what we think our friends, family (or the world) expect from us. But until we make choices, define our purpose and create our dreams based on what energises us and opens us up (even if we are still a little scared!), then we will live from fear.

And me? With a successful marketing career to date, I have achieved what I feared missing out on in London. In the process I have realised that important meetings are not that important, chasing grand titles is tiring and there are other things I prefer to spend my money on than Louboutin shoes (never say never though).

That said, I’m still working on releasing myself from the perils of expectation and fear-based decision-making. It’s certainly a process. At the time of making that choice, I had no idea what other possibilities I was exposing myself to, or that those opportunities would come to be more valuable than anything I had previously conceived or imagined in my mind. What I did know, is that the decision to stay in Australia was, without doubt, the right one for me. And whenever I hear that whisper, I remind myself, that it hasn’t failed me yet.