You know something in your life needs to change. Maybe it’s your job, your relationship, or a situation you’ve been putting up with for far too long.
You’ve thought about doing something about it. More than once. But every time you seriously consider taking that step, the consequences seem so overwhelming that you end up doing nothing.
So what are you supposed to do when you can’t see a way forward without turning your entire life upside down?
I’m Noemi, the psychologist behind Gangatu. Today, I want to talk about how to approach those major life decisions when everything feels too complicated, the stakes seem too high and you have absolutely no idea where to begin.
Just the other day, during a session, a distressed client, completely paralysed by fear at the thought of making a decision, asked me what to do.
What do you do when you’re facing a challenge so daunting that it feels like the ground is giving way beneath your feet?
If you’re alive and have a pulse, chances are you’ve felt like this more than once.
A major life change.
I see this a lot with my clients. And it’s one of the scariest things, because in many cases it means taking your whole world apart, letting go of so many dreams, along with the whole future you’d imagined for yourself.
All so you can take the life you have now apart and rebuild it, this time making more conscious choices about what you want and need at this stage of your life.
Right.
Do you know what I said to him?
I said:
“Make a plan, man”
And from there, together, we started working out a strategy for what that might look like in his particular situation. For what he really wanted his life to be like.
And why a plan?
Here’s why:
Before making a major change to your life, if you can, you should make a plan.
I’m never going to recommend that my clients immediately quit their jobs, end their relationships overnight or start completely different lives from scratch.
You have to be realistic and work with where you are now.
That means you have to stop treating dissatisfaction with your life as an abstract problem. You have to pin it down and make it specific. In the session, we look at how to do that. And then we start identifying what we can actually do to change our situation.
Picture this.
Someone who doesn’t find their work meaningful.
That could be your situation, right?
Imagine someone who says: “I hate my job.”
Right.
But what exactly does that mean?
This is where we move from the abstract to the concrete:
Do they find their tasks boring?
Are they having problems with their colleagues?
Do they feel their work isn’t recognised?
Is their pay too low?
Do they feel professionally unfulfilled?
It’s important to pin down each of those problems, separate them out and look at them one by one.
Why?
Because saying “I hate my job” describes how you feel overall, but it doesn’t tell us exactly what you hate about it. So we don’t know what needs to change or how we might change it. Once we identify the specific problem, however, we can start thinking about specific solutions.
Imagine the main problem is that your boss doesn’t recognise your work or pay you fairly. Now you have something concrete you can act on, and that opens up several possible ways forward.
You can prepare for a conversation, ask for better terms, start looking at vacancies at other companies or develop skills that would allow you to apply for better-paid positions. So on so forth.
A major life change can feel impossible when everything is still tangled together in your head. 30 Decisions is a free ebook about the decisions that can genuinely change the direction of your life, and how to think about them more clearly before you act.
Get 30 Decisions:
Love,
Noemi
