2021-12-05 On making your own decisions

How often do you decide to go a certain direction, whether that’s in your career or personal life, and you end up deviating from where you wanted to end up? And how often do you let other people allow your decision-making? For many of us, those two things are interconnected. For example, we want to pursue a creative career, but we let our partner or parents talk us out of it. Instead, we take a job that’s considered desirable by others. So many of us listen too much to what others say and think. In our endless quest to please the people in our lives, we become the product of what others want.

When you’re still in the phase of making a decision, and you’re looking for feedback, it’s good to have input from others. But let’s say you’ve already made a decision and you share it with someone you love. What usually happens? If you go to bed that night second-guessing yourself, something’s not right. You’re letting other people get in your head too much. It’s difficult to find a balance between being open to people’s advice and being indecisive.

When you want to please everyone in your life, you end up harming your own sense of self-worth. It’s a form of suffering. You don’t have to do everything for yourself because that’s the recipe for ending up alone. But every person in life must also make their own decisions when it comes to personal matters like who you spend time with, what type of work you have, whether you want kids, who you want to have a romantic relationship with. You don’t need to let others influence you when it comes to things like that.