Dear Ralph: I am too indecisive

Hello Ralph,
        I don't know if this is the place for this problem but I just thought i'll give it a try. I grew up with a very bad character and people are beginning to complain so much and tell me that it would affect me. I am never able to come to a conclusion. I find it very hard to say something and stick to it. Before I make up my mind about something it gets too late to even matter. And then if I rush into making up my mind, I usually make the wrong decision most of the time. It happened recently during my job hunt. I don't even want to start recalling everything that happened but just know that this my character led to me losing the opportunity at having the job. At least that is what most my friends say was the cause for it. I don't know what to do and I am really afraid that carrying along like this is going to cause me problems in the future. Just imagine when I am married tomorrow and can't even make decisions for my family. What kind of man would I be? I really need your help, if you can offer any kind of advice on this it would really be good. If not I would still understand. I like your blog by the way. Keep it up

                                                                                                                                                   Samuel









Dear Samuel,
         There are many things that cause indecisiveness and bad decision making. The key is to look for the root of the problem and pluck it out from there. So I would make some suggestions and give some tips.

    You need to know that it is normal to not get everything right all the time. It is possible that your problem is that you are seeking perfection, therefore that fear of not meeting your targets or even having a flaw in your decisions causes you to panic and over think things, which further leads to bad decisions. So you need to understand that you cannot be perfect. Mistakes are part of human behavior, all you can do is learn from them and keep improving. So don't put too much pressure on yourself.

Lack of confidence could be a very big contributing factor. Work on your self confidence and you would notice a drastic reduction in your indecisiveness. Without that trust in your abilities you are bound to question your capability and doubt yourself. This could also leads you to make wrong decisions. Because even if the right one was to come to you as the first decision in your head, your self doubt causes you to second guess, which makes you question yourself more then lead you to decide hastily. So practice building up your self confidence. You could go through my inspirational section to know if my topics on self confidence would help you in any way.

Lack of preparation. This helped me personally to get over this particular habit. I also suffered this problem of indecisiveness but then, I made a habit to prepare for things on time, speculate possible problems and solve them before they arise. By doing that I found out that when the time comes and a similar problem was troubling me, I was well equipped mentally for it. But then as I'm sure you know, you can't think of everything or prepare for every single situation. At least though, this would help you out through some of the problems and cut down the ones that hit you unawares.

Learn to be more calm. Rushing over decisions is only going to help you spoil things more. So learn to stay calm in most situations. This also helped me a lot. You would learn to analyze things faster, weigh the pros and cons of the situation presenting itself in front of you before making your decision. You might think that by rushing over the decisions you would be faster, but then again if you keep sacrificing the quality of your decisions just to save time it won't really count would it? So be more calm and relaxed.


Generally just learn to trust in yourself a little more and stop worrying too much about the future. Everything would be okay. Do the much you can in life and stop hanging over the things you cannot handle. Look more at your condition and compare with the things I just wrote for you to know if any of these can help you out get over this. But don't beat yourself up over it or worry too much about the future. Just do what you can do now and by the time the future comes, you won't even remember you had this problem.

Best of luck


                                                                                                                                                  Ralph