Last week, I wrote about my process of setting my yearly goals. In that post, I mentioned how setting goals has helped tremendously with my decision-making process. This week, I want to dive deeper into this topic.
I recently heard a story about a friend of a friend. I was told that this person uses her values to make all her decisions. When a decision is put in front of her, she advocates that it is easy for her to say yes or no because all she has to do is ask herself if what she is being asked to do aligns with her values.
I admired this strategy, but I immediately knew I wasn’t there yet. My first, gut reaction was that’s great and all, but does she feel any guilt about her decisions? Apparently the answer is no, but the guilt that comes with decision making is where I struggle most.
My decision-making struggle
I feel very aligned with my values. For the first time in my life, I feel like I know what I want and am very clear on how I want to live my life and what is important to me.
However, when it comes to making decisions, especially those associated with friends and family, I have a really hard time saying no, even if what I’m being asked to do doesn’t align with my values. For me, it’s because of the guilt. I always feel guilty, like I’m letting someone down, if I say no or make a decision that aligns with my values but goes against what the other person wants.
Even one of my favorite Glennon Doyle quotes doesn’t help. In her most recent book, Untamed, she talks about telling her daughter that, when given the choice between disappointing herself and disappointing someone else, she should always disappoint someone else. She should never disappoint herself.
This is something I try to live by. It’s something I preach to anyone who needs to hear it or will listen. But I still struggle with it myself. I still get the guilt, and I hate that guilty feeling. Like, really hate it. I will often betray myself and choose to disappoint myself to avoid the guilty feeling.
My decision-making breakthrough
I recently had a bit of a breakthrough on this topic. I realized something that I think will help my specific situation with this going forward, and who knows, maybe it will help you too!
First, a bit of backstory…
Something you may not know about me is that I have officiated a lot of weddings. Ok, maybe not a lot by certain standards, but I would argue that I’ve officiated more weddings than the average human.
In Vermont, you can get a temporary officiant license that lets you marry one couple on one day, and for the most part, that’s what I’ve done.
It all started when one of my closest friends asked me to officiate their small wedding. When the word started to spread among other friends and family, it started a sort of domino effect. I have now officiated 5 weddings, and it’s become something I really enjoy doing.
Although I have only officiated weddings for friends and family up to this point, it’s something I think about doing more often in the future. I have a list of things I want to do/explore on my journey to financial independence, my Financial Freedom List, and officiating weddings is definitely on it (although I have to admit it isn’t currently super high up on this list, like starting this blog was, for example).
Tangent aside, a friend of my sister-in-law recently reached out to ask if I would officiate her wedding this summer.
My immediate knee-jerk internal voice told me to say “Yes, of course!” because 1) I like officiating weddings and 2) I’m pretty obsessed with helping people. Plus, saying “Yes, of course!” is just what I have always done as the people pleaser and is my default.
But this time was different. I felt something in my gut, something maybe I’d felt before but just pushed away or didn’t listen to. I heard this voice below the surface shouting for help and saying No.
So, naturally, I didn’t immediately listen to my gut and tell this woman who wanted me to officiate her wedding No (because who would do such a thing?!). But, this time, what I did do instead of saying yes is that I sat with these feelings I was having for awhile. I let my feelings be, and I tuned into them (really just meaning that I was simply more aware of them and I didn’t push them away).
For many reasons (COVID was still going rampant, this was a person I didn’t really know or feel connected to, etc.), I realized that I knew deep down that this was not something I wanted to do.
But I felt so guilty. Although nothing was official, my sister-in-law had been casually bringing up the subject for awhile before this woman actually asked me, and I felt like I had been letting everyone believe that this was something I would take on.
I told myself that I would be really disappointing both my sister-in-law and this woman if I said no, and I hated that thought. Even though I knew that I shouldn’t disappoint myself, that nagging guilty feeling persisted.
I grappled over this decision for what felt like ever. I had long conversations about it with my husband, who reassured me that I shouldn’t do it if I didn’t want to, but I still struggled.
Finally, I decided to put myself first, and I told this woman no. Her response? A very friendly and pleasant “No problem at all! We completely understand.”
Whoooosh. A big sigh of relief.
The next day, I found myself still thinking about it. I was so frustrated with myself that I had wasted time agonizing and couldn’t just easily make the decision I knew I wanted to make and not feel so guilty about it.
But then I remembered the goals I set for the year. And how those goals were aligned with my values.
As I wrote about last week, my values are something that are always there, under the surface, but they’re hard for me to reach at any given moment. That’s why using my values to make decisions didn’t resonate with me at first.
My goals, on the other hand, have become a way for me to create something tangible from my values, something for me to focus on daily, something for me to latch on to when I need them.
When I thought more about it, I realized that officiating weddings was not one of my goals for this year. In fact, it wasn’t even close to resembling any of the goals I had set for myself.
I realized that maybe for me, aligning every decision with my values isn’t what will work for me to get rid of the guilt. But maybe thinking about my goals for the year when I make decisions will help.
When I had this realization, that officiating this woman’s wedding was not in line with my yearly goals, I instantly felt really good about my decision. I didn’t have any butterflies in my stomach. I didn’t have that icky guilty feeling.
How it’s going currently
Since this breakthrough, I’ve started being more mindful about how I’m feeling when I need to make a decision. It’s also gotten a lot easier to think about my goals when I’m making decisions. It’s even helped with some of the anxiety I experience around money and making decisions!
For example, two decisions came up recently that involved 1) friends or family and 2) spending money. I didn’t even think twice about the money I was spending (within reason, I still shopped for a good deal). I knew instantly that I wanted to say yes to these decisions because they were aligned with my goals for the year.
One of my goals was to spend more meaningful time with friends and family (caveat: this goal is not general and is specific to those friends and family that are important to me and enhance my life rather than deplete my energy – you all know who those friends/family/people are).
So, when I had a cousin reach out to a few of my family members to ask if we wanted to do a weekend getaway at an AirBnB in Vermont, I was able to enthusiastically say yes without feeling guilty about money. Similarly, when my childhood best friend told me she was coming to Vermont and asked if I wanted to travel across the state and get an AirBnB to spend the weekend with her and her boys, it was an easy answer with no guilty feelings. These are my people and the thought of spending quality time with them, especially after so much time apart due to COVID, made me downright giddy.
I’ve also been able to put this strategy into action with saying no, and it’s even rubbed off on my husband (who has a hard time saying no to friends and family as well)!
Although we said yes to camping with some of his friends and their kids for the 4th of July weekend, when they asked us a few weeks later if we also wanted to camp with them in August, it took us about 5 minutes to say no. Not only will we already be camping with them in July, but we would have also had to take an extra day or 2 off of work to camp with them in August, and our vacation days are precious to us. We may have wanted to say yes if we weren’t going to be seeing them at all this summer, because of our goal to spend more time with friends and family, but because we already had something booked with them, it was an easy decision.
I am really excited for what aligning decisions with goals means for me and how it fits into my life. I feel great about continuing to keep what I’ve learned in my mind as I make decisions, because let’s be real, we have to make them every day!
What helps you make decisions? Do you align your decisions with goals or values? I would love to hear from you!