Women entrepreneurs:
It’s one thing to take your time to make a well thought out decision about a step that you want to take…. And it’s another thing entirely to UNDERMINE yourself AND your credibility by second guessing and hesitation.
But I totally get it. This is something that we have ALL experienced.
Taking time to make a solid, well thought-out decision for yourself is EXCELLENT. It shows you value your time, it shows you value OTHER people’s time and it really demonstrates that you want to make rational decisions for yourself and your future.
But here’s the challenge.
If you find yourself second guessing your decisions or hesitating about decisions you’ve already made, it undermines your credibility because it shows that you don’t value your own decisions AND you don’t value your own time, either.
On this episode of Power Play, I lay out the three biggest reasons why you might be feeling overwhelmed and indecisive (AND how to conquer them).
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Episode Transcript
It’s one thing to take your time to make a well thought out decision about a step that you want to take. It’s another thing entirely to undermine yourself and your credibility by second guessing and hesitation.
I was recently speaking with a woman entrepreneur. This is a consultant, who has built a successful business and she’s really on the cusp of reaching a new level or going after a new level inside her business. And for her, this is going to mean taking some bold action. And for her, the challenge is that she has a lot of indecision and actually has been experiencing indecision for several months over taking this bold action. So she’ll wake up one day feeling full of commitment to making this bold move and the next day she’ll find herself filled with second guessing, with indecision, and really receding back into her safety zone.
Now, I totally get it. This is something that we have all experienced. The challenge is that taking time to make a good solid thought-out decision for yourself is excellent. It shows you value your time. It shows you value others people’s time. And it really demonstrates to yourself and to others, that you are going to make rational decisions for yourself and your future.
The challenge is that, if you find yourself about to commit to actions or second guessing your decisions or really demonstrating ongoing hesitation about decisions that you’ve made, it undermines your credibility because it shows that you don’t value your own decision and you don’t value your own time, either. And that is not the kind of signal that you want to put out in the marketplace. And it’s certainly not the kind of split dual energy that you want to be living and leading with. In fact, I would argue that it’s almost impossible to lead from that place.
So, if you are experiencing a period of ongoing hesitation or indecision, one of three things could be happening.
The first is that this is simply where you are at. You need to accept it and rather than trying to force things that need to happen, it’s time for you to take some time out, to spend time and sort of quiet or solitude, to really give yourself the space to hear your own mind and to trust what you are actually saying to yourself. Right? It’s time to disconnect and reconnect to who you are and what you want.
When you’re not able to be in that place (and for so many of us who are running businesses and raising families and having volunteer activities we don’t have the time to connect deeply to ourselves in that way) you can see how you can become a victim or you can tolerate indecisiveness on your own part. So that’s one reason why that can happen and the solution, again, is to really disconnect and reconnect to who you really are. Disconnect from the outside world and to a stimulus and reconnect to who you are, what you’re here to do and to that internal voice and intuitiveness.
The second reason that you could be wallowing in indecision, is that you actually don’t have the information you need to make the right decision. And if that is the case, you need to sit back and ask yourself: Why am I hesitating here? What information do I need in order to make a decision? And why don’t I make a decision once I have that information? Asking yourselves those questions can really bring up a good insights that make very often that decision clear for you.
And then the third reason that people can wallow in indecision, is because you have trained yourself to expect negative outcomes. Once you’ve been around the block, you’ve seen success with certain initiatives, you’ve seen failure with certain initiatives, and you might find that you are always on the lookout for what could go wrong, for potential pitfalls, and what this does is it actually trains you to expect negative outcomes which holds you back from committing to bold action. It holds you back from decisiveness. And this is absolutely something that you need to rewire yourself to continue to be willing to take risks, to continue to be willing to commit to bold action, even if, especially if, it takes you into new uncharted territory, because that’s where the true growth happens.