Are you waiting for the perfect time?

Begin the year with a bang! Clinical psychologist Dr Toni Lindsay says tackling uncertainty could be key to achieving your goals in 2023

- By Dr. Toni Lindsay

Tip

Identifying the ways you are thinking about decisions will help you to get “unstuck”.

You might imagine that when really big things happen in your life, you’d be prompted to make big changes. Think about a movie where someone gets left at the altar on their wedding day. They normally make some astronomical change and find a new (and usually very different) path. And sometimes this is what people do. But for most people, they get stuck and they struggle to make decisions. They begin to put things off, wait for a guarantee or for a sign that things are going to be okay. And then they wait for another one and time passes by. But putting off the decision and waiting for a sign doesn’t make anything more certain or guarantee what will happen next. There isn’t ever going to be a perfect time.

GREEN FOR GO?

When you drive away from your house in the morning, you know you probably won’t have a perfect run. You will hit some red lights and traffic, and who knows what else? But if you’d said that you weren’t going to leave the house until you could guarantee that all the lights were green, it would seem ridiculous. You would never leave the house. But we do this all the time with other aspects of life – we don’t make a decision because we can’t guarantee the outcome.