Every Yes Comes With a No: How Decisions Shape Your Life

How many decisions do you think you've made today?  Before you've even left the house, you've probably made dozens; what time to get up? whether to exercise? what to wear? whether to check your emails before breakfast? whether to have that extra coffee? whether to give yourself five minutes to think or launch straight into the day?  Most of these barely register as decisions, they're just things we do. 

Yet, when we think about the decisions that shape our lives, we tend to think about the big ones; changing careers, starting a business, moving house, ending a relationship or taking an opportunity that could change everything.

These decisions we agonise over, discuss with friends, write endless lists about and occasionally lose sleep over.  I do wonder whether we're giving enough attention to the smaller decisions we make every single day though.

Whilst the big decisions might change our direction, it's often the smaller ones that determine where we actually end up.  That's what I want to explore: how decisions shape your life, your success and ultimately, your happiness.

How Decisions Shape Your Life, often Without You Realising. The way you spend your time, the people you see, the commitments in your diary, the habits you've developed, the things you prioritise and the things that always seem to get pushed to another day.  How much of that has been consciously chosen, and how much has simply happened because you've continued making the same decisions?

Perhaps you've become someone who always works late, not because you particularly want to, but because there's always something else that needs doing.  Maybe you've stopped making time for something you genuinely enjoy because other things have gradually taken priority, or maybe you've built routines that support exactly the kind of life you want, without really stopping to appreciate the decisions that made that possible.

None of these things happened overnight, they happened through repetition.  One decision became a habit, a habit became a routine and eventually that routine became what you considered normal.  The decisions we repeat have a habit of becoming the lives we live.

There's another interesting part to this too, those repeated decisions don't just influence what we do, they can also start to influence who we believe we are.  Every time we speak up despite feeling nervous, we create another experience of being someone who can contribute.  Every time we follow through on a commitment to ourselves, we reinforce the belief that we can trust ourselves.

The reverse can happen too, if we repeatedly put our own needs last, we can begin to see ourselves as someone whose needs simply aren't as important.  If we consistently avoid opportunities because we're frightened of failing, we can start to believe we're not the kind of person who takes risks.  Our behaviour can reinforce our beliefs, and those beliefs can influence our next decision.  Before long, we can find ourselves making choices based on an identity we've created through years of repetition, without ever stopping to question whether it's who we still want to be.

What’s great though is the decisions that helped create those patterns can also help us change them, every yes comes with a no.  This is such a simple concept but one that I find particularly interesting.  Every time we say yes to something, we're effectively saying no to something else.  Say yes to another evening of work and you might be saying no to time with your family, say yes to an opportunity and you might be saying no to the comfort of staying where you are, or say yes to everyone else's expectations and you might be saying no to your own priorities.

It works the other way too, saying no to an opportunity because you're frightened of failing might mean saying no to something that could have been brilliant, saying no to a difficult conversation might mean saying yes to another six months of frustration and saying yes to something because you don't want to disappoint someone can mean disappointing yourself instead.

Of course, life isn't always as straightforward as choosing between two neat options, sometimes the choices available to us are limited, and every option comes with a cost, but I think that's precisely why it's worth paying attention.  When we make a decision, do we really consider what we're choosing, or are we simply responding to what's immediately in front of us?

In business and careers I often see people spending an extraordinary amount of time waiting to feel ready before making a decision; ready to apply for the promotion, to launch the business, to have the conversation that needs to happen or to put themselves forward, charge what they're worth or try something different.

Usually what they're waiting for isn't more information, it's certainty.  The reassurance that they'll make the right decision, that everything will work out and that they won't regret it.  Unfortunately, life doesn't tend to offer that kind of guarantee and whilst we're waiting for certainty, time continues to move on with or without you.  Opportunities come and go, circumstances change and other people make decisions that affect us.

I've always believed that we have far more choice than we sometimes recognise, but far less control than we'd like.  We can make thoughtful, informed decisions, we can prepare, consider the consequences and do everything possible to give ourselves the best chance of success.  What we can't control is every outcome and perhaps that's one of the reasons decisions can feel so uncomfortable.

We're trying to guarantee the result before we've committed to the action, yet some of the most important decisions we'll ever make will involve uncertainty.  The aim isn't always to make a decision knowing it will work, sometimes it's to make one knowing that, whatever happens, we'll find a way forward.

We spend a lot of time worrying about making the wrong decision; what if it doesn't work? What if I regret it? What if I make a mistake?  All reasonable questions, but how often do we ask ourselves what happens if we don't make a decision at all?

Convincing ourselves that by waiting, we're keeping our options open, we're being sensible, giving things more thought or waiting for the right moment, and there are times when that is exactly what we need to do.  Sometimes, however, waiting is just a more comfortable alternative to making a difficult choice.

Its not always without consequences; business ideas go unexplored, opportunities pass us by and we remain in the situation we are in because making a change feels more uncomfortable than staying where we are.  We calculate the risk of doing something far more carefully than we calculate the cost of doing nothing.

Not every opportunity should be pursued or every situation changed, but I think it's worth recognising that indecision can influence our direction just as much as a conscious choice.  Not deciding doesn't always mean nothing changes.  It can simply mean we're allowing circumstances, habits or other people's decisions to determine what happens next.

There's another side to decision-making that I think deserves far more attention, the decisions we make to protect what's important our time, energy, relationships, health and values.  We often talk about boundaries as though they're something we establish once and then simply maintain, in reality, boundaries are decisions we make repeatedly.

The decision not to answer that email at 10pm, the decision to have an uncomfortable conversation rather than allow resentment to build or the decision to turn down something that looks like a brilliant opportunity because it doesn't fit with what matters to us.  There will be times when our decisions disappoint someone else rather than continually compromise ourselves and that's not always easy.

Especially when we've spent years being the reliable one, the helpful one, the person who can always be counted on, but if we never make decisions that protect our own priorities, we can find ourselves living a life organised almost entirely around everyone else's.  Then we wonder why we're exhausted, frustrated or feeling as though something is missing.

What we choose to protect says an enormous amount about what we actually value.  Its not just what we say is important, but what our decisions demonstrate is important.  There's often quite a difference between the two.

I think this is where the conversation becomes particularly interesting because success and happiness aren't necessarily the same thing.  You can make decisions that build a successful career and gradually create a lifestyle you don't particularly enjoy.  You can achieve the goals you set yourself, only to realise you've sacrificed things that mattered more along the way.  Equally, you can make decisions that look insignificant to somebody else but make an enormous difference to the quality of your everyday life.  Your decisions only need to make sense for you, something I think we sometimes lose sight of.

We become so focused on what we should be achieving, what other people are doing or what success is supposed to look like that we forget to question whether our decisions are taking us somewhere we want to go.  There's very little point being brilliant at building a life you don't really want to live.

I'm not suggesting we need to analyse every decision we make, quite frankly, that sounds exhausting.  I'm certainly not suggesting that every difficult situation can be resolved by simply making a different choice.  Life is complicated, circumstances aren't always fair, responsibilities are real, and sometimes the options available to us are far from ideal.  I do think we could benefit from being more conscious of the decisions that are ours to make.

Especially the ones we've stopped noticing; the things we automatically agree to, conversations we keep avoiding, opportunities we dismiss before exploring, habits we repeat without questioning and the things we say matter to us but somehow never make it into our diaries or priority list.

Perhaps it's worth asking ourselves: what am I saying yes to?  What am I saying no to as a result?  Am I making this decision because it's what I want, or because it's what I've always done?  What might it be costing me to avoid making a decision?  If I keep making the same decisions, am I happy with where they're likely to take me?

We can't control everything that happens in our lives nor predict every twist and turn along the way and we can't guarantee that every decision will be the right one.  What we can do is become more intentional about the choices available to us.  Ultimately, the life we create isn't shaped by one extraordinary decision, it's shaped by the decisions we make, the decisions we avoid and the decisions we keep making without even realising we are.