Decisions, Decisions

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been weighing a pretty big decision. More on that in the coming days, but making decisions is always a challenge for someone who is both a very analytical thinker and also someone who leands very much towards “realist” with a healthy dose of pessimism baked in.

Since the early summer, I’ve been seeing a therapist fairly regularly. One of the things we’ve really focused on in those sessions is to try to understand the things that send me for a loop and the reasons why. I don’t need to get into all that because it’s very much specific to me, and how I think, but figuring all that out over the last few months really helped when it came time to make this big decision.

Knowing what was causing my summer of discontent, I could weigh the different factors and evaluate each against the options I had in front of me. It gave me a level of control that I initially didn’t think I had when this opportunity presented itself. I also knew from therapy that feeling like I was not in control was a big trigger for me and so the realization that I actually had control of this situation removed a lot of the stress.

I actually travelled down to Newport Beach, California as part of the process. I had mostly already committed to the change, but this was the best and maybe the only way for me to validate what I believed to be true when I made the decision. In the end, my sense of what I would be getting myself into was mostly right and in some ways things were better than what I was expecting.

So the decision was made and I feel pretty good about it. Some days I’m still gripped with apprehension (not fear) about it all, but mostly I’m excited about the next couple of years and what I’m embarking on.