76| Right or Wrong Is the Wrong Question: A New Way to Think About Every Decision You've Made

What if the decisions we’ve been calling the biggest mistake of our lives wasn't actually wrong at all but what we needed in order to get here right now, even if there were an easier path? How do we stop looking at decisions as right or wrong, easy or hard and instead find freedom and courage in realizing it’s all just data and direction?

Transcript

What if the decisions we’ve been calling the biggest mistake of our lives wasn't actually wrong at all but what we needed in order to get here right now, even if there were an easier path? How do we stop looking at decisions as right or wrong, easy or hard and instead find freedom and courage in realizing it’s all just data and direction? This podcast is always 20 minutes or less so you don’t have to feel overwhelmed or overhaul everything in your life, but just make small, simple changes to create more calm and peace. To get to your better life, make small changes and begin to live it!

 Hey friends or hey new peeps, I'm really glad you carved out a little time for this one today. Maybe you're folding laundry, maybe you're driving somewhere, maybe you're sitting still for once with nowhere else to be, and either way, I'm happy you're spending a few minutes here with me and thank yourself for taking a little time for your self care. 

Before we get into it, I just want to say, if you've been carrying around a decision you made years ago like it's some kind of permanent stain on your story, this episode is for you. Last week on episode 75 we chatted about being ready to make a change and how that was actually a decision. That ready was not a feeling but a decision to simply just move, just take action even if it was the smallest of actions. And this led into me thinking about those prior decisions and the emotions we have tied to them about if they were good or bad and how does that help to identify them that way? So much of our lives, we walk around sorting our decisions into two little boxes. Good or bad. Right or wrong. Smart or stupid. We replay choices from years ago and grade ourselves on them like we're handing back a report card. And what if that whole grading system is actually keeping us stuck in regret, not being compassionate with ourselves and is not helping us grow.

Here's the reframe I want to offer today. Of course, there are some decisions that really do fall into a basic category of right and wrong, things like intentionally hurting someone physically or emotionally. We're not throwing that out the window and in some cases we unintentionally intentionally hurt someone. Now let me explain that in that if you have had past traumas, sometimes without wanting to, you direct that pain and trauma to others so it’s intentional but only because you’re trying to manage your own pain. Still not ok but helps us to understand it a bit more. But outside of those clear moral lines, so many of the decisions we agonize over, the job we took or didn't take, the relationship we stayed in a little too long, the move we made or didn't make, the apology we gave or held back, those aren't really good or bad decisions. They're decisions that either make your life a little easier or a little harder for a while anyway depending on what you needed at the time. And sometimes the harder path is exactly the one doing the most work for you, even if it doesn't feel like a reward in the moment.

Let's pause here for a second and think of one decision from your past that maybe you've labeled as a mistake, something you've replayed with a little bit of shame or regret. Just for a moment, I want you to set down the right or wrong label completely. Instead, ask yourself, what did that decision end up teaching me, or what did it lead me toward, even if the road there was bumpy. You don't have to answer that perfectly right now, just let the question sit there right now.

I think we inherited this good or bad grading system pretty early in life. School trained us to think in terms of correct answers and incorrect answers, with very little room for the messy living in between. So we carried that grading system into adulthood and started applying it to things that were never meant to be graded that way, like which career path to choose, who to love, when to walk away, when to stay and we started comparing too much. Life isn't a multiple choice test with one bubble to fill in. It's much closer to a winding trail where some paths are smoother and some paths are steeper, but more often than not, every path is still capable of getting you somewhere meaningful, just in different ways and on different timelines.

There's a researcher named Carol Dweck who found that people who view their abilities and choices as fixed, meaning either you got it right or you got it wrong, tend to experience more anxiety around decision making and more difficulty bouncing back from setbacks. But people who view their abilities and choices as things that develop and grow through experience, including the harder experiences, tend to show more resilience and a greater willingness to take meaningful risks. In other words, the moment you stop treating a hard decision as proof that you failed, and start treating it as information that's helping you grow, your entire relationship with decision making starts to shift. The hard path stops feeling like punishment and starts feeling like a class where you are both the student and the teacher.

Here's a small action you can put into place starting today, and it’s small and simple like we’re always talking about. The next time you catch yourself labeling a past decision as good or bad, just swap the language. Instead of saying that was the wrong choice, try saying that choice made things harder for a while, and then ask what it made possible afterward. Language shapes the story we tell ourselves, and that small swap in wording can soften years of self judgment without you needing to do anything else.

Let's take another reflective pause. Think about a decision sitting in front of you right now, something you haven't made yet, something you've been going back and forth on. I want you to notice if you've been quietly waiting for the version of this decision that guarantees it's the right one. But let’s consider this, there may not be a single right answer waiting to be discovered. There might just be a few different paths, some straight and smooth, some winding and confusing, but each one teaching you something or building something different in you, depending on which one you choose.

I also want to bring up something that we may think which is the idea that the harder path isn't automatically the wrong one just because it's harder. Sometimes the more difficult road is exactly the work you need to do, not because suffering is noble or because you have to earn a good life through hardship, but because growth often requires friction. Think about anything that's ever made you stronger, whether physically, emotionally, or in your relationships. It rarely came from the path of least resistance. It typically came from friction, some push and pull, something that asked more of you, and in asking more of you, it built a version of you that the easier path simply wouldn't have built. That doesn't mean you should go looking for hardship on purpose. It just means that when a harder decision shows up in front of you, it's worth asking what it might be building, instead of immediately assuming it must be the wrong choice because it's uncomfortable and hard.

I think there's a really useful model for this kind of thinking, and it comes from the world of science. Scientists don't run an experiment because they're confident they already know the right answer. They run an experiment because they've made a series of decisions about what to test and how to test it, and they fully expect that some of those decisions will lead to results they didn't predict. A scientist doesn't look at an unexpected result and call the whole experiment wrong. They look at it as data. Information. Something that tells them what to try next.

Think about how many experiments in history failed to prove the original idea, but ended up revealing something else entirely valuable, sometimes more valuable than what the scientist set out to find in the first place. Penicillin came out of a researcher noticing mold contaminating a sample he hadn't intended to leave out, something that, by his original plan, would have looked like a mistake. He could have tossed it and called that batch ruined. Instead, his decision to actually look closer at the unexpected result led to one of the most important medical discoveries in history. The experiment wasn't right or wrong. It was a decision that led somewhere worth paying attention to, even though it wasn't where he initially aimed.

This is such a freeing way to think about your own decisions. What if you approached the choices in your life less like a student trying to get the correct answer on a test, and more like a scientist running an experiment, genuinely curious about the outcome rather than terrified of getting it wrong. A scientist who gets an unexpected result doesn't spiral into shame about it. They get curious. They ask, interesting, what does this tell me, and what should I try differently next time. That same curiosity, applied to your own life decisions, takes so much pressure off the moment of choosing. You're not trying to predict the one correct outcome in advance because you realize there are multiple. You're simply willing to make a decision, see what it teaches you, and adjust from there, the exact same way good science actually works.

With that in mind, think of a decision you've been hesitant to make because you're afraid of getting it wrong. Now imagine treating it the way a scientist treats an experiment. Not as a single shot at being right, but as one data point in an ongoing process of learning what works for you. Does that take any of the pressure off for you, even a little? Maybe it makes the decision easier or if looking back, it helps make the decision feel more purposeful.

Between what happens and our response or our decision is the space to choose our response and by choosing our response, we find out growth and freedom. The decision itself isn't where your worth gets measured. The space where you choose, and what you choose to make of whatever happens next, that's where the actual growth lives. Even decisions that lead to harder outcomes still leave you with that space, that power to keep choosing your response as you move through it. When you're facing a decision, instead of asking yourself which choice is right, try asking which choice moves me closer to the life I'm actually trying to build, even if it's the harder one for a while. This question takes the pressure off finding a perfect answer and replaces it with something far more useful, better direction. You're not trying to avoid every hard road anymore. You're trying to notice which road, hard or easy, actually points you toward where you're hoping to go. Your decision gets to become a compass instead of a correct answer.

Let's pause once more for reflection. I want you to picture the life you're quietly working toward, whatever that looks like for you right now. Maybe it's more freedom, more peace, more connection, more creative fulfillment, more stability. Now think about a decision you're sitting with currently. Does one option feel easier in the short term but maybe pulls you further from that life. Does the other option feel harder right now but seems to be nudging you closer to it. You don't have to act on this immediately, I just want you to notice the direction each option seems to be pointing. I think one of the kindest things we can do for ourselves is to get rid of the idea that every hard season of our life is evidence that we made a wrong turn somewhere. Sometimes the hard season is simply the season where the most necessary growth happens to live. There's research on what's called post traumatic growth, which looks specifically at people who've gone through genuinely difficult life experiences, including loss, illness, and major life disruption. What researchers have found is that a meaningful number of people who go through hard seasons report developing a stronger sense of personal strength, deeper relationships, and a clearer sense of purpose afterward, not because the hardship itself was good, but because the way they engaged with it, the choices they made within it, ended up shaping real and lasting growth. That doesn't mean hard things are secretly blessings in disguise, and I never want to minimize real pain by wrapping a bow around it. But it does suggest that the harder path isn't actually a punishment or a wrong turn. Sometimes it's simply the path carrying the most growth, even when it doesn't feel fair in the moment.

I want to gently address something here too, because I don't want this episode to sound like I'm suggesting you should go looking for the hardest option every time, as if difficulty alone proves you're growing. That's not it at all. Plenty of decisions that make your life easier are also wonderful, healthy, life giving choices, and choosing ease isn't a moral failure. The point isn't that harder is always better or that easier is always worse. The point is simply that the difficulty level of a decision isn't a reliable measuring stick for whether it was the right one. Some easy decisions lead you exactly where you need to go. Some hard decisions do too. The measuring stick that actually matters is whether the decision, easy or hard, is moving you toward the life you're genuinely trying to build, and away from a life that was never really yours to begin with, maybe one you inherited from other people's expectations.

Let's take a final reflective moment before we wrap up today. I want you to think back over the last year of your life and pick a couple decisions, big or small. Instead of labeling any of them as good or bad, I want you to simply ask what each one led to, what it taught you, and whether it nudged you closer to or further from the life you're hoping to build. Remove the grading system completely and just look at the direction each choice was actually pointing. It can sometimes help if you picture what your life might look like in a year, what are you working towards and then think about your decisions and day to day choices and are they moving you closer to the life you have pictured?

So here's my invitation for this week. The next time you catch yourself agonizing over a decision, trying to figure out which option is the right one, I want you to pause and ask two simpler questions instead. Which option makes my life easier right now, and which option, even if it's harder, seems to be moving me closer to where I actually want to end up. You don't need the perfect right or wrong answer, we just talked about that there is no right or wrong answer. You just need a direction, and you can always adjust course as you go, the same way you would on any winding trail or path to a place you’ve never been before and that’s what life is, a path you’ve never been before.

If you want to make this practice a little more tangible, here's an idea. Grab a notecard or open a note on your phone, and instead of writing pros and cons, write two new columns, one labeled makes it easier and one labeled moves me forward. You might find that the column you've been avoiding, the one full of harder choices, is quietly doing more for the life you're building than the column that just feels comfortable. And you can look back at a past decision using those same columns to help free yourself from thinking it was the wrong choice, and instead help you see here's what it actually led to, or how it helped even as it might have been harder. You might be surprised how freeing it feels to now change that story you’ve been telling yourself without the good or bad label attached. 

And if this episode got you thinking, maybe that thinking has led you to someone who also might need permission to release a label they've been carrying around one of their own decisions too or might need a nudge to make a current decision. And as always, please subscribe and leave a quick review if you can and if you feel you want to as it really does help our community grow and help others find us and realize they don’t need huge changes to affect their lives in a positive way so please share however you can.

Thank you for being here today. Thank yourself for being willing to look at your own decisions a little differently. And the next time you're standing at a fork in the road, trying to decide which path is right, remember that you might not need to find the right path at all. You might just need to notice which one is leading you toward the life you're looking for, the life you’re building, the life you deserve, little by little, peace by peace.