Overcoming Decision Paralysis

Photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash

This morning, I ran a 4-mile race in Colorado snow. The race started with just some light flurries and then about halfway through the snow really started to come down; serendipitously that’s when the song “one foot” by Walk the Moon came on my playlist. It was the perfect reminder that the best way to make progress is to just focus on putting one foot in front of the other; this is especially true in the middle of a snowstorm running on an ice-covered path.

As I was running, I flashed back to a recent conversation about decision paralysis. The person I was speaking to was thinking about starting their own company but was feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tasks to be done. As we talked, I empathized because I remembered feeling the exact same way when I started my own business. I had so many things I wanted to do, arguably needed to do, and all of them should have been done yesterday.

How do you move forward in those situations? How do you move forward when you feel paralyzed by the decision in front of you?

When you feel decision paralysis creeping in, you need to focus on the very next step; you need to find the step that will keep you moving.

When I was running that race the only way I could keep myself from slipping and falling was to roughly point myself in the right direction and then zoom in on the very next step. The very next step was all I needed to accomplish. The very next step is what kept me moving toward the finish line. 

When you look ahead today what is your next step? There are a lot you can take, many of them might be worthy of being your next, the goal is to just pick one. Just figure out what you need to do today to keep moving - one foot at a time - in the right direction.