By District Director, Emily Murray, DTM
For lunch today I ate chocolate chip cookie dough and a peach Red Bull from 7-11. I feel no guilt about this. I am an adult. Adults make good decisions; therefore, this was a good decision. My stomach disagrees, however.
Emily…what on Earth are you talking about?
Hold on – I promise I have a point!
We all do it. We all make decisions. And we make them constantly. Most decisions make life smoother but don’t have a giant impact – red shirt, blue shirt, one Dr Pepper, two Dr Peppers. We make decisions based on the information we have, balanced with what we need/want/can afford/don’t know/hope for/our gut tells us/a feeling in the universe/a flip of the coin…whatever.
Sometimes decisions seem innocent and shouldn’t be a problem, and yet…through no fault of our own, we wind up off the rails. My husband and I once went to the Oregon beach to go for a walk. There were two paths to the beach from the parking lot. The left path was a gentle well-kept slope but put you out at the far end of the beach near the rocks. The right path was a little bit steeper and a little more rugged, but it put you out in a good place on the actual beach. I chose the right-hand path. Part way down, I tripped over one root, slipped on another root (the Pacific Northwest coast is always wet), landed on my knee in the mud, and then rolled into the bushes. It was unpleasant and dirty, and I felt silly, but I wasn’t hurt. Laughing, I tried to stand up to recover. FWOOOP! I slipped on the underbrush and ZOOP – I fell off a 20-foot cliff onto the beach. At no point in planning this hike did the thought that I might fall off a cliff occur to me or factor into any of my decisions. Thankfully I wasn’t injured. I came out of this with a bruised knee and a sore bum and covered in lots of mud and dirt. After my husband caught up and I took a moment, we did our planned beach walk. I try not to let unexpected catastrophes win.
You know the saying ‘been there, done that, got the t-shirt’? Well, I actually did get the T-shirt. Thanks to Trio training in Vegas, I now have a $70 t-shirt that says ‘Bad Choices Make Good Stories’. Like most people, I don’t actually set out to make bad choices (even if my husband thinks I do). But I don’t control the world and sometimes you have to make the best of bad options. Take cancer for example…when I was diagnosed the options were lumpectomy leaving one side badly disfigured, single mastectomy, or double mastectomy. Which one of those is the “good” choice? In my opinion, they are all bad choices. When you must choose the best of the bad, it makes deciding so much harder. I made the right choice for me at the time. I have no regrets, but it wasn’t an easy decision.
When a decision is not obvious or easy, when there’s a large possibility for things to go really wrong, when the decision could make a mess that negatively impacts us or others, or if it could lead to regrets, that’s when it’s scary. We all have regrets. It’s often the possibility of having a regret that stops us from making the big change decisions.
My opinion is – even if it all goes pear-shaped, I’ll still have made the best decision I could have made at the time. I’ll still have had new experiences, I’ll still have tried something, I’ll still have grown. And that’s what makes me go full steam ahead into insane decisions. Knowing that I’ll still get something out of it helps me have fewer regrets when my decisions have unexpected consequences and I fall off a cliff – literally or figuratively.
So, I encourage you to ignore your stomach and have that cookie dough and Red Bull for lunch. Do the weird/hard/scary/new thing. Seize that opportunity for growth – and see who you are afterward. At the very least, you’ll have a good story!
