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Indecision plagues me. I am planning a trip to a conference for my team, and have to pick the hotel. Thankfully, the conference recommends a few hotels. Not so thankfully, the options are mostly identical.

Why not choose?

Let's start at the beginning. I believe there's a spectrum of indecision: in some scenarios, it's easier; for some people, it's easier. I currently lie towards the generally indecisive end: picking a restaurant, ordering household items on amazon, reaching out to someone, or writing a blog article. Rarely is the choice obvious.

At the heart of indecision is fear. Admitting to fear is looked down upon, especially for a man, but a quote has stuck with me recently: courage is not the absence of fear, but acting despite the fear.

Fear of failure is fear of making the wrong choice.

If I buy the wrong household item, it'll break down and I'll feel like a fool.

If I approach this stranger to talk, they may reject me.

Fear of success is fear of making the right choice. This can be difficult to appreciate. It's been described to me as: when the fear of making a change is greater than the fear of the status quo.

If I book this trip, I'll have to give up the safety of my daily routines.

If I try this new activity and find that I enjoy it, I may have to face that I don't know myself completely.

How to choose

I read recently that it's widely believed that first comes confidence, then comes action - in reality, it's the opposite: first comes action, then comes confidence. So, how do I make choices? Let's look at a few tools.

Goals

Setting intentional goals is one way out of the impass. For example, with health and wellness as a goal, I will limit my intake of unhealthy food: this helps with choices at the grocery store as well as dining out.

If frugality is the goal, then purchasing an item based on its cost effectiveness will guide my choice.

Goals provide a metric for filtering and sorting: exclude the options that don't contribute to the goal, sort the remaining by how much each contributes.

Experts

Thanks to the internet, there's a review of practically everything under the sun: travel destinations, local car repair shops, and movies (cheers to watchmojo top 10 videos).

This can, paradoxically, become overwhelming: attempting to read the review for dozens of choices does not help with decision paralysis, but contributes to it via increased stress.

Expert guides, on the other hand, like wirecutter, are fantastic resources. This is another method I use for cutting down a broad field of choices to a select few.

Letting go

The above heuristics take a broad set of choices into a limited or ranked set of choices. Chances are, the final or top few will be roughly equivalent, just as in the conference hotels. I could spend untold hours pouring through reviews, endlessly sorting and re-sorting the list, but it won't make the choice for me.

All that's left to do is let go. There's no certainty in life. There's no way to know the outcome ahead of time. The hotel choice may result in any number of possible horrors; or it may work out just fine. The choice really boils down to the paralysis of fear, or taking a leap of faith and deciding.

Embrace the choice

Reframing the experience of choosing from anxiety to empowerment can help to build a positive self-image and confidence. A life without choice would be dull and present no opportunity for self development. Embrace the chance to fail, to learn, to grow.