117 Why the Right Decision Won't Make You Feel Better
The “right” career decision cannot guarantee happiness, confidence, or certainty. Learn why seeking everyone else’s advice can erode self-trust—and the question that can help you hear what you genuinely want.
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How to Make a Decision Without Turning It Into a Test of Your Worth
[00:04] Welcome back, my friends. I’m Liz Jolley—engineer turned life coach, mom of three, and founder of The School of Courage.
[00:10] This is Episode 117, and it’s for the woman who has a decision in front of her, has asked everybody she trusts what to do, and somehow feels more confused than when she started. I want to begin by telling you about the time I climbed out a window in my house.
The Night I Climbed Out the Window
[00:27] I was eight months pregnant. I had a four-year-old and a two-year-old, and I had finally gotten them to bed. We were living in Anchorage in a house with a daylight basement, and I was so miserable.
[00:40] I climbed onto the couch, opened the window, and heaved my giant, eight-month-pregnant body out onto the grass with my car keys in hand. I was sloppy crying—the kind of crying where you can hardly breathe, and it is definitely not pretty.
[00:55] I could barely get my big old body through the window. Then I waddled over to my minivan and drove up to the hillside.
[01:03] There was a spot where you could see the whole city from the parking lot. I don’t even remember the drive or exactly how I got there. I just remember crying the entire way and asking myself the same question: What is wrong with me that I can’t get it together?
[01:20] Here is the part that made no sense to me at the time.
Capable at Work, Failing at Home
[01:24] At work, I was thriving. I was one of the youngest supervisors in a 10,000-person company. I led a team of 11 people, most of whom had kids my age, and I took it very seriously.
[01:39] I read everything I could find about leadership. I studied it and practiced it. Every day I walked into that building feeling capable and confident, like I knew who I was and who I wanted to become as a leader.
[01:51] Then I would come home and feel like I was failing at the one thing I wanted most in my life: to be a great parent. I had read so many parenting books, too. I knew in my head what I was supposed to do. I just couldn’t seem to actually do it.
[02:09] So I did what capable people do, right? I tried harder. I found a better planner, a better scheduling app, more help, and better systems. I tried to become more disciplined and organized.
[02:26] I was driving myself absolutely crazy because, underneath it all, I believed that if I could just make the right decisions every day, I would finally feel like I was doing life right—and like I was a good mom.
When Everyone Else Seems to Have the Answer
[02:40] I asked everybody. I described the impossible situation I was facing between motherhood and my job and essentially asked, What should I do?
[02:52] I asked my mom, my spouse, my friends, and the woman at the office who seemed to have figured all of this out years ago.
[02:58] Everybody had advice, but everything they said had the same effect on me. All I made it mean was: Why is this so obvious to every single person but me? Why can’t I get it together?
[03:11] It wasn’t that their advice could not have shown me something helpful. It was that I made their advice mean I wasn’t capable enough to figure out my own life.
[03:20] Meanwhile, there was this quiet standard in the air about what a good mom actually does. I couldn’t find a version of myself that satisfied all of those criteria at once, so my brain did the logical thing: It made me the problem.
[03:36] Here is what I understand now that I could not see from the front seat of that minivan on the way up to the hillside.
The Hidden Promise Beneath the Checklist
[03:43] So many of us were handed a checklist when we were very young: Be a good girl. Get good grades. Work hard. Get into a good school. Choose something practical. Get the job. Become financially independent. Buy a house. Get married. Have the kids. Take care of everybody around you—and make sure you never need anybody to take care of you.
[04:08] Underneath that checklist was a promise nobody ever talks about: If you do it all correctly, you should be happy. You should finally feel comfortable. You should not feel so miserable in your life. You will be good enough, like you have finally figured it all out.
[04:26] We work so hard to check all of those boxes. Then somewhere around midlife, we look around and think, Well, this didn’t pan out the way I thought it would. Right?
[04:34] Again, we make the problem mean we are the problem instead of challenging the underlying promise—which is ridiculous.
[04:44] We doubt ourselves. We tell ourselves: I made the wrong decision. I picked the wrong career, the wrong spouse, the wrong company, the wrong boss, the wrong time to have children, or the wrong job.
Why the Right Decision Won’t Make You Feel Better
[04:55] Maybe this next decision will be the one that gets everything to click. That is how career decisions often become a test: Did I do it right? Did I pass?
[05:07] Everybody has an opinion about whether we are doing it right. Once you believe there is a right answer, everybody around you looks like they are holding it—as if you could ask them to vote and then know what you need to do.
[05:21] So we ask our moms, our spouses, and the people at work we consider mentors what we should do so we can get it right and be, quote-unquote, successful.
[05:32] Of course, we find ourselves trapped in indecision and confusion.
Life Is 50/50
[05:36] Here is one of the things I have learned and teach everyone I work with: Throughout our lives—from the time we are little kids until we are probably 90 years old—life is going to be 50/50.
[05:51] Every chapter we live contains something wonderful and amazing, along with something hard, uncomfortable, or awful. Many times, that is the whole experience of being human.
[06:00] It is not automatically better over there than it is here. We are not in this game to make all the right decisions so life can be 100 percent positive, happy, and joyful all the time. That is not what we truly want.
[06:16] I am not saying your circumstances do not matter. I am not telling you to stay somewhere harmful or remain in something you genuinely do not want. Not at all.
[06:26] But notice if you are looking to your choices to prove that you finally got life right—as if ending up happy or satisfied would prove you did everything you were supposed to do and checked all the boxes.
[06:42] Life is 50/50. It is not the role of anything outside of us to make us happy or give us the feeling we want.
Stop Making Yourself the Problem
[06:50] That night on the hillside, something finally cracked within me. It marked the end of my strategy: believing I was a victim, that everybody was failing me, and that I was failing myself because I could not get this whole life thing right.
[07:03] This was the time in my life when I found coaching. I learned that I was in charge of my own feelings—and that I had a messy brain that needed examining. All of the thoughts swirling around in my head needed to be questioned.
[07:17] After that, I stopped blaming myself for being the problem. I began to stop beating myself up. I started questioning the notions we absorb while growing up: the good-girl checklist, the idea that we are supposed to feel happy on the other side of a decision, and the belief that other people know what we should or should not do.
Questions That Bring You Back to Yourself
[07:38] Whatever decision is in front of you, ask yourself: If I knew I would be happy either way, what would I do?
[07:45] What would I choose if no one else’s opinion mattered? What rings true in my soul?
[07:48] Do not automatically make a pros-and-cons list. That usually smuggles everybody else’s opinion right back into the process, and we do not need that.
[07:58] Life is always going to be 50/50. We can use these moments to come back to ourselves and ask: What do I actually want? How can I create the life I want instead of continuing to follow the checklist we were handed while growing up?
[08:14] If you want help with any of this, come find me at The School of Courage. The link is in the show notes.
[08:19] With that, I wish everybody an amazing week. I’ll see you next time.
