The Right Decisions

How do you make the right decision when your options feel nearly impossible?

What happens when you’ve spent decades of your life building a career, a family, and a life based on what you thought would make you happy, but somehow you don’t have the energy for any of it anymore?

This is a situation I keep seeing with women who are pretty much exhausted all the time. And they come to me because they know they can’t keep surviving on an empty gas tank much longer, but they don’t know what the right decision is.

They feel totally stuck because they don’t want to give up the career they spent 20+ years building and of course their families and children need them.

But they don’t have enough energy for everything and aren’t sure where more energy will come from.

Sometimes they tell me they don’t even have one minute alone and that their only alone time is in the bathroom!

This is a problem because they have arrived at a breaking point.

They are sometimes starting to have some health problems from the stress.

And they don’t fully enjoy any parts of life. They feel resentful at work and so tired when they are at home with their kids.

They usually think the problem is job related and it’s a decision between staying at their current job (which often involves an upcoming promotion that they’ve been working towards), or look for another job, or quit all together.

But this is not the real problem, and this decision would never solve the real problem.

The real problem is “self-erasure.”

“Self-erasure” is taking yourself off of the priority list for so long that you aren’t even sure you know what you want anymore.

Self-erasure is building your life based on what you should do, rather than tuning in to yourself and being able to listen to your inner guidance long enough to find our what sparks are still alive in there that would tell you what you really WANT.

Self erasure is doing everything for everyone else and checking the boxes like you are an employee in your own life.

This happens a lot. It’s not something abnormal. I see it every day. And it happens when you start out on a path with big goals that you think will make you happy so you sacrifice and work hard and you know there’s a reward coming, but you don’t slow down long enough to make sure this is what you really want.

And by then, you’ve already been on the path so long you think you just have to keep going.

But you can’t keep self-sacrificing your way to happiness. Especially when you don’t have more than one minute of time to yourself.

The only solution to this is to start believing that you are your top priority. And this means you have to give yourself more than one minute of time alone to think.

Because if you don’t make yourself a top priority, nobody else will. It’s your job to make yourself your top priority. And then, when you are the priority, and you have time to connect with your inner self, you’ll know what the right decision is.

If you struggle with erasing yourself from your priority list and you’d like some help, send me a message at christina@christinarenzelli.com