How to Make Tough Decisions

“The quality of your life is built on the quality of your decisions.” – Wesam Fawzi

I believe that it’s harder today, than perhaps any other time in history, to make decisions. Why? Because it’s harder today, than perhaps any other time in history, to drown out the outside world and get to the truth of who we are. It takes a bit of time and discomfort to really have a think about what we think. Consciously deciding not to let someone else make up our minds for us takes effort: we have to overcome the mind’s natural desire for unconscious programming to take over, to then remain in that frustrating state of unknowing for as long as it takes!

For virtually 99% of our history as a species, this wasn’t avoidable. So many times throughout the day, we’d have time to think—not necessarily because we wanted to, but because we had to. Time spent walking to and from school—commuting in general for that matter—was about letting the mind wander (or accepting that we didn’t have a choice). Our imaginations would stir and sometimes we’d be forced to contend with and rectify conversations that occurred throughout the day, personal grievances, fears for upcoming scenarios and potential solutions for perpetuating conflict in our platonic and romantic lives. Still, the discomfort was unavoidable so it didn’t engender more suffering than we could bear. Now, being alone with our thoughts, fundamentally, is painful. This is because we don’t have to be alone with them anymore. The moment boredom kicks in, we can whip out our phones and lose ourselves in the deep seas of dopamine, bathing under the moonlight of distraction. The trouble is, we’ve evolved to let the mind wander so that it can emotionally regulate, integrate experiences into the narrative of our lives and update its maps of our internal and external worlds. Not giving our minds the time they need to work their magic leaves us further and further disconnected from who we are because, essentially, we’re not letting ourselves be us; we’re not spending time with ourselves to get to know ourselves. And not only are we not spending time with ourselves, we’re spending far too much time with pseudo versions of others heavily curated and filtered online. As writer Kerri Sackville and author of The Secret Life of You states, “When we use social media to run from our thoughts, our thoughts will, eventually, become too frightening to confront.”

I’ve noticed this in my own life—the thought, pardon the pun, of having to think, quickly followed by a dull sense of unease (usually residing and festering in my belly). It happens mostly when my partner and I go shopping. Walking down the aisles in Woolies, my partner might decide to take a quick detour. It annoys me that we’ve strayed from our original plan—a very mild transgression, something that reflects more poorly on me than her. The annoyance quickly turns into boredom. Without conscious thought, the phone finds itself in my hand and I’m doom-scrolling towards eternal oblivion. When I finally wake up from this terrible nightmare, precious time has passed, my partner is looking at me like I’m a robot, and the feeling I worked so hard to avoid in the beginning has now not only turned up to the party but invited its friend “shame” too!

It’s a vicious cycle.

The Bigger Problem

Life is the sum total of our decisions. This means we have to get good at making them (which is distinct from only making the right decisions). I was recently faced with one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make: the choice between studying a Masters in Counselling and Psychotherapy or an Honours degree in Psychological Science. I know, I know! Seems pretty trivial, yeah? Seems like a wonderful privilege, getting to decide which degree to study! Though the gift of choice provides us with the opportunity to have agency over the direction of our lives, I also find it to be rather paralysing, especially when decisions stir inner conflicts. And I believe that, in this day and age, the “opportunity of choice” is making us all very, very anxious indeed (but I’ll save that for another article).

The title “Clinical Psychologist”, for me anyway, always brought with it a sense of reverence and prestige. For a long time, it represented the epitome of understanding human behaviour—the science of the mind, as the textbooks define it. And yet, at the same time, I knew deep down that I absolutely, one hundred percent, couldn’t stand the clinical approach to psychotherapy. It has been a constant battle for me to see someone as the product of their behaviour, as a chimp wearing nice shoes! To me, a person is so much more than that—not the least, the tension between how they think, feel and act. To have a human life doesn’t simply mean to act—nor does it mean to figure out how to act right—but to think and struggle with the conditions of life. That people all over the world are getting up every day to, in some way, assuage the discomfort they feel from the requirements and rules of the game of life—namely, that they will die; that they have to make their own decisions; that they will always be isolated existentially; and that, try as they might, they will never find an inherent universal meaning, other than the meaning(s) they subscribe to—is remarkable. How do people wrestle with these concepts? In any case, it’s the ‘wrestling’ part of psychotherapy I enjoy most, not necessarily the cure, antidote, or prognosis for a disorder. (In many ways, I don’t want to know about the cure; I want to be on the journey with someone as they discover it for themselves. That sounds like the right cure: self-actualisation!)

After having completed a Graduate Diploma of Psychological Science, I was eligible and then later offered a position into the Honours program at Bond University. Though I utterly detested studying statistics and research methods, I somehow ended up with an 82 or High Distinction for my final Intermediate Research Methods grade. Though I’m not abdicating responsibility for my own decision making, the opportunity cost for this grade was moodiness, a poor diet and sleep, and an understandably disconnected relationship. Like with my Bachelor’s Degree in Sports Management (majoring in Economics), I was doing something I wasn’t interested in purely for the sake of conforming to the societal norm. What I’d give to convince my younger self to go to India and volunteer in an Ashram rather than ‘learn’ to party and force myself to study something I wasn’t interested in . . . Still, lessons and growth blah blah blah.

I finished my Graduate Diploma with a 75 average; the cut-off was 70. I was unbelievably outcome-oriented at the time and didn’t feel I had a moment to stop and smell the roses or dance in the timeless present. These feelings were exacerbated by the simple prospect of completing psychological research. I didn’t want to. I knew that deep down, but I was still highly concerned about what others thought of me—or, more accurately, what I thought others thought about me. As Kerri Sackville says, “You can’t feel truly understood by anyone else if you don’t know what you think or feel or believe. And you can never feel loved for who you are if you don’t even know who that ‘you’ is.” What an excuse it would have been to simply tell others “I don’t know myself yet!” That, of course wasn’t true. I knew exactly who I was; I was just afraid to walk down Authenticity Road.

A journal entry from the 26^th of July this year paints a weary picture. Check out the mental hoops I jumped through to try and convince myself I was excited about clinical psychology:

The path ahead is now clear. You’re on track to become a Clinical Psychologist. It’ll take a lot of time and dedication, but it will also be incredibly interesting. You’ll learn so much! And to think of the doors it’ll open for you once you’re fully registered. As my clinical manager said, the Masters of Counselling and Psychotherapy program is a dead-end degree. It doesn’t open up anything thereafter—and he should know as he just finished studying it! Although the subjects look great, no doors will open. Being a clinical psychologist will give you access to all sorts of high paying job opportunities. You’ll also be able to work in private practice and be eligible for fantastic Medicare rebates. You can work twenty hours per week, get paid well over $100K per year and have more than enough time to write and spend time with your family. If your values are 1. Time to read and write; 2. Family; then it can only be the clinical pathway. Doing the Masters of Counselling and Psychotherapy doesn’t open any doors. It’s as simple as that. So, with that being said, how can you absolutely fall in love with the journey of becoming a clinical psychologist? How can you live each day to the fullest, getting wildly excited about research, diagnoses, clinical assessments and academic writing? Let’s start falling in love with and getting motivated by the prospects of fourth year. Who will you meet? What research will you undertake? How can you contribute to necessary research? What will you achieve and who will you become? Integrate your values into this path because this is the only path for you now. There is no other way. The boats have been burnt.

Then again on the 31^st of July—another desperate attempt to fuel my insecure little ego with reasons as to why I needed to suffer and self-sabotage in the name of happiness:

If I go to university, I’ll be someone who graduated with a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology. Feel the feeling. It’s a proud feeling. It’s satisfying. It feels right. Now feel into a Master’s of Counselling and Psychotherapy. That feels a little less fulfilling; it feels like I’m taking the easy path. Now feel into not bothering with any more study and just working. That feels easy now—like a giant weight lifted off my shoulders; but it’s also existentially destabilising. It doesn’t give me a path. To not have anything more to strive for takes my purpose away from me. Being successful is hard. Being unsuccessful is hard. You don’t get to escape the hardship. Sure, you could choose not to study any further. Enjoy your life! Work the crazy, high-paying job, full time. But by thirty-five, you could have been a Clinical Psychologist. What does that mean in terms of who you want to be? Tom, who do you want to be? You don’t seem like you want to start your own business, but you also don’t like working for someone else. You always feel most satisfied after a morning’s writing with a coffee. How then will you make your money? Think about this line: Tom Ahern is a Clinical Psychologist, writer and podcast host. I don’t think I’m quite yet ready to become “nobody”. To me, having the title of Clinical Psychologist is more about what it represents than just the arbitrary title. It’s kind of like saying, “I climbed mount Everest. I did it. I made it to the top and no one can take that away from me.” It’s a sense of purpose and mission that I find equally intimidating and inspiring. I don’t care about the incurred debt.

Imagine, in less than five years’ time, every day could be reading and writing in the mornings, and therapy with clients in the afternoon. Not that you couldn’t do that now; more so, you could do it knowing you are capable of achieving very hard things. And because you can’t think of an equally or harder path right now, just do the hard thing. The hard thing is the Honours degree in Psychological Science and then the Masters of Clinical Psychology.

And then once again on the 1^st of August:

I may as well get the degrees if I’m going to be studying anyways. The thing to consider here is: do you need to have the degrees and the title of “Clinical Psychologist” to be considered an expert? Not necessarily, but in my field, it really helps. I think what will help me the most is the combination of socially validated expertise in the guise of degrees/credentials as well as originality and authenticity in my writing. Combining the two, along with my podcast to build brand and visibility, will help me become the “Tom Ahern” I want to be. Not studying any further will feel lovely in the short term; but the “what ifs” will hurt in the long run. I’ll feel like I pulled out of the race too early and that I actually had more in the tank. I can’t do that to myself. Likewise, the Masters of Counselling and Psychotherapy will give me more expertise and skill but not the title—and the title really does help! These aren’t arbitrary things. It would be like climbing Mount Kosciuszko compared to Mount Everest: A great effort but not the best effort. Furthermore, it’s three years away, and then I’ll have the rest of my life to rest if I really want to. Not doing Clinical Psychology will always have me wondering “what if?” I’d love to really fulfil my potential, and no one can take the hard work away from me. That is what the degree represents. Come back to what you need to do. You need to get your expertise level status from the degrees, build a brand with your writing and podcasting, and then stay the course.

There are three statements I’d like to make reference to. In the first journal entry I asked myself, “How can you absolutely fall in love with the journey of becoming a clinical psychologist?” In the second journal I stated that doing the Masters of Counselling and Psychotherapy feels like I’m “taking the easy path.” In the third I wrote that the Clinical Psychology pathway is only, “three years away, and then I’ll have the rest of my life to rest if I really want to.” These three statements highlight how outcome oriented I was. Being outcome oriented, to me, is a toxic way to live (I know this now). It says, “I’ll be happy when . . .” Though I am grateful to be alive in the twenty-first century, I cannot help but resent how pervasive this incessant drive towards achievement is in the western world. We are obsessed with the destination (or am I bringing you into this when I shouldn’t be?). Not that having goals and striving towards ideals isn’t important; more so that getting to the end—of this task, this project, this deadline, this day, this year, this life—will leave us regretting not having truly lived in the moment. We’ll miss all the fun! Why pay for the movie ticket if you’re only going for the credits? We just don’t stop and smell the roses enough (please tell me if I’m unfairly roping you into this, won’t you!?).

The second point I’d like to highlight is that I conflated having fun with “taking the easy path.” I’ve come to recognise that being fulfilled and proud of who you are isn’t synonymous with bearing an impossible load. Rather, the key to life is harmonising ease and difficulty. It’s about choosing the right load and picking up the rock only you can. Only Arthur could pull out the sword from the stone. Likewise, our adventures are meant only for us to embark upon. In The Myth of Sisyphus, French existentialist writer Albert Camus wrote, “There is scarcely any passion without struggle.” Not too long ago, I’d have pedestaled struggle for the sake of itself. Now I recognise what Camus was saying—namely, that passion, a feeling of personal inspiration, can only come from choosing the appropriate struggle. Meaning doesn’t come from having a hard life; it ensues by being mission centred. I now try to ask myself, “What’s worth the struggle?”

Proving to Others We’re Good Enough

For many of us, our direction in life tends to meander and oscillate between doing what we know will bring us joy versus doing what we think we should do—or worse, what we think will prove to others we’re better than them. Unfortunately, I lost myself in the revenge fantasy for years, and this catalysed my relentless desire to hold the title of “Clinical Psychologist”. It would become an evening to remember when a therapist whom I used to work with called me one night to advise me to further my studies in psychology before seeing clients for counselling sessions.

At the time, I’d been creating content on YouTube about my personal experiences with mental health issues. Vlogging, blogging and interviewing soon became advice-giving and coaching. He could see the writing on the wall and warned/encouraged me to tether myself to learning and practising first. I know now that he only wanted the best for me. I know now that he was right. At the time, however, I felt dejected, despondent and enraged. It took me three hours of moping around the house without an aim—existentially anxious and overwhelmed—before an anger-inducing, ego-driven mission would begin to fuel me with energy and dark satisfaction. A quest to graduate university with a doctorate in Clinical Psychology emerged from the murky waters of my insecure subconscious. “This would show him”, I thought. This was a revenge fantasy like no other. Podcaster Chris Williamson had this to say when discussing the pitfalls of being motivated by a revenge fantasy:

“Okay, so I would hijack my own direction purely to try and prove somebody else wrong and somehow believe that that’s me taking control of my life? Are you kidding me? I’m allowing them to ventriloquise me through pain they didn’t even mean to give me.”

My god I resonated with this so deeply when I heard him say it. Because that’s exactly what happened! I was really enjoying creating content, writing and speaking about philosophical and psychological concepts. Then my old psychologist called me up to literally help me, and I lost myself down a road I wasn’t ever meant to walk down. But, like Williamson sarcastically alluded to, I thought I was in control because I was going to show him! Lesson and growth, blah blah blah.

The best thing you can do if you’re wanting to prove to others that you’re good enough is to stop what you’re doing and go meditate in a cave for nine months until you love yourself. Now, I get that most of us don’t have the means to move to the Himalayas, but the fact remains that ‘enough-ness’ won’t ever be found on the outside—or, more accurately, “doing” won’t ever be enough so long as what you’re doing isn’t an expression of who you truly are. The trouble is that most of us, including me, allow the resentment to calcify around the wound of not feeling good enough. That calcification grows and becomes what I call the “the sinister cycle of more”. For some, it might be that a parent neglected them, so they run desperately toward anything or anyone that remotely resembles love. For others who were pedestaled and trophied as children, they run away from anything and anyone who resemble external (meaningless, for them) validation, left to wander aimlessly in a reality that has no place for their authenticity. For me, the pain of hearing (not that this is what was meant to be conveyed) that I didn’t know enough led to writing three books, reading more books in three years than I’d read in my entire life, gaining a Diploma of Counselling and a Graduate Diploma of Psychological Science—and still, I didn’t feel like I knew enough. Again, I was playing the game I thought someone else wanted me to play.

If you’re wanting to prove to others that you’re enough—or worse, better than them—then you’ve lost. Trust me, I know. Though I learnt a lot about myself when guided by my revenge fantasy, I knew, deep down, that eventually coming back to my own path would have to be prioritised. This is when the choice about whether to continue pursuing the clinical versus the psychotherapeutic pathway emerged. It took me five months before I was able to rest upon the right decision. And though the indecisiveness emanated from the difficulty between choosing myself over what I thought others valued, it taught me a lot about how to approach tough decisions.

Cultivating the Skill of Decision Making

I’ve come to recognise that it isn’t the decision itself that is tough or hard, moreover the baggage we bring to it that fogs our clarity. Making decisions, like anything in life, is a skill. Just because you find yourself in an adult body, doesn’t mean you’re equipped with what you assume adult skills are. We all have different strengths and weaknesses and our childhoods, life circumstances, biological tendencies, interests and environments influence our competence across the vast domains of adulting. Making decisions is one of those domains and, I’d argue, a meta-domain that trickles down and moulds our capacity to be competent in other sub-domains. Like my client, you might not be ready to make a decision as significant as quitting or staying in your job; staying or leaving a relationship or choosing to live overseas indefinitely. That’s okay. Challenge yourself incrementally—work your way up. If you can adopt a single belief system in life, it should be that you can getter better at anything so long as you practice the relevant skills.

My sense of worthlessness came from my inability to let go of a trivial revenge fantasy and discontinue walking down a path that wasn’t ever laid out for me. The quest to find the holy grail of ‘enough-ness’ was, I thought, to be found in beating others at their own game. It wasn’t. And by the end, I was able to recognise that the only game you’re supposed to play is the one that feels right for you. This means that there is no competition because, if you’re playing the right game, you’re not up against anyone else. It’s your path and you’re path alone.

What Feels Heavy, What Feels Light?

The inability for me to decide which degree to study came not so much from my difficulty with decision making moreover my perpetuating imposter syndrome. Though it took me five months to make the right choice, what I learnt about decision-making proved invaluable. One of the best tools I used was to think back to times in my life when I was faced with tough decisions. I thought about what helped me make the right choice then, or what the influences were that motivated me to make the wrong choice. In so doing, I was able to recognise that when things are aligned, they flow. When things aren’t, they feel heavy and burdensome. By choosing the wrong path, life feels heavier and slow, like water doing its best to flow down a river with many obstacles in its path. Choosing the clinical psychology pathway felt like water trying to flow amidst debris after a flash flood in an urban environment. The water would no doubt be brown and murky, over-encumbered and weighed down by everything in its path. Sometimes, removing those obstacles is important, necessary and worth the pain—if the path is right for you. Other times, you have to stop, let go of your ego and say to yourself, “Yeah, this is someone else’s path, not mine.” Choosing the psychotherapy pathway, on the other hand, felt like white-water rafting! Challenging, yes. Inspiring, yes. Worth the effort—absolutely! That, compared to swimming in the contaminated Ganges was a no-brainer.

The happiest of us all aren’t those who have, know or achieve the most but those who flow the most. Flow isn’t synonymous with laziness. It’s picking the right challenge. If you’re facing a tough decision, ask yourself the following: “Am I actually being lazy or is this path just not for me?” In the end, I decided to do the master’s program because it looked interesting; it’s something I could really sink my teeth into. It wasn’t about the title and the accolades but the experience of studying itself. And that is how I know I’ve made the right choice. It feels good in my body.

If You’re Struggling to Make a Tough Decision

I gained a massive amount of insight by following Alex Hormozi’s advice. Hormozi is an incredibly successful entrepreneur and, in my opinion, one of the best out there at disseminating unbelievably practical information and ideas. Hormozi reverse-engineered the process. In the YouTube video I watched, he said, “What would I do if I was trying to make the worst decision possible?” He said that he’d have a terrible night’s sleep, go without eating, work himself into an incredibly scarce mindset and rush the decision. In so doing, he’d be tired, hungry and feeling significant lack in his life. In his words, “We are emotional decision makers. We need to control the extent to which our emotions influence our decision-making.”

So, to work back from the above, make your decision when you’ve slept and eaten well, when you don’t feel rushed and when you feel abundant with who you are and what you have. This made complete sense to me. Though my sleep and eating were on point, I felt incredibly unworthy and now realise that the pull to continue down the clinical pathway didn’t come from interest or passion but an attempt to make others (one man who was actually trying to help me) see me as an expert. What a waste of time!

It was starting to click. I wrote in my diary on the 17^th of August:

Think about how utterly concerned you are with yourself. That’s how everyone else is. No one cares if you’re a counsellor or a clinical psychologist . . . No one! This is all coming from fear. Work through the fear, work through the not ‘enough-ness’. Remember, in less than seventy years, no one will care you were even alive. You absolutely must do things to make you happy. That’s the game. Why do I want to be a Clinical Psychologist? Because it sounds impressive.

Let’s combine what we’ve learnt so far. The first thing here is that you don’t need to make a decision about university any time soon. There’s no rush with it. You could go back to university in nine years. The second thing here is that you don’t need to be a Clinical Psychologist to write bestselling books. You can be a Counsellor. Sure, it might help to add to your credentials with a Masters in Counselling and Psychotherapy—and the course looks interesting—but it’s not absolutely necessary.

When I’m on my deathbed I’d definitely regret not having studied further. I genuinely believe I have more to learn from others and want to keep studying because I enjoy writing. The question is: will I regret not having become a Psychologist versus a Psychotherapist? The Clinical Psychology pathway drains me; the psychotherapy pathway energises me. I’d learn way more doing psychotherapy because I’m genuinely interested in the coursework versus the psychology pathway where I’d be doing it purely for the title. Though the Clinical Psychology Master’s program might have some interesting elements to it, its emphasis on research over reflective practice would drain me immensely. And on my deathbed, wouldn’t the ultimate regret be not having lived a life true to myself? Why then should I double-down on what the insecure part of my brain thinks others value?

Death is Coming

Ultimately, what enabled me to find the courage to put myself first was what Australian writer and former palliative carer Bronnie Ware recognised as the biggest regret of the dying: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying became an international bestseller. It gave us all a glimpse into what truly matters when death comes knocking. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard”; “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings”; “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends”; and “I wish I had let myself be happier”, were the other four. Personally, the only one that matters—the regret that all the other regrets emanate from—is the inability to be courageous enough to live an authentic life.

This became the defining metric for me and one I strongly recommend you consider if/when faced with a tough decision in your life. And when you audit your life and decision making against what will really matter when you’re on your deathbed, you can then ask yourself a follow-up question that will most likely put the final nail in the coffin: “If I’m being honest, what do I know the answer to be already?” Being stuck on a decision is far more problematic than knowing what you have to do but being afraid to do it. I have to admit that the fear of not being enough still rears its ugly head from time to time, but as time passes, that fear—and subsequent insecurity—is losing its edge. I can honestly say that I know I’ve made the right decision.

So, think about dying. As writer and teacher John Wineland says, “Make death an ally”. Think about how you feel about yourself when you’re by yourself. Think about where you find your flow. Think about what feels heavy versus what feels light. And, when it’s all said and done (and I know this sounds painfully clichéd, like some arbitrary self-help line, so I apologise profusely!), do what makes you happy.

A Word of Thanks

I’d still be stuck on this decision if it weren’t for my wonderful powerhouse of a mum. She’s a true leader, someone who lifts others up and helps them become everything they could be by demanding the best from them. I know this firsthand. She won’t ever give you a fish, but she’ll teach you how to make a fishing rod (then she’ll tell you where the best spots are to fish!). She isn’t satisfied until you are with your own autonomy and independence.

Countless hours were spent going back-and-forth between the psychology and psychotherapy master’s program on the phone with her. Pages of texts, precious vibrations of the voice box offered in service of helping me decide what to do with my life. Five months it took, and not a single request to have me return the favour in some way, shape or form.

Mum, you never once took the struggle away from me but helped me stand on my own two feet. You’ve given me the credence that I’ve made this decision myself, not because someone else told me to. I feel stronger, more powerful and more independent because of it—and because of you. Thank you.