“The time will pass anyway, you can either spend it creating the life you want or spend it living the life you don’t want. The choice is yours.” ~ Unknown

I used to be the queen of indecisiveness. I blamed it on my Virgo sun sign. But, really, my inability to make decisions came from believing I didn’t really know what I wanted. Eventually though, I realized most of it boiled down to fear and I came up with these 5 important questions to help make every situation, and what I wanted in it, crystal clear.

These questions work for just about every type of decision we have to make, so start askin’ away and you might just be surprised to find out what you really want.

5 Questions to Ask Yourself When You’re Stuck

1. If no one else had any opinion about this, how would I feel?

It’s so easy to let what other people think cloud our own clarity. We often value other’s opinions over our own; and sometimes prefer to listen to others so we’re “off the hook” if it doesn’t work out perfectly. By filtering out other people’s opinions (or even smarter, not asking them in the first place), the voice that speaks to us most loudly about what we should do, will always be our own.

2. Is the fear of failure, or of success, standing in my way?

If failures were obsolete, we’d all be more aligned with our hearts. The fear of failure and humiliation are very real and very present during decision-making. Equally as important to pay attention to though, is the fear of success. When we succeed, our lives can change drastically too and sometimes, that’s just as scary. Gently looking at our fears is a great way to determine if our indecisiveness is because we’re scared to excel, or scared to fail.

3. If nobody’s feelings could get hurt, what would I do?

I have always had a major heavy heart about hurting other people’s feelings. This, I know, has steered me far from choosing what’s best for me, many times. Asking this question can be one of the most powerful. When we remove our fear of hurting others from the equation, we can usually quickly see what we truly want for ourselves.

4. If I wasn’t trying to be “practical,” what would I decide?

Feeling like we need to be “practical” and “reasonable” is often a limiting belief. Of course we do need to worry about some realities of life; but most times our limits are just created by rules we’ve been playing by our whole lives. And we never stop to think it might be good to change them. It’s ok to stretch our desires into the “fun” and “exciting” instead of the practical, extend beyond the safe boundaries of where we’ve been living, and know we can dream bigger for ourselves than we’ve been allowing ourselves to.

5. Will I survive even if it doesn’t work out?

Decisions are tough, but even when we believe we made the “wrong” one, we usually survive them anyway. One of the best ways to eliminate fear about figuring out and going after what we really want, is reminding ourselves that we’ll survive, even if things don’t turn our perfectly. Perspective is everything.

Now that you know what you really want, are you brave enough to choose it?