Why You Can't Make Decisions (And How To Stop Being Stuck)

Neuroscience shows that one of the biggest differences between successful people and everyone else isn't intelligence. It is their tolerance for uncertainty. If you struggle to make a decision, start a business, leave a relationship, move somewhere new, or finally go after the dream that you have always wanted, this is why. It's not that you're lazy or procrastinating or undisciplined. It's that you're waiting for certainty. Before you act. You're waiting until you feel ready, or you have all of the information, or you have the perfect formula before you actually go and do it. I see this all the time in the people that I coach, in my friends, and in people who say they want to change their lives. Everyone wants the perfect formula for getting it right. They want to know that this is what works. But the truth is that life doesn't work that way. And if you're not willing to get it wrong, you are never going to get it at all. This is the trap that so many people live in. In this video, I'm going to explain to you the neuroscience behind why your brain resists uncertainty, why this keeps you stuck, and most importantly, how to train yourself to make decisions, take action, and feel comfortable in the uncertainty that is life. And if you're new here, hi, I'm Em. I'm a trained neuroscientist. I've got 2 degrees in neuroscience as well as many years of research experience in the lab. I am now an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, and coach to people all over the world. I think we're in over 55 countries now, and I am here to help you rewire your brain, level up, and live your best life. Now let's dive into the neuroscience of this first, because understanding what's going on in the brain always helps me sort of overcome whatever's keeping me stuck in any moment. From the brain's perspective, it's pretty simple. Predictability feels safe. Okay? Your brain would rather keep you in what feels normal and familiar and predictable, even if what is normal, familiar, and predictable isn't what you want, because your brain knows that you can survive this. Familiar discomfort is safer than unfamiliar discomfort. Making a decision that changes your life, whether it be to start a business, leave a relationship, or get into a relationship, move somewhere new. These are decisions that bring you into uncertainty. I've said it once and I'm gonna say it again. Growth happens in the unfamiliar. It happens in the discomfort. So getting uncomfortable and moving into the unknown, moving into uncertainty is actually extremely important for growth, for your ability to actually live the life that you want. If you think about your dreams right now, think about the thing that you really want deep down, it probably will require you move into uncertainty and move into the unfamiliar or the uncomfortable. Now, many people have a very low tolerance for uncertainty. This is where the indecision comes in. This is where the overthinking comes in. This is where we wait. And we wait and we gather information and we ask other people's opinions and we think about all these things and we, and we're patient and we think that waiting and studying and, and learning more is the answer. But the problem is that this level of indecision can actually burn cognitive resources. Every unresolved choice remains open in your working memory, which increases mental load. If you've ever been working on a project for an extended period of time and then finally complete it, and all of a sudden you feel like this weight has been lifted off of you, it's the exact same thing. Now, before we move into the solutions of how to make decisions and how to move into the unknown and the unfamiliar and actually start to achieve your goals and dreams, I wanna give you an example. Let's say you walk into a coffee shop, you want a matcha, and they have many different flavors of matcha. They've got mango, ube, coconut, strawberry, whatever. I personally love an ube strawberry puree, but that's not besides the point. You stand there at the counter and you can't decide. They all sound good. You're really in the mood for a tropical fruit and there are so many options, and you're on vacation in Hawaii and there are so many different Hawaiian-only special flavors that you can only get at this one coffee shop. And so you stand there in indecision and you weigh all of the options and then you really can't decide. So you start asking the people that work there, what's your favorite? What do you think? Maybe there's people in the coffee shop that have ordered drinks and you ask them, which one do you like? Do you like that flavor? Did you like the ube that you just ordered? And you start asking everyone's opinions. Now you're sitting there and you just cannot figure out which matcha you would like the best. And rather than just sending it and trying it, whichever flavor, You don't order a matcha because you aren't 100% sure which one you would like the best. Now, this might sound crazy to you, right? You're like, well, just order a flavor and try it. And if you don't like it, order a different one. Like, it's not that big of a deal, right? It's not that deep. This is the way that so many people live their lives. I know someone who has been talking about wanting to move to a coast, a beach town, for a year and a half. But they are unsure which coast they wanna live on, whether it be the West Coast or the East Coast, right? And they've called all the people, they've talked to people, they've visited both, just can't decide which one they would like living in better. Immediately I think to myself, you could have lived in both places by now and you would know for sure which one that you would like better because you would've done it and lived it and experienced it. Now, this is the way life works. Life rarely gives us certainty before we act. This is why there's that saying, hindsight is 20/20. Everything is clearer in hindsight, right? That's because certainty, the answers, they come after we take action, not before. We don't get the answers and the clarity and the certainty from sitting around wondering and thinking and gathering other people's opinions and researching online, calling it research, but really it's just procrastination and indecision and the inability to handle uncertainty. Now, The irony is that indecision, it creates the exact thing that many people are trying to avoid, which is lost time. Now let's dive into these solutions here because decisiveness and the willingness to act and really move toward chasing your goals and dreams can be cultivated by developing self-trust, increasing your tolerance for uncertainty, and getting clearer on who you want to to be. Now let's dive into the solutions here because decisiveness and the willingness to act and really take action toward your goals and dreams can be cultivated by developing an increased level of self-trust, increasing your tolerance for uncertainty, and getting clearer on who you want to become. Solution number 1 to indecision and an unwillingness to take action is self-trust. Self-trust does not mean that you believe that you will make the right decision. It doesn't mean that you trust yourself to make the right decision. It means that you trust that you will be okay even if you make the wrong one. That's really the key difference here. Self-trust is the belief that you can handle whatever happens next. Now, how do you build self-trust? You might be wondering. The first is through developing a relationship, a connection to your intuition, to your own inner guidance system. I personally did this through a practice that I sort of made up called intuitive hiking, where whenever I was in my PhD living in Tucson, I would go hiking. I would I would go out into the mountains and I would, I would wanna get to this one part of the mountain and I would go off trail. I was in, I lived near this like mountain park where it was okay to kind of just like go off trail. So I would go off trail and I would try to get to the top and then I would try to get back to my car without looking at Google Maps. In the beginning, I would check the maps before I got back to my car and every single time I was like, damn it, I shouldn't have checked the map because I was on the right path. Over time I stopped checking the map. And started trusting my own intuition. There are many ways to practice listening to your own intuition, but it might be easier to start small. Start with small choices like what you're going to wear today or what you're going to eat. Maybe rather than sticking to a specific diet, start asking yourself, what is my body actually calling me to eat right now? Or maybe when you are in your morning meditations every morning, you ask your intuition a question like, what does my body need today? Or what is there for me to do? Like, what am I being called to do today? What sort of energy do I need to call in? Start listening. Listening to your own intuition. Another way to build self-trust is to stop avoiding discomfort. If you're looking for a secret formula to automatically trust yourself, really the answer is to start doing difficult things that you're not sure that you can do. Stop avoiding discomfort, right? When I was on that trail, I wasn't sure that I'd be able to get back to my car, but I just, I just tried and I let myself fail. Another way to build self-trust is to keep your word to yourself. Do the things that you say that you are going to do. If you have a friend or you're in a relationship with someone and they're always telling you one thing and doing another, what are you gonna believe? Their words or their actions? Your brain works the exact same way. You can do all of the affirmations and tell, but if you're, if you're telling yourself, yeah, I'm gonna do that morning routine tomorrow morning. Yeah, I'm gonna start meditating. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. And you don't do it. You don't follow it up with action. Your brain doesn't trust you. And then you don't trust yourself. So start keeping your word to yourself. That might be one of the fastest and best ways to start building self-trust. And start small. Make small promises to yourself and keep them. Your brain learns really well through what are called prediction error signals. We learn through feedback. Thinking about doing something does not create feedback. Action does. So start doing things. Do things that you don't feel comfortable doing. Get outside of your comfort zone. The small things, the small things every single day will build up and help you start to do the big things like moving to a new city or starting a business or getting into or out of a specific relationship. Solution number 2 will be a game changer and actually will change your life if you do just this one thing, and it is to improve your relationship with uncertainty. When it comes to uncertainty and the unknown, you really have two choices. You can be afraid of it. You can look at the future and the unknown and the uncertainty and be afraid of what might happen, of failure. Or you can look at uncertainty and the unknown and let it make you feel excited. Personally, for me, the unknown and uncertainty is extremely exciting. If you are trying to control every single outcome and trying to figure out everything that's gonna happen and try to figure out all the little details before you do something, before you make a decision, you leave no room for divine intervention, you leave no room for the universe or God to do God's work. Like you leave no room for that. If you are trying to control every outcome and your entire path, life can be so much greater than you could ever imagine. If you just relinquish control over the path, over the timeline, it can be so much better than you could even dream. If you just stop trying to micromanage every single detail and you started listening to your intuition and following your heart. When I first moved into the world of entrepreneurship, I had a whiteboard full of ideas and I just didn't know which one was gonna work the best. All these different ideas to make money. I had no— I was brand new to this world. I had just left academia, got my master's in neuroscience, and I only knew academia and research. And I went into entrepreneurship, content creation, all of this. I had no idea what I was doing. I had all of these different ideas to make content, but I was consulting for a woman and I asked her after our session, after I finished consulting for her, cuz she had been in business for a long time. And I said to her, I said, I have all these ideas and I just don't know which one's gonna work the best. I don't know which one is gonna make me the most money. She said, stop trying to figure out which one is gonna work the best and do the one that excites you the most, because that's the thing that you're gonna make work the best. So many people sit around and just think to themselves, I don't know which one I'm gonna like the best. I don't know which is gonna work the best. I don't know. The truth is that you're never gonna know, and you might end up doing all of them. If I'm being honest, a lot of those things on the whiteboard, I have since done many of those things. But if I sat around just trying to figure out which one was gonna work from the beginning, I never would've done anything and I would have no information. But instead, I've now done so many of the things on that list that I created years ago because I just started and I allowed myself to get it wrong. I need you to remember that the goal might not always be to make the right decision, to make the perfect decision. The goal is to become someone who isn't afraid to make the wrong decision. If you are afraid of making the wrong choice, you will sit in indecision and just continue to waste time. And before you know it, months and years will have gone by and you will have done nothing. And I say this so passionately because so many People in my life have been struggling with this exact same thing, and that is what called me to make this video. I was speaking at UCLA to a group of students about content creation and the business side of it and all of that. And something that I realized after speaking there was that a lot of the questions that I received were, were really underneath the surface level about creating certainty. They wanted to know for sure this was gonna work. Like, what is the right time? What's the right, you know, way to post? What is, what is the right camera? What is the right mic? What is the right lighting? Like, well, like, what is the right way to do it? They wanted this like perfect answer, this perfect formula before they went and did it. And it kept so many of them from starting. And the truth is that if they just would've started creating the content, they would have all of these answers by now. Because the truth is that there is really no one-size-fits-all approach, and that's the way that life works as well. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to life. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to business or content creation or any of that. What works for one person is not necessarily gonna work for another. You have to learn what works for you, and the only way to do that is through action and through willingness to get it wrong. Now, I would be remiss if I did not take this a little spiritual right now. And talk about my, one of my favorite sayings, and that it is trust and surrender. Trust and surrender has gotten me through so many times of extreme uncertainty. I have moved across the country twice alone where I knew absolutely no one. First time when I went to start my PhD, and the second time when I moved across the country to live on Miami Beach because that had always been a dream of mine. I knew zero people both times. And I remember when I first moved to Arizona to start grad school, I had sticky notes all over the walls, all over the doors that said trust and surrender. And there were so many times where I relied on that, where I was in such uncertainty. I didn't know what was gonna happen. I didn't know if it was gonna work out, but I remembered to trust and surrender. I remembered that there is an infinite intelligence a knowing that, an awareness that is far beyond our perception and our capabilities. And just to back that up with science here, like we know for a fact that there are animals that can sense, perceive, and detect realms, dimensions of reality that we cannot with our human brain. There are animals that can perceive different spectrums of light, the UV spectrum. There are animals that can detect electromagnetic fields. We know that for a fact that there are things that we cannot perceive So what don't we know, right? And so knowing that I don't know everything and knowing that there are levels to this world that I have no way to perceive and truly understand with this human brain that I have, knowing that allows me to trust and surrender. Now, of course, I've had many spiritual experiences as well where I have kind of experienced these higher realms for myself, and that has allowed me to trust and Trust and surrender on an even deeper level. Trust and surrender is a mantra that has gotten me through so many times, and many of the students that I coach have shared with me that trust and surrender has completely changed our lives. And I've actually had multiple people tell me that they wanna get trust and surrender tattooed on them because it has made that big of a difference in their lives. And it, I wanna get it tatted on me as well. It's actually gonna be my next tattoo because it, it has completely changed my life. But I think that trusting And surrendering in the unknown and relinquishing, letting go of control, it really does allow you to take the weight and the pressure off and breathe and follow your heart and move from fear to love, fear to maybe even excitement for what's to come. And when you can move with that energy, reality really does start showing up and shifting for you. Solution number 3 is alignment. It is nearly impossible to make good decisions and make choices and take action towards the life that you want if you do not have extreme clarity about who you are and who you wanna become. If you know who you wanna become, making choices is easy. If you know the life that you wanna live, if you've seen it, if you, if you can close your eyes and you can see the future that you wanna live, making choices become simple because it's like, does this expand me? Does it contract me? Does it energize me or does it drain me? Does it align with who I am becoming? Does it align with who I'm being called to become? And again, maybe you don't know 100%, and that's where you feel the uncertainty and do it anyway, because uncertainty isn't something to fear. It is something to be excited about. Now, I feel like a broken record talking about this topic of alignment and choosing who you wanna become and having a very clear description of who the version of you that has it all is, but that is because it is that important. Having a clear description of who the version of you who has it all is, that will completely change your life. It'll allow you to make decisions like that. I had a client who recently told me that, that this one thing, asking herself, what would my highest self do, changed her life. It has allowed her to make choices, make decisions, take action in a way that she has never been able to, to take action before because she has a very clear description of who her highest self is. And then in, in the face of information, of choices. She knows what her highest self would do, and she makes that decision. And I want to leave you with this: not making a decision is a decision. It is a decision to stay exactly where you are at, exactly where you are right now. You cannot say that you want a different life while continuing to choose the same reality that you are living in every single day. If you want your life to look different, you have to choose differently. Your life is waiting on You. Now, if you wanna rewire your brain, discover who your highest self truly is, rewire your habits, regulate your nervous system, discover who you truly are on a soul level, find your purpose, and so much more, then I highly encourage you to go to the description and click the link to learn more about my coaching program, MindCraft, and, and my community. I also host a free masterclass where I describe the entire process of becoming the version of you who has it all. And last but not least, I am going on tour. If you are interested in seeing me live and in person, there is a link to RSVP for your city. I highly encourage you to do that because those RSVPs are how we are going to decide which cities to go to. With all that being said, I'm sending you so much love. I'm rooting for you. You got this. You can do it. Now, please just go do it. Make the decision and allow yourself to get it wrong. I'll see you in the next video. Bye!