Decision Time

Not long ago, I experienced some discomfort due to cognitive dissonance. I was looking through the course selection sheet for next year and was met with many choices. As anyone would, I weighed all of my options and considered the pros and cons of each. After making the decision to take a significant number of challenging courses, I was left with an uneasy feeling – one that told me I would suffer next year. I disregarded this feeling because I had the same predicament last year, made similar choices and was met with this same apprehensive feeling. This feeling told me that I had willingly subjected myself to a stressful year, however it turned out that the felling was wrong. This experience has made me consider my “gut-feeling” and its tendency to be incorrect. It was wrong on that one instance, but what if it is right this time, or the next? This contemplation has left another moment for cognitive dissonance to appear and shine doubt on both choices – the choice on whether or not to trust that “gut-feeling” and when, since you don’t exactly have a gut-feeling telling you when to trust your gut-feeling. So how do you know when that feeling will be right? I suppose the answer is that you never know if that feeling is right or wrong until you take the leap and proceed with the task at hand. Cognitive dissonance was the feeling that told me I had to make a choice and my gut feeling told me that, either way, there would be consequences; after these two feelings, there is one more – a wave of anxiety than comes just before you find out if you made the right choice or not. That ten-second trepidation is the worst of the three feelings, in my opinion. It’s the cause for people to get cold feet and back out of a potentially important task. After (or during) the anxiety, the cycle repeats – you are forced to choose between following a task through or backing out (cognitive dissonance), which is followed up with your gut feeling that says something along the lines of, “You can’t back out now! You’re so close!” or, “You’ll only make a fool of yourself! It’s a huge mistake!” and lastly, the feeling of apprehension. The trick is knowing when to trust your feelings and when to just go with the flow.

Every choice we make leads us down a different road and we often get stuck between the decision to go left, right or in some diagonal direction. It would appear that, sometimes, there is no right choice – only a lot of different options. Having these choices leaves us uneasy as we wait to find out the conclusion of our predicament and discover any consequences we will be forced to face. Each road leads to a separate destination, some are unwanted and even bit scary, while others take us straight to our goals. We just hope that if we go down the wrong road there will be a place to take a U-turn or someone to help us find a detour back to the road we wanted to take. And, every now and then, all we need is a bit of good luck.