Stay or Go Decisions

What if you’re currently tolerating a situation you don’t want, but you’re unclear about where to go next? What if your current job, relationship, or lifestyle is a mismatch for you, but you feel hesitant to leave it behind? Imagine being stuck on an island, but you don’t like it there. It’s too small. The weather is often bad. And it smells like rotting fish. And suppose that when you climb to the tallest point on this island and look around, all you can see is the vastness of the sea in every direction. What do you do? Well, you have two options. You can stay or you can leave. If you stay you’ll survive, but you’ll be grudgingly tolerating an undesirable situation for the rest of your life. You’ll never be very happy there. You’ll always wonder what it would have been like to leave and if you could have found something better. And you’ll die on that island still wondering what could have been. If you build a raft and try to sail away from the island, you may encounter different problems. How will you survive the journey? How will you navigate? What if you get lost at sea? What if you die of thirst or starvation or exposure? What if you run into a storm or get attacked by sharks? There’s no guarantee that you’ll survive. It may have been safer to stay. This framing is similar to how many people approach tricky stay-or-go decisions. They frame it as something that requires a leap of faith into the risky unknown – an unknown filled w...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Creating Reality Emotions Lifestyle Source Type: blogs