I see it every day.  I do it myself.  We all do.  We get stuck sitting on the fence.  It's comfortable for a while, but then it starts to hurt and most often we tend to go back down the way we came.  It's familiar. That doesn't make it right. But it doesn't seem to make it wrong either. Kind of like that old saying "the Devil you know verses the Devil you don't."  But it is wrong.  Dead wrong.  Once you're up on the fence the best thing to do is to crawl down the other side. It took some work to get up on the fence. At a minimum it took a decision and generally making a decision is the hardest part. So once you're there it makes no sense to go back the way you came. Now if you were climbing a fence and when you got to the top a rabid dog stood snarling at you, then a retreat makes sense.  But what if you reached the top and upon looking down it looked a bit more challenging than you had thought or even perhaps carefully calculated.  Go for it!  Be committed.  There was a reason you started the "climb".

Sitting on the fence is all about decisions.  We make hundreds of decisions every day and most are automatic so that's easy. It's the ones that give us pause that result in us sitting on top the proverbial fence. And it seems that we're not getting better at making decisions. There are a number of reasons. We're busy. Natural inertia - resistance. And the really big one; too much information. Yep. It turns out the more we learn, the harder it is to make a decision. Even worse, we might actually make poorer decisions when we have more information at hand.

I find that this problem is exasperated by sales people; even good ones that are sincerely trying to help you.  They believe that more information will help you feel at ease and lessen your uncertainty. Frankly they are just making matters worse. Of course we are really the problem. We tend to ask for more and more information, because its available. We need to guard against searching for that one product or solution that will be the "perfect" one; the one that means we will be thrilled with the decision. Rather we need to relax. We need to recognize that there are probably lots of right solutions, choices and products that work and move on. People at the top of every profession share one quality - they get things done. This ability supersedes intelligence, talent and connections and has greater influence in determining your salary, your speed of advancement and satisfaction with your chosen work. 

You can of course make decisions quicker even with the bombardment of choices and resulting consequences. Spending less time atop the fence is a learned trait. And just because you fall off the fence sometimes doesn't mean you shouldn't continue to cross over it quickly. The more often you do it the more the voice in your head reinforces your actions and kills fear. Action is the best cure for fear. So while we think it would make our life better if every time we started to climb a fence we did so with a guarantee that what we expected on the other side was there, that's not really helpful. We need the fear of climbing and the unknown on the other side. It's how we grow. So come on up and over. Choose something today that you've been meaning to make a decision about and quit thinking and researching and take action and if you're so inclined, drop me a note and let me know how it feels!