If you’ve had a chance to view my past few blog posts, you know I’ve been writing about limiting beliefs. This week, we’re continuing that conversation by focusing on uncertainty and regret – something that many women are surprised to experience when on the brink of big things in their career.

I often work with women who tell me they feel like that proverbial deer in the headlights. They just don’t know what to set their sights on next, and they feel like they’re going to get it wrong.

That’s an incredibly debilitating feeling. Overwhelmed by the potential paths ahead, they can’t choose one and move forward.

What causes their hesitation? It’s not just the cornucopia of options ahead of them. It’s also regret about how they came to be in their current position.

I worked with a woman in this exact situation. She was stuck choosing what her Plan A was going to be, and just wanted someone to tell her what to do. She regretted the career choices she had made up until that point and just saw closed doors everywhere.

It’s a simple calculation that happens to many women in the face of uncertainty: unhappy with where they are, they look back at past decisions with regret, then worry about making decisions that will lead them even further away from our goals.

In coaching sessions with my client, we realized that this combination of regret and worry was slowing her down. She needed to stop over researching potential options and expressing despair about the situation, and instead choose the best option at her fingertips—and then go get it.

Limiting beliefs love to keep us looking backwards instead of looking forwards.

This a difficult subject for my clients to grasp, but it’s an important one: there are no right answers. Not in your in career, not in design, and not in life — but there is a right attitude.

When we can recognize that there are no guarantees in life, but we still move forward with Plan A, what we most want and hope becomes possible for us. That’s when we can get creative and crafty about how we’re going to achieve our goals, and then move our little bums to get there. If we hit obstacles, we learn from them and use that knowledge to refine our strategy.

And if all else fails, we still have Plan B as a backup.

Either way, the important thing to remember is that not making a decision is in fact a decision. It means staying in the place you are, rather than pushing forward with the work that you know you’re meant to do.

Struggling with option overwhelm, or noticing other signs that you’re not reaching your goals? My Next Level coaching program opens for registration in January. Let’s chat and see if it’s the right fit for you.