One reputation I have with my family is not a very positive
one. I am constantly told that I am unable to make a decision. Anything from
what movie we watch to where we go out to eat to where we go on vacation, I
just don’t want to get involved. When a decision affects others equally or more
than it affects me, I like to remove myself from the decision-making process. I
developed this reputation over time, because being in the middle child of two
brothers means that I don’t really have to make a decision. I was always able
to just ask one of my brothers to make the decision, or say ‘I don’t know/care’
and have the decision made for me. I’ve never been one to be too strongly
opinionated, I prefer to just go with the flow and sit back and let others
decide things that don’t have a big effect on me.
While I’ve been doing this for basically my entire life, my
family has only recently caught on within the past couple of years. They think it’s
pretty funny most of the time, and try to use it against me, by forcing me to decide
things. This is fair however, because I had been using it to my advantage for a
while, by saying, every now and then, that it was my turn to pick where we eat when
there was some place I really wanted to eat. However, to this day I try to take
as little responsibility as possible, and my family tries to get me to make
every decision possible, and it balances out somewhere in the middle.
I try to work on making decisions, every once in a while but
for the most part being non-committal hasn’t necessarily negatively impacted me
in any major way. It’s not like I hate making decisions, it’s really just that I
prefer not to make them when they have little effect on me and affect others. Most
of the time it’s a benefit that I’m not expected to take responsibility for any
of the decisions made. Although when it does backfire and they try to force me
to make a decision, it’s not always the best. Overall, while most would see it
as a negative, I feel my reputation for being indecisive is fairly neutral and
benign.
You might benefit from reading this piece from today's Chicago Tribune about the problems that helicopter parents create in their children. Trying to apply that story to your situation, the issue is whether you are making your own choices in other situations where your family is not present or whether you rely on the family even then, via text messaging or phone calls, or some other mechanism. The problem, then, is not the consequences of the immediate decision at hand, which seems to be how you've evaluated your behavior in this post. The problem is that you don't learn how to make good decisions, by considering the consequences of the decisions you do make. There is learning by doing here. So if you don't do, you don't learn.
ReplyDeleteThis may be of little consequence when it comes to what to order at a restaurant or which movie to see with your friends. But it may become a much bigger deal for other life decisions, such as what job offer to accept, whether to trust somebody in a high stakes situation, or how to direct you own lifelong learning after you graduate.
Now a bit about me to commiserate. There are many things I do care about intensely, where I will exercise quite a bit of decision making authority. There are other things I simply don't care about at all, such as how our house has been designed. My wife did that entirely to her tastes. I was not involved in the choices, other than about the overall cost. If you can partition your world into those decisions that you do care about and those you don't, that might not be so bad, as long as each side of the partition has some substance to it. If the part which has the decisions you do care about is rather meager, I'd work on changing that if I were you, lest you learn the lesson that you need to do that the hard way and suffer some rather bad consequence because you didn't exert enough control of the process.
At the least, it is something to think through while you can, before that bad consequence has manifest and when you can still do something to prevent it from happening.