How do we know what we really need: permission to pause.

I think that one of the main difficulties in life is knowing whether our decision-making corresponds to our needs, and how healthy those needs are.

Personally, I often struggle to know whether I am making the right decision or not. So, what can we do?

In my experience, we are all in the same boat.

To know whether our decision-making is aligned with our needs, we first and foremost need to know what our needs are. It sounds like a simple question, but I believe it is one of the most difficult questions we can ask ourselves.

We live in a society that is very task oriented. From a very young age, many of us learned that we must have goals to grow up and become someone in this world. That was certainly my experience. There is great value in building a life with aspirations and dreams that excite us and give us purpose.

However, after spending so much of our lives pursuing goals and striving to achieve them, we can easily forget to ask whether those goals are aligned with our real needs.

I think it is in those moments of uncertainty that we have an opportunity to pause and reflect:

“What is going on here?”

“Why am I no longer happy doing what I am doing?”

“Why do I feel so stressed about making this decision when, in the past, I would not even have hesitated?”

Or perhaps the simplest question of all:

“I genuinely do not know what to do.”

Knowing whether we are making the right decision is, as I mentioned above, incredibly challenging. So how can we help ourselves through these moments of uncertainty?

The answer is not an easy one, and, personally, it is a question I genuinely enjoy exploring.

I think it has less to do with relying solely on our prefrontal cortex to find the right solution, and more to do with pausing. Yes, simply pausing… and allowing the answer to come a little closer to us.

It may sound philosophical. To some people it may even sound naïve or overly idealistic. But I must say that, in my experience, it can be remarkably helpful.

When we allow our uncertainty to exist without immediately trying to solve it, we are not ignoring it. Rather, we are giving ourselves the space to breathe and trusting that, in time, our deeper needs will become clearer. Those needs may, or may not, have anything to do with the goals and ambitions we have been pursuing.

And perhaps that is the real challenge.

The challenge is allowing ourselves the time we genuinely need to discover what our needs are in any given situation.

I think that is particularly difficult in today’s fast-paced world, where we are constantly expected to make decisions quickly and efficiently.

Perhaps giving ourselves permission to pause is not a sign of indecision after all.

Perhaps it is simply the beginning of listening to ourselves.

I wish you all the best.

Carlos Monteiro