Are you wrestling with a decision you are afraid to make?
Transitions are inevitable stages in our lives, if we are to believe William Bridges and Martha Beck. Yet we fear to make those transitions, and often continue our lives regretting our actions. But regrets only make things worse, because they cause us to doubt our instincts - which are ALWAYS right. Regrets also use hindsight, the refuge of the perfectionist, to judge past situations using present parameters, skills, and information.
According to Martha Beck (Finding Your Own North Star), we have two selves: an essential self that we repress as much as we can because of a lack of self-belief and social conditioning, and a social self that is driven by our childhood rearing, our peers, work colleagues and society at large. Our essential self might want to be a rocket scientist, for example, but our social self, with all those negative voices of disapproval and displeasure, will hammer home the point that we will never make rocket scientist: not brainy enough, being inadequate, simply stupid, not as good as our brothers or sisters, etc. So we deny our essential self its desire, making do with something else, while constantly feeling uneasy, insecure, anxious, unfulfilled and fearful, until our essential self can bear it no more and has to act. Usually with something tragic (like a breakdown or loss of job through redundancy), the loss of whatever we are clinging to. And so on...
To remedy that kind of unhappy situation, change comes in three forms: "shock, opportunity and transition". Shock is usually external to wake us up (like natural disasters), opportunities will pop up when we least expect them but are often huge challenges (and we live a life of regret when we ignore them), while transition begins slowly and unnoticeably and gathers momentum over time to something massive. But all three types have one process in common: death and rebirth.