CHAPTER 8

The Right Decision Often Feels Wrong

Recently, a listener of the The Mel Robbins Podcast wrote to me with this question:

Just reading the question, I could feel my heart seize. I bet yours did too. When the stakes feel this high, the right answer always feels wrong.

On the surface, the answer is simple, even though it doesn’t feel like it. He should call it off. If you’re dreading the wedding, you are making a mistake. If you can’t stop thinking about calling it off, then you should.

Just because the right decision seems clear, doesn’t always mean it’s an easy decision to make. That’s because the human experience is largely an emotional one.

What seems logical on the surface doesn’t feel logical when you know it will cause other people a lot of pain.

Too often in life, when you’re in that dilemma, you choose to inflict the pain on yourself instead of making a decision that you know is right for you but is going to be painful for other people to accept.

The groom who wrote to me knows, intellectually, what he needs to do. The problem is his emotions. He wrote to me because he is seeking reassurance. He has absolutely no idea how to handle what he’s feeling, or how to deal with the emotional upset it will trigger in other people.

Agonizing over a difficult decision is a mentally healthy response to a very difficult situation. The fact that he is worried about other people is a sign that he’s a good person.

There will be many times in your life when people are going to be mad, disappointed, or heartbroken by the things you say or do. There just will be. You have to be able to separate yourself from your emotions and the emotional reactions of others when you’re determining the right decision to make.

You can’t let your emotions drive your decisions, because they will often stop you from making the right decisions.

This is a hell of a lot more difficult than it seems. It can be devastating to make the right decisions. It can be absolutely heartbreaking to be honest with someone. It can feel like that decision might destroy you from the inside out, especially when it hurts someone you love.

Just take the situation with our groom who wants to call off his wedding and doesn’t know how. You probably felt a wave of dread wash over you as you read through the message, and you and I don’t even know this person.

That’s how powerful emotions are.

You feel the weight in your chest as you picture him sitting his fiancée down and saying, “We have to talk.” You can imagine him making the phone call and telling his parents. You can almost hear the sobbing as his fiancée buries her face into her hands. Your heart tightens as you picture the grief clogging her throat when she calls her parents. You can feel the anger swelling up in her dad’s chest as he experiences the heartbreak of his baby girl. “Dad, he ended it,” she might say. “He called off the wedding.”

You’re just reading and thinking about the situation, and it’s creating an emotional reaction inside of you. And this is why letting people down and breaking their hearts is one of the hardest things you’ll have to do in life.

Adults are allowed to feel how they’re going to feel—and they’re allowed to be angry. Broken. Devastated. Overwhelmed. Embarrassed. And extremely pissed off at you.

You can’t control it.

But you try to control it by avoiding the truth. We’ve all done this. It’s why you’ve found yourself staying in the wrong relationships or the wrong jobs or the wrong patterns of behavior for years.

It’s why you still haven’t called out your friend for talking behind your back, or confronted your mom, or taken a leave of absence, or confessed to your best friend that you are in love with them.

It feels easier to avoid it, because avoiding it means that you don’t have to face it. But easier now makes it way harder later. Avoiding the hard conversations now won’t make them any better next year.

In fact, from experience I can tell you that the longer you wait, the more painful it gets. Choosing not to do what’s right for you will do nothing but cause you more pain.

So, did the groom call off the wedding? I don’t know. Do I hope he did? Yes. I hope so for his sake, and I hope so for hers. Everyone deserves to be with someone who wants to be with them.

In life the most courageous, honorable, and kind thing to do is tell someone you don’t want to be with them. It’s hard to be honest, especially when other people are emotionally immature.

You don’t want to deal with their guilt, venting, and bad moods, so you just avoid them. You’re not avoiding confrontation—you’re avoiding someone else’s emotions. The only conflict is the conflict you’re going to feel internally about how your decisions are going to impact other people emotionally and how they’re going to react.

It’s why people stay in marriages for a decade that they know have ended. It’s why people stay in jobs for too long. It’s why people pick majors and career paths and stay in them because they’re afraid of making a decision that’s going to cause someone else to feel something. And if you understand that emotions are a normal part of life, and that adults are allowed to feel the ups and downs and can survive it, you would be more courageous. It’s not your job to protect everybody else from feeling emotions. Your job and responsibility is to live your life in a way that is aligned with your values, and in a way that gets you.

Sometimes that’s going to hurt someone. It’s going to disappoint them. It’s going to cause pain or heartbreak knowing that your decision will hurt someone else—and it’s going to be one of the hardest things you’re going to do in life. When I know my actions may disappoint or upset someone, I find it helpful to remember Dr. Damour’s framing that negative emotions are a mentally healthy response to life’s upsets.

People are allowed to be upset when you change your mind, and disappointed or heartbroken when you break up. People are allowed to be depressed when they lose their job.

So how do you do this, and how do you manage the excruciating level of guilt and discomfort YOU are going to feel when you make a hard decision that you know is the right decision for you?

Learn to Ride the Emotional Wave

What’s helped me is thinking about emotional discomfort like learning to ride a wave in the ocean. Because, at their core, emotions are like waves. They rise, they fall.

Some days, your life is going to be steady, still, and calm. Other days, like the day you call off the wedding, there’s a hurricane that hits, and you’re going to feel like you’re drowning. But you will not drown.

Will it suck to call off the wedding? Yes. Will it be one of the most painful experiences of your life? Yes. Will her dad want to kill you? Definitely, for at least a few months. Will your parents lose their deposit and be angry with you? Yes. Will their hearts break because they love your fiancée too? Yes.

They’re going to grieve the loss of what they thought would have been great.

And then slowly, as you Let Them feel whatever they need to feel, and you let yourself feel whatever you need to feel, and you don’t try to control it or avoid it or change it, life has a way of going back to a new normal.

Eventually your parents will understand not only why you made the decision, but they will also be proud of you for having the bravery to do it. Let Them.

Let Me is the part where you remind yourself that this too shall pass. You are stronger than anyone else’s emotional reaction. Let Them have their opinions. Let Them have their reactions. Let Me have mine. Let your emotions rise up and give yourself the space to process your emotions too.

Never let someone else’s emotional reactions keep you from making the hard decision. Let Me be honest with myself and others. Let Me do the hard thing that is painful now, because it is the right thing to do and will save me from so much pain later. Let Me give myself the opportunity to have the life I deserve.

So let’s summarize what you have learned about dealing with someone else’s emotional reactions. Right now, you allow other people’s emotional reactions to dictate your choices. The Let Them Theory empowers you to take a step back when another adult is acting like a child.

1. Problem: You’re allowing other people’s emotional immaturity to have power over your life. You’re allowing somone else’s outbursts, guilt trips, and reactions to dictate your actions, leading you to constantly manage their emotions rather than focusing on your own. This means you’re always prioritizing the emotional needs of others at the expense of your own happiness.
2. Truth: Other people’s emotional reactions are not your responsibility to manage. You cannot control how others feel or respond; nor can you fix their emotional immaturity. Most adults have the emotional capacity of an eight-year-old and you can’t change that.
3. Solution: Using the Let Them Theory, you can stay in control even when an adult is acting like a child and having an emotional outburst. Make the right decisions for you, even if they make other people upset. You maintain your power when you stop taking on the burden of others’ emotions and act in a way that aligns with your values.

When you say Let Them, you give others the space to experience their emotions without making it your responsibility to manage or fix them. When you say Let Me, you find the courage to make the right decisions for you, even if it will feel wrong to others.

It’s time to grow up and act like a mature adult.