I stalled for two years on leaving Melbourne. I liked the city, I had friends and a job, and on paper everything was going well. I just did not feel at home there.
A decision you can't make often looks like that. Nothing is wrong enough to force it, but you can't escape that one thing just isn't quite right. What follows is what I ask people to do when they tell me they can't make a decision, and what I did in the end myself. It works whether the decision is about a job, a relationship or a place.
Why you can't make a decision you have thought about for months
Most people in this spot are not short of information. You have made the list. You have asked the people you trust. You have probably read about analysis paralysis and recognised yourself in it. More thinking is not what is missing.
What I see instead, in the people I work with, is a decision that has effectively been made already, and a person who stays in the middle ground anyway: testing it, negotiating with it. The middle ground still pays something: safety, support, a version of the future you are not ready to let go of. That is a real reason, and it is currently yours.
Staying paid me too, and I kept waiting for it to feel like home.
The waiting costs more than people expect, even though acting is not easy either. The back-and-forth uses up more energy than the decision would. You can feel clear on a Tuesday and be back at the start by Friday.
What I ask instead
When someone tells me they can't make a decision, I ask them to hold one of the futures in mind as if they had already decided and were living it, and to notice how that feels rather than think it through. Then one question: is this a feeling I would like more of, or less of?
Let that future go, hold the other future in the same way, and ask the same question. Give each one long enough to actually feel it. The decision is in there.
Ask the question about the future as if it is done, and you are living in it, not about the option as it stands today. Today, the middle ground can feel safer, because it pays you something.
The answer does not have to feel exciting. When I thought about moving to Amsterdam, it felt fairly neutral, somewhere worth exploring. What I did feel was clarity, and more of it than I had in Melbourne. Clarity counts as an answer.
What finally moved me was getting sick of it. There was the plain logic too: two years and I still did not feel at home. After I left, I had the best 15 years of my life in Amsterdam.
You can trust your gut and still be afraid
The gut can speak while you are still afraid. Call it your gut or your heart, it is already in there, and it would be odd not to feel fear if the life you have built is one it is time to leave.
So there is a second question after the first: am I ready to face what following the feeling would do? A lot of people need some encouragement here, especially when what they would be leaving is a life they built themselves and no longer want. If the answer is not yet, that is worth knowing, and it gives you something concrete to work on.
Try answering that as a number. Zero is staying exactly where you are. Ten is going with the feeling. Where are you? Then ask what would get you up one number, and answer by feeling into it rather than thinking about it.
You have probably made the classic list already, and it did not decide for you. If the decision has been stalled for a long time, that is a conversation more than a tool. I keep a free 45-minute call open for exactly that: peteradams.coach/call.
Try it this week. There is more in there than the list ever showed you.