Quit the stable job for a startup opportunity? Stay in the city or move closer to family? Chris had spreadsheets, advice from everyone, and still couldn't decide. The answer wasn't in the data. It was in what he kept saying out loud.
Chris is 30. He has a good job at a big company. Stable, respectable, boring. Then a friend offered him a role at their startup. Less money, more risk, potentially more reward. And his parents keep asking when he's moving back home.
He made pro/con lists. He ran the financial numbers. He asked friends, mentors, his partner, random people on Reddit. Everyone had opinions. The data pointed one way, his gut pointed another, and he had no idea which voice to trust.
The deadline to decide was approaching. Every night he'd go to bed sure of one choice, then wake up convinced of the opposite. The indecision itself was becoming unbearable.
"Everyone keeps asking what I'm going to do and I don't know. The startup could be amazing or it could fail in 18 months. The corporate job is safe but I'm already bored. And moving home would make my parents happy but would I be happy? I keep running the same mental loops and getting nowhere."
"Talked to my mentor today. He said 'what does your gut say?' And I realized I don't know. I've been so focused on what I should do, what makes sense, what other people think, that I've completely lost track of what I actually want. When did I stop trusting myself?"
"I notice that when I talk about the startup, my voice sounds different. More animated? When I talk about staying at the corporate job, I sound like I'm reading a press release. 'Good benefits, stable income, career progression.' It's all true but it doesn't feel true. Does that make sense?"
I've been tracking how you talk about each option. Here's what the language reveals:
Your words are already choosing. You're just not letting yourself hear them.
But what if I take the startup job and it fails?
You've asked variations of "what if it fails" 8 times. But you've never once asked "what if the corporate job slowly drains me?" or "what if I regret playing it safe?"
You're only stress-testing one option. That suggests you've already made a choice you're afraid to admit.
But taking a risk feels irresponsible
Whose voice is that? In your recordings, when you say "responsible" and "should," your tone shifts. It sounds like you're quoting someone else's values, not speaking your own. What does responsibility mean to you, specifically?
"Went back and listened to my first week of entries. It's so obvious. Every time I talk about the startup, I sound like myself. Every time I talk about staying, I sound like I'm convincing myself of something I don't believe."
"The fear isn't that the startup might fail. The fear is that I might succeed at something I actually care about, and then I'd have no one to blame but myself if I'm still not happy. Staying safe means never having to find out."
Three weeks of talking through this decision, and you haven't once genuinely argued for staying at the corporate job. You've only defended it. There's a difference between choosing something and defending a default. Your voice has been telling you the answer all along.
"I'm taking the startup job. Saying it out loud feels... right. Not safe, but right. The pro/con list never would have gotten me here. I needed to hear myself talk through the fear, hear the excitement I was suppressing, hear whose voice I was actually listening to. The decision was there all along. I just needed to get quiet enough to hear it."
Big decisions aren't made in spreadsheets. They're made by listening to what you're already saying.
Logic helps with small decisions. Big ones require listening to how you talk about each option.
The energy in your voice, the words you choose, the questions you ask, it all reveals what you already want.
Some of your thoughts are yours. Some are inherited. Speaking them out loud helps you tell the difference.
The startup is hard. Some days Chris wonders if he made the right call. But then he listens to his old recordings, the ones where he sounded dead inside talking about the "safe" path, and he knows. Even on hard days, he sounds more alive than he did on easy days at the old job. The voice doesn't lie.
If you've been going in circles with pro/con lists and outside opinions, try talking it through instead. Your voice might already know the answer. You just need to hear it.