#211: A Good Decision Is Not the Same Thing as a Good Outcome

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Hey there, beautiful humans. Welcome back to Your Favorite You.

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I am still Melissa Parsons, your favorite general life coach and podcast host, and I'm actually recording this one from Southwest Florida, where I'm spending the week with my mom, part of the week with my husband, he only got to come for a little bit.

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My son Jack and Jack's girlfriend, Anna, were at my mom's condo on the beach.

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A couple of days ago, this trip handed me an entire episode live in real time, so I wanna tell you exactly what happened.

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If you've ever spent September in Florida, you know the weather down here is its own unpredictable character.

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So we were out at the pool, some of us sunning in lounge chairs, some of us floating with our books, some of us actually swimming, and all around us, in almost every direction, there were visible storms.

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Not right on top of us or even a couple miles away, but just around us. You could hear some distant thunder.

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And there was maybe one patch of sky, about 60 degrees or so of the sky off to the west toward the coast, that stayed clear and sunny the whole time. Everywhere else looked like trouble.

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And here's the detail that mattered. There had been some news stories just in the past few months about people being struck by lightning while in the water at the beaches nearby.

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Not a hypothetical abstract danger, but a real and recent one. So of course, I was checking the radar on my phone every several minutes while we all sat there in our various states of relaxation.

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I wasn't checking obsessively. I wasn't in a panic. I was just checking, the way you glance at your fuel gauge on a long drive. And at a certain point, my son Jack thought he saw lightning.

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Between that, the radar, and the storms visibly surrounding us on nearly every side, we made a call. We packed it up. We packed it in. It was only about 2:30 in the afternoon.

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So at this point, I headed inside to the gym, and I did a Peloton hike on the tread.

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And if you want a recommendation, the 20-minute '80s walk with Kirsten Ferguson from September 7th, 2026, is genuinely divine. I'm talking Janet, Whitney, Prince, 10 out of 10.

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But partway through that walk, glancing out the window, I noticed the pool area was still intermittently sunny.

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No rain, no lightning that I could see, and my first thought was, "Damn, we could have stayed." But then, almost immediately behind that thought came a second one, and that second thought is this entire episode.

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No. No, that's not how this works. That is not how we like to live, whether you're my coaching client or you're me.

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I made the best decision I could with the information and the tools I had available to me at the time. And today, I wanna unpack exactly why that sentence matters so much.

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Because I think almost all of us are quietly torturing ourselves over decisions using a measuring stick that was never fair to begin with.

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Here's the trap I almost fell into on that treadmill, and the trap I watch so many of my clients fall into consistently: Judging a decision by how it turns out in the future instead of judging it by what you actually knew and had available to you at the moment you made the decision.

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Think about what I actually knew sitting at that pool. I knew there were storms visible in almost every direction.

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I knew there was a recent real pattern of lightning strikes that were deadly at beaches nearby. I knew my son thought he'd seen lightning.

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I knew none of us, including me, were willing to gamble with our lives over an afternoon at the pool. Given all of that, packing it up and leaving was the correct decision, full stop.

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That doesn't change even one bit based on what the sky happened to do 20 minutes later. But that's not how it feels in the moment of second-guessing, is it?

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In the moment of second-guessing, the outcome, the sunny skies, the absence of rain, the absence of further lightning feels like evidence. It feels like proof that the original decision was wrong.

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And here's what I want you to really sit with. It isn't. An outcome is not evidence about the quality of the decision that preceded it. An outcome is just what happened to happen.

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Those two are completely different things, but we conflate them constantly. Here's why this distinction matters so much.

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If you only trust a decision when the outcome turns out well, you're not actually making decisions based on judgment anymore. You're just gambling and calling it wisdom whenever you happen to win.

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And on the days you happen to lose, even when you made a completely sound, well-informed choice, you can choose to tear yourself apart over it as if you did something wrong, when the only thing that actually happened is the universe rolled differently than it could have.

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I wanna name something else I knew standing at the pool that I conveniently forgot about 20 minutes later on the treadmill.

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There were two possible outcomes when we made the decision to leave the pool, not one. One outcome was that it would clear up beautifully, and we'd have simply left a little early on a nice day.

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That was a consequence I was fully willing to live with.

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The other possible outcome, the one I'd apparently already tucked away and forgotten, was lightning striking that pool area and severely injuring or even killing some of the people I love most on this planet, including me.

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When I stood at the edge of that pool making the call, I was weighing both of those. On the treadmill, only the pleasant one was still in view, the sun shining over the pool.

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That's what selective memory does to a good decision after the fact. It edits out the very risk that made the decision correct in the first place.

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I want to pause on one more piece of this story because I think it's easy to miss.

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The whole time we were at the pool, I was checking the radar, not once, not never, repeatedly, casually, like I said, the way you would check a gas gauge when you're driving.

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That's a specific skill, and it's different from the two more common responses to uncertainty.

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One common response is utter denial, ignoring the storms entirely, staying in the water because nothing bad has happened yet, and treating the absence of disaster so far as proof that there won't be one.

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There was one guy who was doing that, total denial, just stayed in the pool the whole time. Made me nervous. The other common response is panic.

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Bailing at the very first cloud, the very first distant rumble of thunder, unable to tolerate any uncertainty at all, making every decision from fear instead of from data.

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What I was actually doing was neither. I was gathering real data continuously and staying willing to update the decision as new info came in.

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That's the actual skill worth building: not eliminating uncertainty—that's impossible—but staying in relationship with it instead of ignoring it or being ruled by it.

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I want to bring this to another real-life example that you might relate to.

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I have a client, whom I love, who is deep in what we call the sandwich generation, caring for her aging mother while also still very present for her young adult children.

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A couple of years ago, her mom decided to move about two hours away from my client to live with her mom's sister, and it worked. It was great for a good while.

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Her mom was happy there, enjoying real time with my client's aunt, building a life that suited her, and then it stopped working.

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Her mom developed some health problems, and it became apparent that being two hours away from my client, her daughter, was really no longer tenable.

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She needed to move back home to be closer to my client and closer to the support she now genuinely needed.

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And here's what I love about how my client handled this, and I really do think it's a direct result of the work that we've done together.

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She did not let this mean that her mother's original decision to move had been the wrong one.

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She didn't rewrite the story of those good years with her sister as some kind of mistake just because circumstances eventually changed.

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She actually helped her own mom see the same thing, that moving back wasn't an admission that the earlier move was wrong.

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It was just evidence that circumstances had changed and that a decision which fit the moment it was made in doesn't have to fit forever to have been the right call at the time.

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That's such an important piece of this because life rarely holds still long enough for one decision to stay correct indefinitely. A decision doesn't have to be permanent to have been right.

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It just has to have been the best available choice for the information and the circumstances that existed on the day that it was made.

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Here's another version of this pattern that I see come up pretty frequently.

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Clients who make the difficult, courageous decision to end a relationship, and then weeks or months later, when life is still genuinely hard, they start second-guessing whether ending it was the right call.

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Now, I understand exactly why that happens.

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You end something painful expecting relief, and when the relief doesn't arrive on schedule, when life is just differently hard instead of easily better, it's tempting to read that as proof that you made a mistake.

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So here's what I try to coach them through, and I think it applies to so much more than just relationships. You're not choosing between hard and easy.

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You're choosing between two different flavors of hard.

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The old hard, so maybe the relationship, the job, the situation you left, was more than likely going to keep producing the exact same results it had always produced.

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You already know what that hard leads to because you were living it. It leads to more of what you say you don't want.

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The new hard is unfamiliar, and unfamiliar often feels worse in the beginning, in the short term, simply because it's unfamiliar.

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But the new hard might actually have a chance at leading somewhere different. It might not, but it might. The old hard had way less of a chance of that.

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It was just going to keep being the same hard forever on a loop.

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This is where a phrase I use with clients a lot comes in when I found myself asking on that treadmill, too, once I caught myself making up stories in my head.

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Is this what your favorite version of you would do? Not would your favorite version of you have magically known the sky would clear up.

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Would she have made the decision to protect the people she loves with the information she had? Would she have ended the relationship that was only ever going to produce the same results?

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That question isn't asking you to predict outcomes, it's asking you to check your process. And your favorite version of you is not the version with perfect foresight. I wish.

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If I could sell that, believe me, I would, but I can't. So it's not the version with perfect foresight. Your favorite version of you is the one who decides well with what's actually in front of her.

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So it's the version who decides well with what is actually in front of her.

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I want to be honest about the flip side of all of this, because it would be too easy, too tidy to leave you thinking good decisions always lead somewhere fine eventually. Sometimes they don't.

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Sometimes you make a genuinely well-informed decision, and it still goes badly. The storm actually does hit. The new hard doesn't lead anywhere better.

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The good decision has a bad outcome anyway, because that's simply a thing that can happen in a world that you don't fully control. Here's what I don't want you to do with that.

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Swing all the way to the other extreme and decide that you should never take a thoughtful risk again, because look at what happened last time.

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That's the same error as celebrating a reckless decision just because it happened to work out.

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You're still letting the outcome rather than the process tell you what you believe about your own judgment. The goal is never zero regret. Some good decisions are simply going to hurt.

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What you're actually going for is not confusing a bad outcome with a bad process.

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You can grieve the outcome fully, genuinely, without rushing it, while still being able to say, "Honestly, I made the best call I could with what I had." Both of those things are allowed to be true.

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So here's what I want to leave you with, my beautiful humans.

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The next time you catch yourself doing what I did on that treadmill, replaying a decision because of how it turned out, instead of remembering why you made it, ask yourself the same question I asked myself.

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Is this what your favorite version of you would do? Not knowing what you know now, with what you actually knew then.

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You're allowed to leave the pool when the sky looks like trouble, even if it clears up twenty minutes later.

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You're allowed to move back closer to family when circumstances change without making it mean the earlier move was a mistake.

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You're allowed to choose a new hard over the old hard, even when the new hard doesn't feel easy right away.

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And you're allowed, when a good decision goes badly anyway, to grieve the outcome without indicting your own judgment.

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And if you're someone who replays your decisions on a loop, who can't quite let a choice be over once it's made, I want you to know that that's a pattern I help clients work through all the time, and you don't have to untangle it alone.

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I'd love to be the person to help you. Okay, folks, I love you all so much. Thank you for listening to Your Favorite You. I'll see you next week.

Hey - It’s still me. Since you are listening to this podcast, you very likely have followed all the rules and ticked off all the boxes but you still feel like something's missing! If you're ready to learn the skills and gain the tools you need to tiptoe into putting yourself first and treating yourself as you would your own best friend, I'm here to support you. As a general life coach for women, I provide a safe space, compassionate guidance, and practical tools to help you navigate life's challenges as you start to get to know and embrace your authentic self.

When we work together, you begin to develop a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You learn effective communication strategies, boundary-setting techniques, and self-care practices that will help you cultivate a more loving and supportive relationship with yourself and others.

While, of course, I can't guarantee specific outcomes, as everyone's journey is brilliantly unique, what I can promise is my unwavering commitment to providing you with the skills, tools, support, and guidance you need to create lasting changes in your life. With humor and a ton of compassion, I'll be available to mentor you as you do the work to become a favorite version of yourself.

You're ready to invest in yourself and embark on this journey, so head over to melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the work with me page, and book a consultation call. We can chat about all the support I can provide you with as we work together.

I am welcoming one-on-one coaching clients at this time, and, of course, I am also going to be offering the next round of group coaching soon. 

Thanks for tuning in. Go be amazing!