We are all forced to make a lot of difficult decisions.

Yes or no: make the product; escalate the conflict; let that thing slide; take on the investor; start the new partnership; move on from the key supplier.

It is an endless barrage of calls that all feel significant. Like the weight of everything hinges on this decision. Then the next decision. Quarterbacking a team on the bubble. Needing to hit every throw. Recognize every bad play call and audible out of it before the damage happens. The pressure is heavy. The consequences feel dire.

It gets to you. The pressure.

Both when it is going well and when it is not. When it feels like you can do no wrong and when it feels like there is no right. If you feel that way right now, I’m sorry. It sucks. I’ve been there more times than I care to relate. Reruns of “what if I fail,” “everyone’s counting on me,” “I need to make it,” and “my family needs this” running in your head.

The pressure pushes the problems into our minds at all hours.

Nagging doubts about the direction we’re taking. Tensions we’re stuck in, struggling with which direction to go. They feel inescapable. Living rent-free in our heads. A child with a terrifically loud instrument — played poorly and often. You feel unable to evict it and powerless to quiet the noise.

The psychological problems of our work feel ever-present in all parts of our lives. We reach a place where we just accept that this is life.

The good news is that this psychological life does not have to be your fate. That you can have your professional aspirations — and your sanity. You can be present at work while leaving you with the mental space to be present with your wife and kids.

I promise you it is true, and if you’re reading this, dubious and scoffing, give me five minutes, and let me show you how to ease this burden.

Reject the tyranny of they

I get it.

You need to prove it, to them. Look good for them. Show them.

You spend a lot of time concerned with what they will think. Then, when you are really challenged by it, you’re not even really sure who “they” are.

You concern yourself with conforming to the expectations of a pretend group of people. Not a specific group of people who care about you, but more generally people in the abstract. You think about a decision you’re wrestling with or a change you want to make and ask yourself, “What would they think?”

They are the source of the pressure.

We spend a lot of time in life distracted by what other people are going to think of us. The truth is most people don’t think about you very much. Mostly, they think about themselves. Consider yourself as an example. How many of your thoughts are deeply concerned with the affairs of others? How many are really about yourself?

Yet we all feel a compulsion to please this abstract community of people. Sometimes making personally costly decisions to satisfy the phantom sons-of-bitches.

Pretend people. Costly sacrifices.

It sounds absurd. It is absurd. But that didn’t stop me from doing it, doesn’t stop me from concerning myself with it today, and reading this, you have to admit there are places where the phantom sons-of-bitches are driving you too.

Step one to eject all that unhealthy pressure from your life — jettison the extra pressure your ego puts on you. The phantom army of they is not coming for you — I promise. Concern yourself instead with:

• the expectations you hold for yourself,
• the obligations you have to family, and
• how to show up in service to your real friends.

The tyrannical they has plenty of other people to terrorize. They won’t miss you and you won’t miss them.

Recognize Where You’ve Stopped Driving Yourself

It can be deeply ingrained, right?

When have a tendency to identify with our accomplishments. Starts young and gets deeper as we get older. We get good grades, we’re good at football, we’re the best at drawing. We find a way to differentiate ourselves through our superiority to others in one way or another.

It makes sense.

We want to be well-regarded. To get positive attention. To get the validation that comes with it and separation from the rest of the pack. To use that separation to get the attention of a woman…

So you concern yourself deeply with their expectations, often for so long that you never pause to stop and consider the expectations you have for yourself.

For some of us, absent the structure that others have given us and the expectations we’ve adopted, we’re not sure what we would do. We are strangers to our own deep, innate desires. Because we have grown up chasing a constant drip of validation, we’ve never truly wrestled with our sense of purpose.

We’ve abdicated our initiative. Living our only life in a way that we think will make others happy, with the assumption that doing so will make us happy too. Oftentimes, it doesn’t. Recognize that this is true, then sit with the big questions.

Sit Patiently With the Big Questions

Then the sad news is that sitting down with a paper and pencil to answer questions like:

• What is success to me?
• What do I really want for myself?
• What would I do if I was not afraid?

Isn’t a straightforward exercise for most of us. When you’ve spent your life trying to conform to others’ expectations, it feels awkward. You struggle. The answers you have don’t feel like they come from deep within your soul but rather feel like something that will sell well in front of the crowd.

We don’t like to sit with questions when the direction is unclear, and the process is uncomfortable. We feel like we’ve had decades to answer these questions, and we should have sorted this out by now. In our discomfort, we get impatient, and we jot some stuff down.

Quick answers to big questions so we can leap back into the fray.

We’re too chickenshit to own that a topic we should be intimately familiar with, ourselves, is somehow strange and unfamiliar. So we cling to other people’s expectations like a life preserver in our sea of uncertainty.

The answers to these questions come by looking inward, not outward. Old habits die hard, and we want to look outward for validation. The problem is that other people’s stories are a bad reference. Their lives are theirs. Yours is yours. One need not concern itself with the other.

Only you can judge whether you’ve lived your life well.

It is ok if the answers to these questions take weeks or months. It is fine not to have confident answers quickly and from deep within your soul; these questions should take a long time to answer. To answer them, you have to study. You need to look at your life as though you were an external observer without confining yourself to predetermined results. You must take notice of the things that inherently want to draw your attention.

Journal.

Observe yourself. Capture these moments.

Allow yourself to sit with the question patiently while being curious and observant about yourself — without judgment. Your goal is not to arrive at a specific answer that you or anyone else expects. You aim to be more confident about what you want for yourself. No observation about your deeper predispositions is good or bad.

Finally — Don’t Compartmentalize — Integrate

It is hard enough to live one life and live it well. Stop trying to live separate lives. You should not have a work life AND a home life.

Just one life.

That means you cannot separate your work and home life like the little kid trying to keep his peas and potatoes from touching. Carefully nudging them apart any time they get too close.

You must integrate all the aspects of your life into one experience — not compartmentalize trying to keep all the parts of your life from touching one another. That is possible when you have integrated who you are and what you do.

It all gets easier when you live your life from an interior place of knowing. The pressure of the hard calls is reduced when you’re only worried about satisfying yourself. Life is lighter when you have set the weight of their expectations. Freer. More fun.

It is easy to say and hard to do. I get that. The exercise is a lot more of an ongoing journey and less of a specific destination. Take the path. Discard the weight. Concern yourself with satisfying the inward expectations instead of the outward expectations. You’ll be glad that you did.

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This article was originally published on Medium in the publication Career Paths.