Daniel: Cornell University researchers found that the average adult makes over 35,000 decisions a day. And over two hundred of those are just about what to eat. Sophia: That explains so much. That’s why by 8 p.m. my brain has just shut down. I can't even decide what to watch on Netflix. But what if the secret to making better big decisions is to actually ignore almost all of them? Daniel: That is the radical and deeply comforting idea behind the book we’re diving into today: The Next Right Thing by Emily P. Freeman. Sophia: Right, and she's not just another self-help author. Freeman has a master's degree in spiritual formation and leadership, and her podcast on this same topic has been downloaded over 25 million times. There's clearly a massive hunger for this message. Daniel: There absolutely is. She's tapping into a deep, collective exhaustion with the constant pressure to have it all figured out. And her starting point is a diagnosis of a problem I think every single one of us feels: the tyranny of the unmade decision.

Sophia: Oh, I know that tyranny well. It's like having fifty tabs open in your brain, and all of them are buffering. You can't focus on anything because this one huge, looming question is sucking up all the bandwidth. Daniel: Exactly. Freeman says that unmade decisions have this incredible power over us. They can turn us into strange, hyper-focused versions of ourselves, where we're constantly scanning the world for clues, for signs, for answers. Sophia: You start seeing 'signs' in your coffee foam or thinking a random song on the radio is a message from the universe. It's paralyzing. Daniel: It is. And she tells this incredibly vivid story about her own experience with this. In her late twenties, she was living a full life—married, kids, a job—but she felt this pull to go back to grad school. And it sent her into a total tailspin. Sophia: I can imagine. The 'why' of a decision like that is huge. The time, the money, the purpose... Daniel: For months, she was completely consumed. She describes visiting the admissions building and smelling what she called "initiative, angst, and Y2K." She was having endless conversations with her husband, friends, family, making lists of pros and cons. She was listening to sermons with this intense focus, hoping a line would jump out and tell her what to do. She was Googling "how to make a good decision" at 2 a.m. She became, in her words, a strange version of herself. Sophia: That is so painfully relatable. So how does the book's core principle, "do the next right thing," actually help in a situation like that? Her 'next right thing' could have been anything. It could have been doing the laundry. How does that help you decide on grad school? Daniel: Here’s the beautiful simplicity of it. The principle, which has roots in places like Alcoholics Anonymous, isn't about finding the final answer. It's about breaking the paralysis of overthinking by taking one, single, immediate, and manageable step. Sophia: Okay, so what was her step? Daniel: Her next right thing wasn't to enroll, or to pay the tuition, or even to fill out the application. It was simply to go to the admissions office and request a copy of her undergraduate transcript. That's it. A tiny, concrete action. Sophia: Huh. And that's it? Daniel: That's it. Because that one small action broke the cycle of anxious, circular thinking. It moved her from a state of passive agony into active engagement, but on a scale that wasn't terrifying. It didn't answer the big question, but it created momentum. It allowed her to breathe again. The point wasn't to solve the five-year plan; it was to faithfully take the one step she could see in front of her. Sophia: It’s like you can’t see the whole staircase, so you just focus on the very next step. That actually feels manageable. It lowers the stakes from "I have to decide my entire future right now" to "I just have to send one email." Daniel: Precisely. You stop trying to carry the weight of the entire decision and just carry the weight of the next small action. And that shift is the gateway to a whole different way of approaching clarity.

Daniel: And that leads us to the next big idea. Once you stop trying to solve the whole puzzle at once, you can start using a different set of tools. It's less about logic and spreadsheets and more about listening. Sophia: Okay, I'm intrigued. If we're throwing out our beloved pro/con lists, what are we using instead? You mentioned 'soul minimalism' earlier. Is that just Marie Kondo for your brain? Getting rid of thoughts that don't spark joy? Daniel: That's a perfect analogy, actually. Freeman argues that we live in a state of constant input—podcasts, news, social media, everyone's opinions. Our souls get cluttered. Soul minimalism is the intentional practice of creating 'output'—of quieting the noise to create space for stillness. She has this great line: "Stillness is to my soul as decluttering is to my home." It's in that quiet space that you can actually hear your own inner wisdom. Sophia: That makes a lot of sense. It's hard to know what you want when a thousand other voices are telling you what you should want. But what about when you're in the thick of a really hard decision, and the quiet just feels... loud with anxiety? How do you listen then? Daniel: That's when you pull out the most powerful tool in the book. It's a single question you ask yourself: "Am I being led by love or pushed by fear?" Sophia: Wow. Okay, unpack that. Because fear is sneaky. Fear often disguises itself as 'being responsible' or 'practical.' Daniel: It absolutely does. And Freeman tells another gripping story about this. In 2011, she was invited by Compassion International to go on a trip to the Philippines. On the surface, it was an amazing opportunity. But she was hesitating. Sophia: Let me guess the 'practical' reasons. Young kids at home? Daniel: Three young kids. Two books she was supposed to be writing. And her father-in-law was very ill. She had a long list of completely valid, responsible reasons to say no. Sophia: So she made a pro/con list and the cons won? Daniel: She tried, but neither saying yes nor saying no felt right. She was stuck for two weeks. Finally, she had a candid conversation with the trip leader, a man named Shaun Groves. After she laid out all her reasons for hesitating, he said something that changed everything for her. He said, "Emily, there may be a lot of reasons for you to say no to this trip, but please, don't let fear be one of them." Sophia: Oh, that gives me chills. He saw right through it. Daniel: He did. And in that moment, she realized her 'practical' reasons were just a cover story. Her real reasons for saying no were that she was terrified of the long flight and afraid of getting sick in a foreign country. Her decision was being driven entirely by fear. Sophia: And once she named it, she could see it clearly. Daniel: The moment she named the fear, its power over her diminished. She realized she didn't want to be a person who made choices out of fear. She wanted to be led by love—love for the children she would meet, love for the work Compassion was doing. And she said yes. That question—"Am I being led by love or pushed by fear?"—became her new compass. Sophia: That is such a powerful filter. I think so many of us, if we were honest, would find that our 'safest' choices were actually our most fear-based choices. It reframes everything.

Daniel: Exactly. And once you start filtering your life through that lens of love versus fear, your whole relationship with the future changes. You stop needing a detailed, guaranteed map for your life. Sophia: You start looking for 'arrows,' not answers, as the book says. What does that actually look like in a real-life crisis? It sounds a little abstract. Daniel: It can feel that way, but there's a deeply moving story in the book that makes it concrete. It's about her husband, John. In 2011, his father died unexpectedly. John was a youth pastor, and he tried to power through the grief, but it caught up to him. He was having panic attacks, couldn't sleep—he was completely burned out. Sophia: That sounds incredibly difficult. Daniel: It was. He ended up taking a three-month leave from his job, which then turned into him leaving the position altogether. So there they were, in a total "What now?" moment. No job, no clear path forward. Sophia: That's the kind of situation where you'd think you need an answer, a plan, a new career path, immediately. Daniel: And that's what they resisted. Instead of frantically searching for a new job title, they looked for arrows. The arrow wasn't pointing to a specific career; it was pointing toward healing. The arrow was rest. The arrow was for John to attend a spiritual direction course. The arrow was for them to focus on their marriage and their mutual desire for a life of meaning, whatever that looked like. Sophia: So the 'arrow' wasn't pointing to a destination, but to a direction of travel? A way of being? That's a huge mental shift. Daniel: It's a monumental shift. It’s about trusting the process. Freeman quotes the philosopher Dallas Willard, who said, "the most important thing about you is not the things you achieve but the person you become." The decision-making process itself becomes the point. It's a tool for spiritual formation. The outcome—the new job John eventually found nearly a year later—was secondary to the people they became during that time of uncertainty. Sophia: It reframes that terrifying "What now?" question. The book mentions a quote from author Ann Patchett, that "What now?" doesn't have to be a panic-stricken question. It can be a declaration of possibility, of promise. Daniel: Yes, it's an invitation to live with open hands. To trust that if you are taking the next right step in love, you will be guided, even if you can't see the destination. You learn to live with the surprise.

Sophia: You know, when we put all of this together, this isn't really a book about making decisions at all, is it? It's about changing our entire relationship with uncertainty. Daniel: That's the deep insight right there. Freeman is making a powerful argument that our culture's obsession with control, with five-year plans, with optimizing every choice, is spiritually and emotionally toxic. It's creating a generation of people paralyzed by the fear of getting it wrong. Sophia: And the antidote isn't a better system for getting it right. It's a system for letting go. Daniel: Precisely. The real path to peace and clarity, according to this book, is to release our white-knuckled grip on the future. It's to focus our attention on the single, small, loving step right in front of us, and to trust that the process of becoming—of being shaped by those small, faithful choices—is the true destination. Sophia: It's about presence over planning. And that feels both terrifying and incredibly freeing at the same time. I think the one thing listeners can take away and do today is to just notice one decision they're agonizing over—big or small—and ask that one question. Daniel: What's the question? Sophia: "Am I being pushed by fear, or am I being led by love?" Just asking it, without even needing an immediate answer, feels like it could change everything. Daniel: A perfect next right thing. Sophia: This is Aibrary, signing off.