Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Life is replete with a lot of decisions. As we navigate our

life's course there are times when we have to make decisions as far as which direction

do we want to go. This can be hard, this can be challenging, this can be overwhelming. So in today's podcast, we're going to talk about how do we navigate the decisions of life well.

You may have never heard of this man, but he's a very famous psychologist that lived years ago, and he's a developmental

psychologist who studied the different stages that we go through in life.

He described eight of them, eight stages that we go through in order to navigate our life successfully.

And if we do them well, in the end, we'll end up with integrity versus despair.

And I remember really adeptly studying him in graduate school

and it came to the realization that for life to go well,

there's a lot of decisions that we have to make and we can choose

ones that make our lives better or we can choose ones that make our lives worse.

One of the big decisions that we have to decide is who am I. This often occurs during

the teenage years where he described it as identity versus confusion. Do I know who I am? What path I want to be on? What I want to do for

a living? But this hasn't always been the case throughout history. Margaret Mead, again, a very famous researcher from the past, studied

more primitive cultures and what she learned was in these cultures who I am and what I'm

going to do is far more limited. If my father is a blacksmith, I'm most

likely going to be a blacksmith. So the identity crisis that Erickson pointed out occurred far less often in the past than it does

today. But today, that is very different. We have to make so many decisions in order to navigate our course in life.

And sometimes it can be overwhelming, it can be daunting, it can be just pure difficult.

So how do we navigate life's course?

For example, when we're younger, we have to decide,

do we want to go to college?

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