The Importance of Your Decision

It looks like life is all about decision-making doesn’t it? 

Starting to make your own decisions is the marking point of you becoming an adult: your parents stop choosing for you or stop telling you what to do and they offer you the responsibility of your own choices. 

This is a marvelous gift (freedom + responsibility) that unfortunately very often comes without any instructions on how to approach and use it. 

So you start your personal process of trial and error, and you soon discover that sometimes taking decisions = pain! 

This happened to me: I wanted so much to get married and be happy forever after and so I got married, but the “being happy forever after” didn’t happen! 

I was frustrated and upset by this, I blamed my husband and various things for the fact that I hadn’t been able to make my life the happy fairytale of my dreams. But eventually things started to make sense when I discovered that the first person to blame was me: I made the decision to marry because I was in love, but also before I understood myself and what I truly wanted out of life. 

And this happens all the time: we make decisions before we clearly know what we want and before questioning whether what we want is truly in line with who we are. 

This is the missing “instructions for use” that should come with the “decision toolkit”!

Start to approach every decision by asking yourself: 

What is the true reason that I want this (not the surface reason, the deep reason)? 

What are the best opportunities I have to achieve this outcome?  

Between these opportunities: which is more in tune with me? 

Which is the one I want to pursue? 

By asking yourself these questions you will avoid unnecessary headaches and your mistakes will be lighter and less painful even if they do still happen.

This will also stop you from undermining your own self-confidence and instead allow you to effectively learn to use your decision-making power, to create the results that you truly want.

This is the wonderful strength your decisions can have: they bring you what you are focusing on with clarity, willingness and passion. 

And when something doesn’t go exactly as you wished, don’t blame yourself too much: we learn much more from our mistakes than from what we are doing right. 

Any decision you make is a GOOD DECISION because through it you are learning something more about yourself and you can then leverage this understanding.

Deciding to not decide is still a decision, when you are not proactive in deciding you are just giving someone else the power to decide for you. 

Think about it: you are trapped in a job you hate, you are frustrated and unfulfilled, but instead of making different choices for yourself, you suffer in silence for years until … they make you redundant! So on top of the pain you have inflicted on yourself you now undermine your self-confidence as well… 

So my little tip for you is the following: explore your intentions, clarify the intended outcome and the reasons you want what you want and then trust yourself and make the decision that makes you feel good and true to yourself, even if this is not what others are expecting of you. 

- to be continued -