Follow These 3 Decision-Making Steps and You’ll Be Well On Your Way to Making Powerful, Purposeful Decisions More Quickly and Easily In All Areas of Your Life
Do you ever find yourself having trouble making decisions? Or when you do make a decision, do you often look back and second guess whether or not you made the right decision?
Some of the decisions you make in life may feel incredibly important.
For example, maybe you’re weighing out leaving your job to start your own business versus staying in your current position to keep good benefits. Or perhaps you and your spouse are deciding whether or not to have children.
These types of decisions are clearly crucial in determining the trajectory of your entire life.
But what a lot of people don’t realize is that small, simple decisions are equally important in determining the direction and quality of our life.
Fine-tuning the way we make small, daily decisions can actually help us make the bigger decisions we face more easily.
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The truth is that simple decisions like what to have for lunch have deeper implications than we might imagine, and bigger decisions can often be made more easily than we assume!
Either way, all of the decisions we make ‒ however weighty or inconsequential they may seem – add up to and lay the foundation for who we’re going to be or not be, for the amount of love and money we’ll have or not have, and so on.
Paying attention to and improving how we make decisions can directly impact our quality of our life, and the better we are at decision-making, the more able we are to create lives we truly love living.
The 3 steps to making better decisions
Here are 3 simple decision-making steps that will help you hone your decision-making skills in order to more swiftly and confidently move forward and upward in life.
1. Pay attention to your feelings
When making a decision, rather than just relying on logic or habit, pay attention to how you’re feeling in the moment and how each option may make you feel once you’ve made your decision.
Let’s say you’re ordering lunch at a restaurant and think to yourself, “Should I have a salad, or a cheeseburger and fries?”
Is your body absolutely craving one or the other? How will each meal make you feel once you eat it? Perhaps the burger will make you feel more satisfied in the moment, but you know deep down that an hour from now you’ll feel stuffed and lethargic.
On the other hand, how do you feel about a salad and how will it make you feel in an hour? Satisfied, energetic and healthy?
If both options elicit similar feelings, just choose what you’re in the mood for and don’t overthink it!
But if one option seems to carry with it greater feelings of vitality, go with that one!
Self-awareness is the key here. Which option just feels on gut level more in-line with who you want to be? There’s your answer.
2. Ask yourself, “What would I love?”
So often, we make decisions based on what we think we should do or what we think we can do. Or we make decisions based on the expectations of others – our parents, spouses and so on.
But instead of being motivated by feelings of obligation and instead of playing it safe, ask yourself this simple but incredibly powerful question…
“What would I LOVE?”
Don’t hold back in answering. Don’t answer based on what you currently think is possible.
You’re not asking yourself which jobs you qualify for based on your college degree, for example – you’re asking yourself what would truly bring you joy.
Once you know what you’d love, once you have a clear vision of what you’d like your life to look like, make your decisions in service of that vision.
Now, let’s say you’re weighing out a decision between two options that both sound great. How do you decide which you’d love more?
Let’s say you’re debating living in New York or Los Angeles, and in theory, you’d love either option.
This is where you want to practice stepping into and trying on each reality. Close your eyes and really visualize both options.
- What does your home look like?
- The block you live on?
- Where do you spend your time and whom do you spend it with in each location?
You don’t have to know anything about what life will actually be like in either place ‒ just pay attention to which option gives you life.
- Which one makes you feel more excited?
- Which one makes your heart beat faster?
- Which one gives you the sensory experience of a life you’d love?
Thoughts and feelings are either expansive or contractive. When making decisions, lean toward the options that make you feel expansive – ones that let your imagination entertain your greatest dream and make you feel genuinely uplifted!
3. Make a decision and don’t look back
It’s easy to waste our precious time and energy deliberating between options, so much so that we end up in a place of frustration and inaction.
In his book The Power of Decision, Raymond Charles says,
“Indecision is actually the individual’s decision to fail.”
Time and time again, research shows that successful people make decisions quickly.
This isn’t to say that we should make impulsive, uninformed or reckless decisions!
But once we’ve paid attention to our feelings and created a vision for what we’d love, we must trust our intuition and make a decision that feels the most expansive.
The key to making decisions quickly is to not second guess ourselves.
Successful decision makers are not afraid of making mistakes – they know it is more important to keep moving forward that to stay stuck in indecision!
If we accept that “there is no failure, only feedback,” as Robert Allen says, then we can make decisions without fear of making the wrong decision!
If we don’t like the results of a particular decision, we always have the option of adjusting course and making a new decision with the knowledge and learning we’ve gained from the previous one.
Make decisions from the NOW
Even though the decisions we make today have the potential to impact our future, we can’t actually make a decision for the future, because it doesn’t exist yet!
We can, however, make the best decisions possible from where we are right now, today.
If you remember that you are always making decisions from the present, you can keep yourself moving forward toward your goals by asking yourself,
“What can I do right now, from where I am, with what I have?”
Every time you answer this question with action, you are making powerful decisions in service of the life you desire.
And now, here is a FREE gift for you
To hone in and practice making better decisions in all areas of your life, I’d like you to read my eBook, Stronger Than Circumstances: 3 Proven Ways to Overcome Fear, Limitations, and Procrastination to Overcome Your Dreams.
In it, you’ll discover how to overcome old, restrictive thoughts and patterns – and tap into the power within you to move confidently in the direction of your dreams.
You’ll also learn exactly how to re-pattern your thinking for success greater than you could have ever imagined!
