Taking The Right Decision

By Angie Doleza.

We can all agree that life is not fair, happiness is not guaranteed and stress is inevitable. Life is no doubt, at times going to throw us many curve balls and it is up to us to choose how to deal with it. With life’s challenges, stress which is usually accompanied by anxiety, may be unavoidable yet it is manageable. Most importantly, we cannot let our worries and our stress crowd out our peace and happiness and the simple pleasures of life.

• Own your feelings. No one can make you happy, no one can make you sad or mad. These are all feelings we each individually choose.
• Don’t overthink it. Most of the things we worry about never happen. Worrying will not stop bad things from happening; it will only interfere with your journey.
• Do your best. At the end of the day, feel good about what you did accomplish today instead of dwelling on what you didn’t.
• Live in the moment. The past is done, we never know what tomorrow holds, focus on today.
• Do not be afraid. “Do not be afraid” is written in the Bible 365 times. This is a daily reminder from God to live everyday fearless.
• Take action. Identify your problems and take steps to solve them.
• Put yourself on the list. Take care of yourself. Exercise and eat healthy. Making yourself a priority is not selfish, as it will make you a better spouse, mother or father, son or daughter, employee or boss and a better friend.
• Lift up others. Be an encouraging and a positive influence on your friends and family. Make people feel good about themselves.
• Count your blessings. Be grateful. Cherish all the blessings in your life. Take comfort in what you do have and reject all envy for what you don’t.
• Find your self-worth from within. Seeking your self-worth from this world will only lead to disappointment.
• Embrace the silence. Practice daily prayer and meditation. Try yoga.
• Be financially responsible. Live within your means. Avoid debt.
• Have something to look forward to. Plan a trip. Plan a party. Make a date with a friend.
• Enjoy your family. Take the time to play with the kids, talk to your family and care for your elderly.
• Avoid negativity. Stay positive in your thoughts and in your conversations.
• Find your passion. Take up a new hobby. Do things you love.
• You can’t save the world. Avoid today’s 24-hour news cycle.
• Turn off the TV. Limit your exposure to back-stabbing, trash talking and unkind programming disguised as entertainment.
• Open your mind. Learn a new skill or a new language. Seek enlightenment.
• Tell the truth. (no further explanation needed!)
• Have a pet. Just one loving stroke to a sweet animal can immediately lower stress levels and warm our hearts.
• Stop and smell the roses. Go outside. Feel the sun. Hear the birds.
• Take one step at a time. Any big task, break it down into small steps.
• Don’t become substance dependent.  A pill or drink will not solve your problems. It will just mask the symptoms and delay the resolve.
• Give back. Give your service to those less fortunate. Contribute to your community.
• Spread kindness. Partake in regular random acts of kindness. Be kind to strangers.
• Show compassion. Compassion is the very cornerstone of our humanity. A life lived without compassion will result in a bitter outcome.
• Careful how you talk to yourself. Be gentle with your internal words. Find positive mantras to replace negative, self-deprecating thoughts.
• Celebrate other’s successes. There is plenty of success to go around, others success takes nothing from you. This is an easy way to identify your true friends.
• Don’t be a social media fool. Social media is not the proper place to put it all out there. It tends to give a voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless yet most of all, a platform for the foolish. Use with caution.
• Enjoy music. Good music can soothe your most inner beast. Turn it up!
• Sleep well. When we always strive to do the right thing, it makes sleep much easier.
• Take a break. Stop during your busy day. Take a deep breath. Give yourself permission to relax.
• Give your love freely. People will disappoint you, love anyway.
• Be a force of peace. Be the level head. Don’t encourage conflict.
• Don’t argue. Accept that not everyone thinks like you. Never argue with a fool because from a distance no one can tell the difference.
• Let your light shine. Be a shining light in a dark world.
• Know that you are deserving. We only receive exactly what we think we deserve.
• Learn from your mistakes. It is only a mistake if you did not learn a lesson.
• Be trustworthy. Keep confidences. Do what you say you are going to do.
• Don’t be an “over-pleaser”.  You can please some of the people some of the time but rarely all of the people, all of the time.
• Talk it out. Sometimes just saying it out load will take the sting out.
• Seek Sanity. Stop doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
• Be Happy! It is a choice made daily.

I guess it just says it all:

As defined by Julia Tang Peters:

“Leadership is about making decisions to change the story –changing the course of events from how it will likely go if you don’t take bold action, and having a vision for how you want the story to go if you took bold action.  There are five opportunities where you make the story instead of the story making you.”

– Julia Tang Peters

Julia Tang Peters, in her new book Pivot Points, concludes that there are five pivotal decisions that propel some entrepreneurs to be gifted leaders:

1. The launching decision
2. The turning point decision
3. The tipping point decision
4. The re-commitment decision
5. The letting go decision

An article in the Huffington Post gives you more details, or you can watch her below.

In her  famous book ”The Five Second Rule”, Mel Robbins which I admire much describes what is procrastination and how you can easily overcome it. I thought I knew BUT what a surprise I had to understand what it really is and how to deal with it.

Enjoy!

In this youtube  video Mel Robbins explains the science behind The 5 Second Rule, a form of metacognition that beats every trick your brain plays on you to cause hesitation, overwhelm, procrastination, and overthinking.

Enjoy.

Youtube video

What makes you uncomfortable makes you grow. What you become depends on how you use your time. The billionaire and the beggar, both have 24 hours in a day, same for the old and the young or black and white etc. We cannot stop a day or an hour. Only you can control how it is going to be used, your choice, your life. From auto-pilot to decision maker is all within your choices, your decisions, your commitment.

Everything comes down to the decisions that you make.

So NOT to decide IS a decision.

Watch this ten minutes video, you are in command.

That is an old saying that is so true. I discovered that fact when I  first read the classic ”Think And Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. He discovered in his study on famous successful entrepreneurs that they all had a written plan to achieve their goals.

In the game of chess they say you are better off with a bad plan than no plan at all.

So not planning is actually a plan, but certainly not yours. It sounds like a guaranty to end up where you did not intend, where do you intend to be in 10 years?

 

 

Not much needs to be added to this conclusion.

When somebody does not do what they said they would, their very action of not doing it does mean something for sure. We might speculate as for the why they neglected to act on their own words, but one thing we can infer for sure is that they do not value their lact of action as damaging to their image and reputation as they probably should.

On tangible effect of this behavior is to lower the quality of communication and understanding on the expected results up to creating confusion leading inevitably to lost of time to clarify things.

In the end one might balance the pros and cons of the time it would take to clarify things as opposed to finding a better match for the task at hands if any.

 

 

This should be a hint for your desire to change which must be alive as without it nothing will ever change.

Tony Robbins coined the CANI acronym which stand for Constant And Never Ending Improvement which can only occur with the desire to improve all the time over your lifetime. So you have to take decisions on what to achieve, what to change in your habits and a commitment to your decisions.

How to take the right decisions is an art and a science. It requires verifiable information,  a desire to analyze the information and take action. Both are mandatory. Then you need action because information without action is no power. If your information is right and you act on it then you might get to your goal. But you need to commit to it otherwise you will never acquire the habit.

Making sure the information is good is key. Therefore due diligence is paramount.

So to take good decisions is constant work and requires practice and change in your habits and way of thinking. To seek new knowledge and identify new trends is the activity leading to improve the quality of your decisions. But we all know that to change is hard for most people.

Why change is so hard? Why most people think they cannot change?
The main reason is because they wrongly believe that change is hard and that they can’t, as simple as that, it is a belief and a habit: the habit to believe the same beliefs! Learning how to change habit is simple but not easy. Nobody can force you but you.

Now you understand the title. But it begs the question then: how do I make and take good decisions, right?

The short answer is: you cannot until you try and find out by yourself! Knowledge follows the experience to quote Lawrence Poole.

You can research and train yourself at making good decisions, all entrepreneurs have to excel at it if they are going to survive and thrive.

Taking the right decisions is not enough, you really need to also change your habits if you want to steer your life towards your new goals, and that is tricky too. We are creatures made of habits and to change them we must consciously engage in new actions, in new activities that will help us practice and acquire new habits, new skills and new types of decisions.