You make decisions all the time.
Many of these decisions have relatively little impact in your life. Deciding what shirt to wear or how you want your eggs prepared doesn’t really carry much weight. These choices are easy and you can usually decide without thinking too much.
Long-Term Decisions
The next kind of decision you make deals with long-term planning.
Joining a gym and making a commitment to working out three days a week is a significant resolution. This decision needs to be backed by willpower in order to stick with it, even when you feel like straying from that commitment.
This larger decision carries more weight and will have more pronounced effects on your life. Bigger decisions require follow through, which means you still have to decide three days a week on whether you will honor your commitment to go to the gym.
Until it becomes a habit, the temptation to stray is powerful. This is why you need a strong resolve for big decisions. This comes with practice and self-respect. It is important to know that once you make a big decision, you need to have the discipline and tenacity to stay the course.
Life-Changing Choices
Another vital decision you make is the potentially life-changing kind.
This type of decision doesn’t require follow through. Instead, this is a powerful choice that you only need to make once. Examples are: moving to take a new job, ending a long-term relationship, or dropping out of college.
It’s easy to get stuck and feel like you can’t make a decision with these high-impact choices. The right way to handle this is to gather all the information you can about your options so you are working with accurate data to help you make an informed decision.
However, it’s impossible to ever have ALL the information. There will be unknown areas.
Once you have enough information, weigh the significance of each piece of information and figure out which parts mean the most to you and which parts are negligible. After you have analyzed the data, turn to your trusted friends or family to get their thoughts on the matter. They might bring valuable insights to your attention.
Ultimately, this is your decision.
Once you have gathered your data, weighed the importance of each piece of information, and discussed it with people you trust, it is time for one of two things:
Decide that the information you have is sufficient enough to make a good choice or decide that you need more information.
Be careful about delaying your choice just because it is difficult. You live in a world with imperfect information and you have to accept that. Eventually, you have to make a choice.
Once you make the choice, stop worrying.
If you’ve followed these steps then you’ve considered all angles and heeded trusted opinions. Be confident in your choice because you know that your decision is the best that could be made, given the circumstances.
You’ll find that your choice is usually the best one.
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