Dial ‘D’ for Decision

Every day we face the challenge of taking decisions. Whether we like it or not, we have to take decisions. The decisions we take can be regarding our professional life or of our personal life. Whatever the case may be but we cannot escape from taking decisions on a daily basis. The quality of our decisions in turn affects the future of our lives.

Like, if we take a poor or a wrong decision it makes us unhappy and can lead us into severe depression.

The question that I want you to ask yourself is:

‘Why do we make poor or incorrect decisions?’

It is not that we consciously make poor decisions. Nobody likes any of their decisions to go wrong; yet most often than not it does.

Once a wrong decision is made by us what do we do?

We start looking at outside factors to blame for our wrong decisions. Most of us might even go to the extent of blaming the neighbor’s wife or even the government for the wrong decisions that we have taken.

Instead of blaming the world we can do better things that can help us grow in life.

To start with we should ask ourselves: ‘Where have I gone wrong?’; ‘What can I do now to change my situation?’; ‘What did I learn from my wrong decision and can I learn to make better decisions in future?’

The great news is that yes, we can really do something about our decision making capability by learning the right way to take decisions in our day to day life situations.

But first let us understand few more aspects about incorrect decisions.

When we go into flashback and look back at our lives, we can see some of the mistakes that we made while taking any decision that went wrong. The mistake can be of looking at just the positive side of the outcome.

Making a decision is just like falling in love with the outcome. When two people fall in love they just focus on the good things of their partner and even though they see some of the not so good traits they choose to ignore it. It is only after they get into relation the not so good traits come in the foreground and it dawns on the partner that after all the decision was not right.

But when we were on the verge of taking the decision everything seemed so right, that is the reason we took that decision. Isn’t it?

Then what went wrong?

Why did my decision fail?

While working to figure out the answer to these questions, I came across a very obvious thought.

Here it is: ‘Our poor decisions are based on illusions on which we strongly believed at the time of taking the decision.’

Just rewind and think of any one decision that went wrong in your life:

What were your thoughts before you made that decision?

How did you feel about it?

Think hard, wasn’t it all an illusion?

Once again, just stop for awhile and study one decision of yours that went wrong. Don’t pity yourself for taking that wrong decision. Analyze it.

Try to remember what was going on in your mind before taking that decision?

Write it down. Stop reading and write it down, what was that one or many thoughts that were going on in your mind before you took that wrong decision?

C’mon do it now.

You don’t have to share this with anybody. Nobody is going to judge you and punish you. So be sincere and honest with your self. Write down each and everything you thought while you were in the process of taking that decision which went wrong.

I know it is painful to remember your past mistakes. I have also gone through a lot of pain to write down what made me take those wrong decisions that almost cost me my life. But it is necessary to understand what we did, so that we are well prepared to learn what we could have done.

Once again, I ask you to stop reading this and take your diary and write down what was that one or many thoughts that were going on in your mind before you took that wrong decision?

You will have to go to my next post after you finish writing.

So, see you there!