Decision.

A decision is a combination process of many substances that relate to its purpose. Each decision is a step in stone for a new chapter of your life. You wonder why most of us hesitate to make a decision especially when you have to face the facts of its huge consequences. It may take you forever to make a decision. Taking time to make a decision is advice you heard the most when you were a kid. It’s crucial but not all the time. You should learn how to identify when you should make a quick decision, why you should make a quick decision and when you should slow down to analyze more about the situation before coming up with a decision. Decision making sometimes is just simply as a selection between a few options, but sometimes it’s more complicated than just a choice we pick. It can be a situation that we need immediate action or it can be life or death kind of decision. It can be a time when you need to make a decision to keep on with the project or stop it. It can be a situation that requires quick creative solutions. What you are about to learn today is how to strengthen your decision making muscle?

1. Starting with building up your level of “common sense”. You may think this is such a no-brainer topic that we shouldn’t take time to discuss. Common sense nowadays is not common anymore. Look at the amount of information you are able to access now compare to a decade or two ago. You thought it supposed to increase your common sense level. But the fact is it confuses your ability to trust your gut because 80 percents of what is out there have no evidence to back it up. It’s not that you don’t know how to do research but the sad fact is you want an instant result. What you usually do is going to the Google site and start reading everything you can find on the first page. Then, you jump into the conclusion. Is it correct? What college teaches us is how to do research and distinguish facts from opinions. However, this college condition comes with a consequence for our lives when your A+ grade motivation is gone. If you are forced to find the right source for your research papers, you will take it seriously but when it comes to your impacting life decision, you choose a shortcut instead. You can increase your common sense by giving yourself permission to do research and find out the truth for yourself before you come to the conclusion.
2. Whom should you take advice from? After finding the right sources for your “common sense”, you should check out some real experience of people who have practice or apply these facts, methods or ways. Another myth about asking for advice is thinking that a doctor takes 10 years in the medical field is a smart person to ask for advice on your health symptom and your stock investment. How silly it is, right? But have you noticed that people ask their parents for business advice even though their parents have no business experiences? Or people tend to ask their friends advice on their relationship without knowing that their friends don’t even have a good relationship? You have to “check the fruits on the tree” before you go for it. Advice is free but its cost is extremely expensive if you listen to the wrong experts.
3. Take daily action to strengthen your decisive muscle. Health and fitness is billions dollar industry. People pay tons of money to build their body muscle and neglect on building their mental muscle. Decisive muscle is one puzzle piece of mental muscle. To develop it, you have to be aware of your daily thought process when it comes to making a small decision whether at a new restaurant to choose your food, making a decision to talk to your team about some changes they need to meet the goals, or a bigger decision on buying a new car, new house, getting married, having kids, changing job, or moving to a new town, etc… If a small decision can take you a long time to make, speed it up so your big decision doesn’t take forever. If it takes you 10-20 minutes every morning to make a decision on whether or not you should snooze your alarm, what to wear, what to eat for breakfast, you have to be aware of these daily routines first and give it some attention on decision making. If you strengthen your decision-making muscle daily, you will be able to use its strength when emergency situations happen or when some unexpected things show up.If you follow step 1 and 2, you should be confident in your decision-making process. It’s just a matter of practicing more.
4. People are so afraid of making a wrong decision so they’d rather not make any decision at all. If your decision-making muscle is weak and you can’t make a decision for yourself, someone else will do it. That’s the last thing that you want cause no one has more interest in you than yourself. You may trust your guts and make a wrong decision once or twice but it’s the only way you can raise your capacity and have a better sense of your guts. How do you build your body muscle? You break it and you build it. If you went to the gym and keep lifting a 10 pounds weight, you will never have a better muscle which can handle a 100 pounds weight. Strengthen your muscle decision by acting fast on a decision that has small impacts or small consequences. Then, you can handle more.

I think we need to educate people about the importance of strengthening their mental muscle as well as their body muscle. Without mental toughness, body toughness won’t last as long.

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