Previously I wrote about gratitude and paying attention to your emotional weather (self-awareness) as steps or keys to being a generally happy person. These are two things you can choose to do everyday, and that’s some of the secret. You have choices to make everyday, and those are two of the most important as you start each day. So here’s the third.
Step 3: Make decisions
You and I will make a bunch of decisions each day. If you do an internet search, one of the most sited number is 35,000 decisions a day! There seems to be no legitimate substantiation for that number. One I do agree with is that we make about 200 decisions a day regarding what we’ll eat and drink. I can get brain freeze at a fast food restaurant staring at the menu, like something will magically appear that I would actually enjoy.
Forget the numbers. Most of us know intuitively that we seem to have too many things, large and small, to decide about. All of those decisions take some energy, and they can create a drain on us. Its called choice overload, and instead of freeing us up, we often end up delaying decisions leaving us dissatisfied, confused, and unhappy with our lives. What do we do about this? Can it be avoided? Yes, we don’t have to be stuck, and here’s a few tips on how.
Remember 2 Tim. 4:7. “God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power, love, and a sound mind.” A “sound mind” implies that we have the ability to make quality decisions about our lives. These decisions will be governed by the Spirit within us, who also operates according to both power and love. God has given us the strength to choose to live in a way that is caring about others. In Proverbs and James, there are a lot of ways in which we are told to live this way and not this way. The Spirit of God will lead us in those ways. Trust Him to do that more and more in your life.
Second, deal with reasons we delay decisions. A lot of unhappiness comes from fear of making the wrong decision, so we put off. Maybe its due to not wanting to make a mistake, or fear of missing out, or just the overload of too much information. In all kinds of leadership decisions, I see people delay in hopes that more people will be happy, or always waiting for more information to magically appear in hopes to take away all ambiguity and risk.
So ask yourself, What decisions am I not making, or avoiding, that I need to make? What’s holding me back? If you want to develop a generally happy disposition and approach to life, don’t delay on small decisions – e.g. no one really cares that much about what you wear today, they’re all obsessed with how they look to notice – and develop a simple process for big decisions. If you get stuck, and you’re not ready to make a decision, then make a decision that you’ll come back to this by a certain day in the future. (I.e. I’m deciding not to decide, but say, just for a week, or maybe a month.) You may need more facts, or you may need time for your emotions to catch up with the reality of what you need to do. But delaying decisions, when you were created and empowered to make good decisions, will not lead to a happier life. Its just going to drain you, and make you unhappy.
Here’s an action point: Identify a decision that you have a hard time making and use a short clear process to resolve it. Here would be an example: “should I take a vacation in the next 6 months?” But you could apply this to any decision…
>Remember 2 Tim. 1:7 God’s given you His Spirit to empower a sound mind to make decisions. Daily surrender to the Lord, saying you’ll DO whatever He wants you to DO. (Doing is making decisions)
>List out what you’d ideally like to benefit from a vacation for yourself and whoever else is involved (friends, a spouse, kids, etc.) and describe what that might look like.
>Check for “feasibility”: time of year, how long, how much you can afford, how much your vacation idea will cost, etc.
>Look for alternatives: our checkbooks rarely contain what our desired vacation looks like – unless you’re like a colleague of ours years ago who literally thought that as long as she had checks, she had money! Look for alternatives: e.g. shorten by a day, do something closer, drive instead of fly, stay at someplace not as nice, save more money by cutting back something else, move the time line to one year, etc. We often get stuck when we lock into the one and only perfect opportunity. Sometimes its just not possible.
>Now that you have a workable plan, pull the trigger. Book the ticket. Put down a deposit. Or just say no, cause its not possible, and be happy that you made a good decision. Whatever it takes to turn the idea into a decision. Otherwise, its just a dream that you keep rehearsing in your mind, wasting your precious time and emotional energy.
Making decisions of all kinds and levels of importance is part of being an adult. You’ll make decisions that you realized were not great ones, but you’ll learn from those and do better the next time. We have to get over the fear of failing in our decisions. Lots of parenting is about helping kids learn how to choose, make mistakes, learn from them, and readjust. Kids build confidence not only when they make good ones, but also when they see themselves rebound from bad ones. If we didn’t learn that lesson earlier in our lives, its not too late to start now. Don’t be stuck. Make decisions and be happier.