How to Make Decisions in Life ⋆ Earth and Water

Making decisions is hard. Most of us can tell you all day long what it is we don’t want yet have a problem figuring out exactly what it is we do want in life.

Throughout the sands of time, what we wanted as individuals has been relatively unimportant. Survival was the only thing that mattered.

Our brains are hardwired for the need to know what’s bad so that we can steer clear of it. It makes sense that we would evolve to not be able to figure out what we want in life.

It’s the same reason negative news and media interests us so much. Why apocalyptic scenarios are found so intriguing and common in the entertainment industry.

Are survival instincts tell us to pay attention to things that could potentially save our lives. Knowing what we want in life has always been irrelevant.

Thanks to modern technology and societal progression, most of us in industrialized nations no longer have to struggle to have our daily needs met. Since we’re not stuck on the bottom of Moslow’s pyramid anymore, we’re able to move up and our options for developing our life into better things is now on the table of possibilities.

And it’s a lot of choices. And it can be overwhelming and hard to sort through them and choose which is best for you. We MUST make decisions though in order to better our lives. We MUST choose a direction to go but most of us remain hovering in the decision-less limbo of where we are and where we want to be.

We’re left in a perpetual state of stuckness. An unsatisfied yearning in our hearts for something more and frustration at not knowing how to get to it.

Knowing what we want is often the only thing in between where we are and where we want to be. I mean, if you know you want sushi, often times all you have to do is get in the vehicle and go get it. It’s the same concept in all things.

You have to know you want to become a writer to find the path to become a writer.
You have to know you want to be a yoga instructor to find the path to be one.
You have to be specific in what you want. Knowing you want better isn’t specific enough to get better. Detail it out.

Practice taking charge of decision making

Practice making decisions. Start with small decisions like avoiding this reoccurring conversation:

Friend and/or lover: “I’m hungry”
You: “What do you want?”
Friend and/or lover: “I dunno, what do you want?”
You: “To not pick.”
Friend and/or lover: “Well what do you feel like eating?”
You: “Food.”
Friend and/or lover: “But what kind of food?”

As you know, this almost never ends well.

Either an argument of frustration erupts or someone finally picks something and the other person doesn’t want that and often it leads to a very disappointing meal and lower vibrations which all suck.

Make a point to make a decision for yourself. Just throw out the first thing that comes to your mind. Not only are you practicing making decisions but by going with the first thing that pops up you’re also exercising your intuition which is going to help you keep the positive momentum flowing and growing.

No one likes or wants to make decisions. We all for the most part just want someone to tell us what to do. Take the initiative to be the one deciding and people will both thank and look up to you for it.

How to start making decisions

Some decisions are way easier to make than others. For day to day things, I highly suggest routines and planners. Routines help us to make less decisions and planners help us to avoid overwhelm when making routine decisions and plans.

Start with small things like food. Plan out what you want to eat all week. It doesn’t matter if you “Might not feel like tacos on Tuesday”. If come Tuesday you find that Thursday’s enchiladas sound better, switch them.

What’s important is that you made the decision to narrow down your options early on so that you have SOMETHING to fall back on or at least start with.

Gut your closet to only what you love and wear. This will make getting dressed easier every day. We only have the capacity to make X amount of decisions a day and if we can take away some of these tiny ones, it leaves us room for the bigger ones.

Steve jobs famously wore only the same things every day so that he could leave more space to make bigger decisions. Once you have these small things covered, you can turn your attention to the bigger things in life like:

What career would make me excited to go to work everyday?
What lifestyle changes could I make to reach my goals?
What could I do to make an impact on the world?
How can I move away from surviving to thriving?

These are empowering questions that are going to help you find a solution to your problems. And now that you have all of the small daily tasks taken care of, you have the mental capacity to meditate on them and allow the universe to guide you to answers.

No one knows and that’s ok

It doesn’t matter what the decision is, just make it. Either it’ll work out wonderfully or it won’t and you can simply make a new decision.

But you have to make them if you want a better life. It’s not enough to know what you don’t want. If you don’t know what it is you DO want, you’re only going to continue finding things you don’t want. Like attracts like, remember?

We are all really good at telling you what it is we don’t want. We’re all exceptionally talented in that area. Use it to narrow down the list of possible wants.

No one really knows what they want. Once you realize that NOBODY knows, it makes it a little bit easier to take the initiative because you’re no longer stuck in the falsehood of comparing yourself to others. Even those of us who look as though we have it all together are fumbling through life.

This is literally how I overcame my paralyzing fear of speaking. I realized no one wanted to be the one to get on stage but that someone needed to, so why not choose to be the one?

People look up to those who know what they want because people desire to also know what they want.

Likewise, you have to know where you’re going if you’re going to make it anywhere.

People walk in circles in their lives, never accomplishing anything and struggling to live a mediocre life because they don’t know what it is that they want.

When you know exactly what you want, you can stop chasing your tail and focus on a more linear(ish) path. Which also takes away a lot of the chaos and roller coaster-y types of situations most people find themselves caught up in.

So leave a comment and tell me what it is you do want. Or at least what you’re trying to figure out.

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