It’s a new year and the internet is full of goal setting and life changing advice, predictions and horoscopes. Including a woman known as Mystic Veg, who predicts the future by tossing spears of asparagus in the air and then interpreting how they fall. Not unlike I Ching to be honest. Though I must say that her 2022 hit rate didn’t look too great. Whether you are wanting to set your ship on a different course or simply want to get a sense of what this year may bring, life is inevitably about making decisions. Should I get a new job, a new house, a new car, start or end a relationship, retrain, move to a new city or even a new country. What should I wear today, what should I have for dinner, should I call that friend, should I start a fitness regime, and if so which one? If you are lost in the maze of life, how do you know whether to turn left or right? Life is nothing but a series of decisions, so how do you know that you are making good ones. And what does the future have in store for you?
In so far as you believe that you have complete agency in your life, then where you are now is the sum total of all decisions that you have made in the past, good or bad, conscious and unconscious. For example, like it or not, your weight and fitness reflect your lifetime food and exercise choices. And you could say the same about any other aspect of your life. Judge the quality of your decision making on your results. So, if you don’t like your results you might want to look at how you make decisions. The bad news is that there is no fool proof method for making good decisions, but there are some tips that help –
- Never make important decisions when you are in a bad mood. Negative states get in the way of you accessing more of your resourcefulness.
- When making a decision it is important to have several, but not too many options. A minimum of three is a good place to start. If you are simply considering a binary choice, there still could be a third way that you have yet to consider.
- Gather more information and seek out the opinions of others. One of the problems with making decisions is we get stuck in our own heads going around and around in a circle. Get another opinion, someone else might be able to see what you can’t. Simply speaking to someone else allows you to hear what’s in your head out loud. And that, by itself can be valuable.
- List pros and cons of each choice, evaluate and consider them and then make an overall decision. Your unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than your conscious mind. Feed your mind the relevant information, sleep on it (allowing your unconscious to process it), and then see what you think and how you feel about it in the morning. If necessary, repeat this process.
- Understand that all decisions are made with incomplete information. There is something that I’ve seen in business called Paralysis by Analysis. You think that the answer is in the data, and that by gathering more data or trying to recut the data in a different way you will get the correct answer. But you have to make the decision, the data can inform it, but it cannot do it for you.
- Once you have made a decision realise that you can change it, most of the time. But even if this is the case you still want to fully commit to the decision that you made. Give it a chance at least.
- Finally understand that there are really no right or wrong decisions. Choices you make in life will lead you in different directions, but these directions are just different, not better or worse, right or wrong, just different.
And what of the future, what will 2023 bring? The way I think about this is that there is no prediction of The Future, because there is no The Future. I am sure that there are many possible potential futures but not one pre-ordained one that we are all heading towards. The future you will experience will be the summation of your choices, past, present, and future. Make these choices and allow the future to unfold as it does. This time next year we will all know what 2023 brought anyway, and how accurate Mystic Veg was too, or not.
“Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny.” Bod Marley
