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Decisions

Episode #42

The idea for this episode came to me while attending a networking event this morning. As I record this it’s the Tuesday before Thanksgiving here in the United States. The episode will go live on Thanksgiving day. In addition to sharing what you do and who it is you help, the coordinate of the meeting asked people to share something they are grateful for.

For me, I’m actually grateful for all the changes 2020 has brought into my life. When I pause and truly think it through, COVID has forced me to re-decide a lot of things in my life. The company I’d worked for since 1983 offered an amazing retirement buyout package, this was actually offered in the exact same year they’d paid out 2 months of pay for a bonus. The highest bonus payout in the companies history.

WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER

  • What a decision is
  • The power of making decisions
  • What happens when we prolong decisions or procrastinate.
  • Why we leave decisions unmade.

FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

If you think about how most people live their lives – most is not even an exaggeration either – most people live their life on default. They are living at the effect of decisions that were made by no conscious choice. They’re just defaulting into previously made decisions or un-thoughtful decisions.

People keep drinking as they have, they eating in ways that adversely affect their bodies, live in the same house, stay married to the same person, have the same job because it’s something they decided oh so long ago.

We aren’t taught to pause and rethink these things unless something forces us to.

2020 has forced many of us to rethink plenty of things in our lives.

I believe that decisions are where we can find the power to create the lives we want to create and evolve into the highest version of ourselves.

Unfortunately, and inexplicably, most of us stop making decisions on purpose as we get older.

We simply fall into patterns of living out the decisions we have made in the past or think if we don’t decide, then we can avoid the discomfort.

This pattern we allowed ourselves to fall into is part of the reason everything happening around us right now feels so darn hard.

A decision is simply a commitment to a thought, feeling, and action that creates a result.

First, everything is optional.

The longer I apply and coach using EXIT principles - uncovering my thoughts, bringing in awareness as to how the thoughts make me feel and how my feelings are affecting my actions, reactions or my nonaction, create the results in my life, the more I realize that the most painful trap we can fall into is the thought/belief that there is not a choice.

When we forget there is always a choice, we get stuck in suffering because we believe we have to live out the “negative” decisions of our past. We start to feel like our life is a list of “have to-dos”.

When I remind my clients there is nothing they have to do and that they have complete free will, they are often very confused. 

Many of them have not considered that much of what they are currently doing is something they either really want to do (take care of their kids, work the job because of the paycheck, clean the house because they like how it looks and feels, cook the food because they like eating healthy) or that they could stop doing if they chose to (clean the house themselves, spend time with family they rather not, follow someone else’s manual for them)

The process of evaluating your life in a way that gives you your power back is imperative

What’s interesting is that it often doesn’t mean you will change what you are doing, but it will change how you feel about it and how you think about it.

This can be one of the most freeing exercises to take your power back in your life

When you understand that there is always a choice.

That you don’t have to continue the decisions of your past and you don’t have to follow anyone else’s idea of how you should live you change the question you ask yourself.

Your power question then becomes - Would I choose this again today?

When you understand that there's always a consequence to every thought you think (the result that comes from thinking the thought), you can take ownership of the results, desirable AND undesirable, that you currently have.

Then from that place, you can decide if you want to keep signing up for mandatory suffering, or if you want to take advantage of an opportunity that involves voluntary discomfort but also the promise of less suffering for the rest of your life.