Tag Archives forDecision

Making A Decision

“Making a decision usually means taking one of two roads. One is doing the right thing. To take the other road, you have to sit back and spin a story around the decision or action you are taking. If you find yourself thinking up an elaborate justification for what you are doing, you are not doing the right thing.” Wayne Sales

This is so interesting. I never thought about how we “spin” a story around why this decision is the right one. I don’t have enough time is a favorite story. Or that decision will mean that my (insert here the person of choice) will leave me or disapprove or will judge me and so on,… I can make this decision and take a short cut to my goal. And the truth is that we just don’t want to do the right thing, because it is harder, takes more time, and so on.

This isn’t just doing something wrong, although that is how we notice the bad decision. Remember the scandal about the auto workers who were taking lunch at the park to drink alcohol or smoke pot? Every day there is a scandal somewhere and it resulted from them telling themselves a story around the decisions/actions they were taking. This is how someone paints themselves into the corner of disgrace.

But there is also disappointment when we find ourselves with dreams that never came true. This is from the decision to be easy on ourselves. Where we believe the story that we spun ourselves that we just don’t have the time to do it now, and there will be time later to do it. Then one day we find ourselves truly out of time, because we are dying with our story (our dream) still inside of us.

This too, was not doing the right thing. So pick yourself up today, and decide that today you are going to put into action one small thing to make that dream come true. One small thing that you aren’t going to do anymore that you know is wrong.

It could be that today is the day you quit smoking. That you actually take the 10 minutes to meditate. That you go for that walk before/after work that you are always going to do and find each evening that you didn’t make time to do. Or today could be the day that you do a grand daring action that knocks everyone you know off their feet.

You choose, big or small, but as Nike says, “just do it!”.