Tag: Decision making

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Positive thinking

A Few Ways to Make Life Changing Decisions

 

Most people don’t know the profound effects of making decisions. Often times, we go through life oblivious to what thoughts we are thinking and what actions we are taking. Every single decision we make in our days shapes our current reality. It shapes who we are as a person because we habitually follow through with the decisions we make without even realizing it.

If you’re unhappy with the results in your life right now, making the effort to changing your decisions starting today will be the key to creating the person you want to be and the life you want to have in the future. Let’s talk about a few ways you can go about making life changing decisions.

1. Realize the power of decision making.
Before you start making a decision, you have to understand what a decision does. Any decision that you make causes a chain of events to happen. When you decide to pick up a cigarette to smoke it, that decision might result in you picking up another one later on to get that same high feeling. After a day, you may have gone through a pack without knowing it. But if you decide not to smoke that first cigarette and make a decision every five minutes to focus your attention somewhere else when you get that craving, after doing this for a week, your cravings will eventually subside and you will become smoke-free. But it comes down to making that very first decision of deciding whether or not to pick up that cigarette.

2. Go with your gut.
Often times, we take too much time to make a decision because we’re afraid of what’s going to happen. As a result of this, we go through things like careful planning, deep analysis, and pros and cons before deciding. This is a very time consuming process. Instead, learn to trust your gut instinct. For the most part, your first instinct is usually the one that is correct or the one that you truly wanted to go with. Even if you end up making a mistake, going with your gut still makes you a more confident decision maker compared to someone who takes all day to decide.

3. Carry your decision out.
When you make a decision, act on it. Commit to making a real decision. What’s a real decision? It’s when you decide on something, and that decision is carried out through action. It’s pointless to make a decision and have it played out in your head, but not doing anything about it. That’s the same as not making a decision at all. If you want to make real changes in life, you have to make it a habit to apply action with your decision until it’s completed. By going through this so many times, you will feel more confident with accomplishing the next decision that you have in mind.

4. Tell others about your decisions.
There’s something about telling other people what we’re going to do that makes us follow through. For example, for the longest time I’ve been trying to become an early riser and whenever I tried to use my own will power, waking up early without falling back asleep felt impossible. So what I did was I went to a forum and made the decision to tell people that I would wake up at 6 AM and stay up. Within two days, I was able to accomplish doing this because I felt a moral obligation to follow through with my words even though I failed the first time. Did people care? Probably not, but just the fact that there might be someone else out there seeing if you’re telling the truth will give you enough motivation to following through with your decision.

5. Learn from your past decisions.
Even after I failed to follow through my decision the first time when I told people I was going to wake up early and stay up, I didn’t give up. I basically asked myself, “What can I do this time to make it work tomorrow? The truth is you are going to mess up at times when it comes to making decisions and instead of beating yourself up over it, learn something from it. Ask yourself, what was good about the decision I made? What was bad about it? What can I learn from it so I can make a better decision next time? Remember, don’t put so much emphasis focusing on short term effects; instead focus on the long term effects.

6. Maintain a flexible approach.
I know this might sound counter-intuitive, but making a decision doesn’t mean that you can’t be open to other options. For example, let’s say you made the decision to lose ten pounds by next month through cardio. If something comes up, you don’t have to just do cardio. You can be open to losing weight through different methods of dieting as long as it helps you reach your goal in the end. Don’t be stubborn to seek out only one way of making a decision. Embrace any new knowledge that brings you closer to accomplishing your initial decision.

7. Have fun making decisions.
Finally, enjoy the process. I know decision-making might not be the most fun thing world to do, but when you do it often, it becomes a game of opportunity. You’ll learn a lot about yourself on the way, you’ll feel and become a lot more confident when you’re with yourself and around others, and making decisions will just become a lot easier after you do it so often that you won’t even think about it.

Anything you decide to do from this point on can have a profound effect later on. Opportunities are always waiting for you. Examine the decisions that you currently have in the day. Are there any that can be changed to improve your life in some way? Are there any decisions that you can make today that can create a better tomorrow?

You may click to see :->Improve Decision Making

Source : Stepcase Lifehack . 14th. July,2010


Categories
Positive thinking

Consulting Heart and Mind

Making Choices from a Place of Balance
Each of the myriad decisions we make every day has the potential to have a deep impact on our lives. Some choices touch us to our very cores, awakening poignant feelings within us. Others seem at first to be simple but prove to be confusingly complex. We make the best decisions when we approach the decision-making process from a balanced emotional and intellectual foundation. When we have achieved equilibrium in our hearts and in our minds, we can clearly see both sides of an issue or alternative. Likewise, we can accept compromise as a natural fact of life. Instead of relying solely on our feelings or our rationality, we utilize both in equal measure, empowering ourselves to come to a life-affirming and balanced conclusion.

Balance within and balance without go hand in hand. When you are called upon to choose between two or more options, whether they are attractive or distasteful, you should understand all you can about the choice ahead of you before moving forward. If you do not come to the decision from a place of balance, you risk making choices that are irrational and overly emotional or are wholly logical and don’t take your feelings into account. In bringing your thoughts and emotions together during the decision-making process, you ensure that you are taking everything possible into account before moving forward. Nothing is left up to chance, and you have ample opportunity to determine which options are in accordance with your values.

Though some major decisions may oblige you to act and react quickly, most will allow you an abundance of time in which to mull over your choices. If you doubt your ability to approach your options in a balanced fashion, take an extended time-out before responding to the decision. This will give you the interlude you need to make certain that your thoughts and feelings are in equilibrium. As you practice achieving balance, you will ultimately reach a state of mind in which you can easily make decisions that honor every aspect of the self.

Source: Daily Om

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News on Health & Science

Teenagers need more sleep, say experts

A leading body clock expert has claimed that students really do need a lie-in of an hour or two in the morning…..click & see

Neuroscience research suggests that the typical morose and sulky   Kevin the teenager  is someone who deserves our understanding, sympathy and help more than an early morning alarm call.

Scientists are beginning to understand why teenagers can turn from sweet, adorable boys and girls into a spotty, unpredictable and combustible blend of truculence, arrogance and moodiness. It is, research has shown, not just to do with sleep deprivation but profound changes taking place in their brains.

The teenage brain is a  work in progress   and needs extra sleep, according to Professor Russell Foster, a   chronobiologist  at Oxford University.

Teenagers have long complained they are too tired to get up in the morning and that starting school early is cruel. Some adults blame the griping on the fact that many teenagers stay up late to do homework, take part in marathon telephone sessions or play computer games.

But work by Professor Till Roenneberg and colleagues at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich has shown that sleep timing changes markedly as we age, said Foster. By the time of puberty, bed times and wake times drift to later and later hours. The tendency to get up later continues until about the age of 19.5 years in women and 20.9 years in men.

“On the basis of this data, we know teens want to go to bed two hours later than 40 to 50-year-olds, and in 10 per cent there is a four-hour delay,   said Foster. In other words, they are biologically programmed to want to stay under the duvet.

Mary Carskadon, the director of sleep research at EP Bradley Hospital in Rhode Island, America, has shown that among US teenagers, on average 25 per cent get fewer than six-and-a-half hours sleep a night.

She estimates that to be optimally alert teenagers need about nine hours of sleep. Studies by Carskadon with colleagues at the University of Toronto have suggested that a later starting time for school would greatly improve alertness and the mental abilities of teenagers during their morning lessons.

Foster said teenagers would not need such long lie-ins if they could “improve sleep hygiene.

That would mean, for example, going to bed at the same time each day, keeping their bedrooms cool and banning computers, lights and televisions.

But that is not always easy, as Foster knows first hand from his own children: Charlotte, 17, Victoria, 13, and most of all from his 15-year-old, William.

“Do they listen to me? They laugh at me most of time,” he confessed.

The basic problem is that society takes no account of the maturation of the teenage brain.

MRI scans of adolescent brains conducted over the past decade have revealed that not only is there major reorganisation in the teenage brain but it continues to develop until the early twenties.

Among the most sleep deprived are teenagers and an increasing body of evidence from sleep researchers suggests that relatively minor changes in the way we time educational activities could have major benefits,   said Foster.

Source:The Telegraph (Kolkata,India)

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