How To Make Good Decisions

How do you make good decisions? This is a great question. First and foremost, make them sooner than you probably have been people who usually say, well, Brenda, how do you make good decisions? They've been waffling so long on making important decisions in their lives that now they're in trouble. So now they're really. Now it's difficult to make a decision. It's usually easier to make a decision early on than it is later on. As more trouble and responsibilities and bad things pile up, suddenly we find ourselves behind, lots of people are mad at us, and now we gotta make a decision to placate or please a bunch of people. If you just made the decision earlier on, it would usually be great. And that also applies to our personal lives. You know, it's like people who hit New Year's resolutions time. They're like, you know what? I finally decided this year to lose some weight. Wait, you decided this year you're 50 and you're 50 pounds overweight. What took so long? If it's a decision that's good for you, make it sooner. If you hate your job and it's terr and it's awful, the decision is make a decision to leave sooner. Like, usually taking action sooner is better than later. I'm not to say, you know, you shouldn't collect information, be judicious and conscientious. It's about collecting information, making right decisions, being really smart. But my gosh, this, our whole culture is in some kind of, like, analysis paralysis now, where people are scared to make bold decisions for themselves, to take fast actions that really move their lives forward because they're scared of change. So I think most decisions, it's like, hey, make it. That's the way to make good decisions. Make it. Stop putting it off. Make the decision. Once you make it, stick to it. You know, try it, implement it, do it, see how it goes before changing or quitting so fast. Make that decision. I know you've got a decision in your personal life that you've been waiting to make. You got a decision, you've been waiting to make it work. And often what we do is we put them off. And that waiting becomes avoidance. And avoidance feels great in the short term, but in the long term, it guarantees suffering. It only gets worse the longer you wait. Second idea is to make sure that you have criteria for how to make a decision. And criteria is usually pretty easy in decision making. And that is you kind of decide what's good for you, what's good for other people. And what would you want to Be the general rule, meaning this. If you have to decide, you know, should I move to Atlanta? Well, you decide first and foremost. Is Atlanta right for you? Is Atlanta right for your family? Is Atlanta right for everybody? Would you recommend everybody live in Atlanta? No. Then probably don't go there. You know, nothing against Atlanta. Okay. This is just about you deciding. Okay. I need to look at my decision making from three very different perspectives. From the perspective of what feels right and true and intuitively good to me, to what decision would support the people around me, my family, my friends, and to what should be the universal rule. If the whole world was faced with this decision, what should they do? Because it broadens your perspective out a little bit. Right? It's that old thing of the paper test. If you've never heard about it, the newspaper test. It's about if your decision and what you were about to do was to appear in tomorrow morning's front page of the news or in some, you know, very popular person's news feed on Facebook, would you be proud of that decision? You know, think about setting up criteria for, you know, if somebody saw that decision. Would you be proud of your. Your choice here? Would it make you feel like, you know what, I followed what was right for me. I honored as many people as I could along the way. And I think this is in general, a good rule for most people. If you can do that, then you're doing a great job in your decision making. And I would say the last piece, which is so important for people is that as they're going to think about a decision, they, you know, it's about collecting as much information as possible that is from informed people. You know, most of the bad decisions we make, we made because we listened to the wrong person. Somebody said, hey, go do this. And we listened to them. And they weren't even an expert. They had no background. They didn't know you, your. Your true heart, your true powers. They didn't know the topic area. It was just somebody you knew and you listened to them. And often a lot of decisions we make that we regret later on. We either we acted without any information, or we acted with information from people who had no information themselves, meaning we weren't listening to or consulting any experts at all. And, you know, there's nothing that you want to achieve in your life that someone hasn't already achieved. There's nothing that you're trying to overcome in your life right now that someone hasn't already overcome. And if you can believe that, then that says a, you have humility and that you're aware of the fact that there's been 7 billion people on the planet here currently, and that we've got thousands and thousands years of collected human history. Someone's gone through what you're going through. Someone's tried to achieve what you're trying to achieve. And because that's already happened, there's a roadmap for dealing with this. So before you make your decision, make sure you go out and do some research. What have other informed, happy, joyous, smart, accomplished people done in that area? What did they choose? When faced with the same fork in the road, which way did they go? And it's not about just following the herd or following what everyone else did, but at least it's having perspective. Because maybe they found a third way. You think you have a choice, A or B? Maybe there's a C right down the middle is the right way. Often when we make bad decisions is because we forced a false choice. We thought we had to take A or B, but we didn't realize there was actually A, B, C, D, E, and F. And had we known there are other choices, we would have made a better choice. But because we didn't do our research and we were just acting from intuition, we made a bad call. So as much as my first takeaway is make the decision, my last one is make the decision after at least you've done some intelligent research. I know all this sounds common sense, but sometimes our common sense is not common practice. If you've made some bad decisions in the past couple months, sit down and say, why was that decision bad? Why did I make it? Was I in a hurry? Did I not set any criteria before I made that decision? Did I not do enough research? Because sometimes the best way to get better at decision making in the future is to look what we did with our decision making in the past. And that also applies to looking back in the past. What's some of the best decisions you ever made? I mean, decision you're really proud of? What criteria were there? What results were there? Going back and analyzing, you're more successful than you realize, especially if you're a person who watches or listens to a program like this. You've got your life. You know, you're moving along, you're thinking about your life in intelligent ways. So give yourself some credit. What great decisions have you made in the past? Now, let me end with this. What's the next few big decisions you need to make that you've just been waiting on? Is it starting a relationship or leaving one, starting a new passion or quitting an old hobby? Is it doing something right for you and your family? Like, what is it the next couple decisions that you should make and go out, do a little research, set some criteria and make this week, the week you finally make that decision by being more attentive to the decisions we have to make and the great decisions we made in the past and the bad ones, we can start to make better ones in the future. The more decisions we make in the future that are great for us, the more we start to feel what we call the charged life. Hey, guys, it's Brendon. Did you like this episode? If you did, you can do three things right now to continue your journey. First, you can subscribe right here to my channel, which I hope you will, so I can keep sending you videos on a weekly, daily basis to change your life. Second, you can get my brand new book for free by clicking the link right here. And third, you can also go to my website, sign up for my newsletter so I can send you free offers, free products, free programs, updates on my events, new podcasts and everything else that we don't do on this channel here. If you like to do that, just go ahead and click any of these buttons you see right here. Look forward to seeing it on the next video. Until then, go out there every single day of your life. Live fully, love openly and make your difference Today.