Just One Decision

 

It is estimated that the average adult makes approximately 35000 conscious decision every single day.

Wow, I’m exhausted just thinking about that. Realistically though, most of those decisions, while still conscious, are done automatically like the decision to reach in the drawer and pull your toothbrush out instead of your hairbrush, or putting ketchup on your hash browns but not your eggs, that kind of thing. Your personal preference to choose one thing over another is still actively making a conscious decision but I’d liken it closer to having a computer program running in the background handling the day to day functions needed to get on with your life.

Every day we wake and make a series of decisions that will ultimately determine how our day will turn out. It begins with the most basic of choices – wake up and get out of bed. But the most important decision of your day is the decision to determine how you are going to feel. If you decide that you feel good, then you will probably find that your day, at the very least, starts out pretty good. If you make the choice that you feel bad, well, that may set the tone for a vastly different rest of the day.

Every minute, every hour as the day progresses, you make decisions that can alter the outcome of your day as well. Poor diet choices, good diet choices, what to wear, whether to work hard or slack off, these kinds of mental decisions form your waking hours but actually stem from much earlier decisions you may have made that are now embedded in our subconscious as part of your belief system. For example, if you have a hidden, subconscious belief that you will always be the fat girl, you may support that belief with poor diet choices. Or if someone repeatedly told you as a teenager that you were lazy, you may always choose the easiest way to do something instead of challenging yourselves to strive for more.

Maturity plays a part as well. The impulsiveness of youth leads us to make uninformed choices that can lead us down roads best not taken. But it doesn’t matter how far down you go, or how hard it may seem to overcome a previous, poorly made choice, you always have the ability to make the decision to turn yourself around and head the other way.

It only takes one second to make a decision that can change your life for the better and it all starts with making the decision to be present and in the moment. When you are in the moment, you can make thoughtful decisions instead of reactionary ones. Being present allows you time to put some thought into your choices. To weigh the pros and cons and to follow out the threads of repercussion the decision may result in.

Every change you make in your life, starts with a decision. To make change lasting, that new decision must be accompanied with determination and commitment.

But the beauty of the human mind is that we have the ability to choose different thoughts than from what we have previously believed were our choices. You always have free will, no matter what. The choice is yours. If you want to have a better life, you simply need to make better decisions.

Don’t think one decision can change your life? Well think about this. You are standing on a path in the forest walking due south but make the conscious decision to turn your body slightly to the east, let’s say but just one degree. In a few step you will be on the edge on the path, In 100 steps you would probably be well within the trees. Now imagine how far from the original path you might be in 1000, or 10,000 steps? Your trajectory has now brought you to a vastly different destination and it only took one decision – to turn your body slightly.

Once you make a new decision and combine it with the commitment needed to give it legs, you will begin to rewrite the old belief program, the one that have been playing in your subconscious mind. This is where all of your default programs and past decisions reside. But by repeating that new decision over and over again, a new program will be created in your subconscious and become the new default system in which you operate from until of course, you make another decision that changes everything once again.

So whether it is one second from now, one hour, or even tomorrow, your life can change. You need only to make the decision to make it so and then to give that decision power by committing to it. Continue to make new choices from the perspective of this new decision and your life can not help but move you in a different direction.

 

*This post was originally published May 20/2017*