Making Decisions Right

Our life is governed by the choices we make on a daily basis. The small daily choices impact our energy levels, our focus, and the way we show up to everything else.

Make good choices and feel great. Make bad choices and feel worse, which makes it harder to make a good choice next.

Big decisions set the framework for our lives - Where we live, what we do for work, who we date and marry, where we go for vacation, where we go to school, etc. As you can imagine, any small changes to any of these things completely shifts your environment and puts you on an entirely different life trajectory.

Choices are powerful and extremely influential. This is why we invest so much time and energy into making the right decisions for ourselves to put us on the life-path that we feel is best for us.

But no matter how informed we are, how much research we’ve done and how diligently we’ve thought about the decision, the end result is unpredictable. In fact what becomes of our decisions is way more variable than we realize.

This is where I want to borrow something I heard Ellen Langer say - Instead of being so consumed with making the right decision, what if we poured ourselves into making our decisions right?

This means that no matter what path we find ourselves on, we invest ourselves in helping to shape it into what we want. It means that we don’t overthink the inputs and we save our best selves to manage the outputs.

Yes it’s important to be really confident about your partner before you choose to marry them, but it’s still up to you to build it into a wonderful marriage. Yes it’s critical to know if you’d enjoy the lifestyle of a certain town and can practically afford it - But you still must follow through on doing things you enjoy to make a new town a better home.

My intention is not to discredit the importance of being really thoughtful about the decisions we make, as I mentioned choices are everything. The perspective I wanted to add is that the outcomes of our decisions are quite variable, and if we want to experience the best parts of those decisions, we need to make it happen ourselves (and we have more control over the end result than we realize). 

It’s not just about making the right decisions, it’s also about making your decisions right.