4 Things That Shape Every Decision You Make
Let’s talk about decision-making…
One of the greatest gifts is the gift of decisions. One major decision that we face every day is how we decide to react to certain events in our lives.
For example, when we feel like our life is out of control, it’s because we have made a decision to classify our life as chaotic. If we feel like we are being controlled, we have decided to give our power to other people or things outside of ourselves.
The minute you decide that you are not the one who holds the power in your life is the minute you lose any ability to take control of the meaning of your experiences.
It suddenly becomes about what other people say and what other people do and how that affects you. Rather than your actions being the sole reason for what you receive or don’t receive in life.
This all comes from the power of a decision. Most of the time such powerful and life-changing decisions such as relinquishing responsibility for your own life is an unconscious process. Therefore, decisions can happen unconsciously such as what I’ve explained or consciously such as deciding what to have for dinner.
For all decsions, the decision-making process is shaped by 4 major things:
- What your values are
- What you believe about those values
- The meaning you have given to previous experiences
- Learned behavior
There are definitely more things that can contribute to decision-making but these are the foundational elements of it I think are the most important to bring to your awareness.
What your values are
The decisions we make are shaped around our values. For example, say your friend has a speech and they really want you to come but you also have a big project that’s due around the same time. Your biggest values will shape what you decide to do — support your friend or work on your project.
If one of your strongest values is friendship, support, or connection you will probably pick going to your friend's speech.
If one of your strongest values is financial independence, achievement, or completion you will probably decide to work on your project instead.
What you believe about those values
Furthermore, what you believe about your values will also play a part in your decisions.
Using the previous example, if you believe that working consistently hard on all your work or school projects will allow you to achieve financial independence then that will contribute to you choosing a project over a friend.
On the other hand, if you believe that supporting your friends and being there for the people you care about during big milestones will increase your connection to people, you will choose your friend over the project.
Therefore, the meaning we give to our values will increase the strength of those values and we will shape every decision we make around them so we can keep that value active in our life.
The meaning you have given to previous experiences
The same goes for the meaning you give to your previous experiences. If we associate pleasure with supporting a friend’s career we will likely do it again.
However, if we associate pain with it because, for instance, it made you miss the deadline on a previous project you most likely won’t go to your friend’s speech this time.
Learned Behavior
Learned behavior is an interesting one because it comes from what we decided was a worthy behavior as a child and took it on for ourselves.
Learned behaviors can be helpful or hurtful to you depending on the reason we adopted them and how we use them today. Additionally, learned behaviors that we have not reevaluated as adults can contribute to the way we make decisions now.
For example, if one of your learned behaviors is to retreat every time someone shows love you may decide to self-sabotage a loving relationship by leaving rather than accepting the love if you learned that love can be a scary thing and you have to run from it.
From this article, you can see how many different things contribute to our decisions on the subconscious, unconscious, and conscious levels.
One thing to note is that we also have the ability to access any of these things at any moment. We can also alter our values, meanings, and beliefs in order to change the way we make and react to certain decisions we have to make.
After reading, think about what are your most important values and analyze how those values have come up in your life. Can you see them playing a part in certain decisions you have made?
❤️🌻 Thank you for reading!
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