The Change You Want Starts with a Decision

On significant occasions like Christmas, New Year, birthdays or anniversaries, near death experiences or bereavements of friends or family, many of us make decisions to change certain aspects of our lives. We make decisions about who we are now versus who we want to become, or how we behave now versus how we would ideally like to behave. Many of these changes can be minor adjustments that are easy to make, or they may be major shifts that require solid focus and dedication. Either way, the change we seek always starts with a decision.

You may query that statement in light of certain situations that you feel were not of your choosing or not your fault. For example, you didn’t choose for the boss to fire you or for the car accident to happen. Nor did you choose for your friend to succumb to illness, or for your business to fail. These scenarios can all perhaps be true in a way but consider these alternative perspectives.

Every Decision Has a Consequence

You are where you are now today in this moment because of millions of small decisions you have made in your life so far.

• You couldn’t have been fired had you not chosen to take the job rather than any other job or career path you might have pursued.
• You wouldn’t have had the car accident had you not chosen to drive today. If you want to go further down the rabbit hole, consider that it was you who chose to even learn to drive in the first place.
• You didn’t choose for your friend to be ill, yet you wouldn’t have even known about it had you not befriended them.
• Your business mightn’t have failed if you had learned better business management skills, or had you never even started the business.

That might all seem a bit cheesy or glib, but you can see my point that your life today is something unique that you have created with the intersection of all your previous decisions in life. Everything has a cause and an effect. Also, the world is constantly changing, and your life will too, whether you like it or not, so you may as well choose to keep improving yourself and your situation!

Every Decision Depends on Your Chosen Perspective

I’m sure you’ve probably heard the phrase, ‘It’s not what happens to you that matters; it’s how you choose to respond to what happens to you that counts.’

Every single one of us is a unique human being with our own unique set of beliefs, our own unique collection of life experiences and our own unique characters and complex personalities. So, every single one of us chooses how we interpret, or make sense of, any situation we are presented with, both consciously, and sub-consciously.

Therefore, whenever we are baffled by why another person chooses to perceive a situation or event differently, and therefore perhaps to behave differently than we would if we were ‘in their shoes’, we need to remember that they are ‘not us’. They have their reasons, even if those reasons make no sense to us.

The Effectiveness of Your Decision Depends on Your Motivation

In acknowledging that we are all a unique blend of beliefs, attitudes and experiences, we can see that how we choose to make sense of a scenario and how we will then decide to act, will depend on the strength of our motivation to act.

It’s often been stated by behavioural analysts that we are motivated away from the things we fear and towards the things we desire – pain or pleasure. Generally, it’s agreed that fear is a more powerful agent in this regard. We all have fears, but some of us allow them to paralyse us into inaction, whereas others choose, as author Susan Jeffers calls it, to ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway’.

Overcoming the Inaction Default

Human beings have evolved to where we can send probes deep into space and make incredible technological advances, as we have done with artificial intelligence for example, yet in our everyday lives we often allow our fears to dictate our choices.

Human behavioural scientists generally agree that when confronted with the unknown, or the potentially uncertain, our default setting is to do nothing. Our primary motivating force, which is a legacy of our caveman past, is one that has enabled us to survive and outlive the dinosaurs and a multitude of other species, and that is our concern for safety. The known, present state represents safety because of its familiarity, even when it makes you miserable. The default is that it’s better to be unhappy, unfulfilled and safe than to expose yourself to a potentially beneficial, but uncertain risk – hence the status quo remains.

To this end, those whom many describe as crazy adrenalin junkies, push themselves outside of their comfort zones to achieve insane objectives like skydiving, mountaineering, scuba diving and so on. By overcoming their fears, they prove to themselves that they can conquer the more banal, everyday challenges, like career choices, relationship management etc. and instead rely upon their imagination and their steely self-determination.

Our imagination can either trap us in our own fear-induced cage or it can propel us to higher levels. As Seneca said, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

The Empowering Conclusion

I’m guessing that if you’ve read this far, no matter what has caused this self-reflection, there’s something in your life that you are contemplating changing and it requires a decision to be made. Here’s the key takeaway, from my perspective anyway (yours might be different!):
By understanding and acknowledging that all of the decisions you have made in your life thus far have led you to this moment, you can then draw great comfort in knowing that therefore you also have the power to make new decisions that will help you create your own idealised version of lifestyle, career, relationship, health condition – physical and mental, indeed anything and everything that you want to change can be changed.

It begins with your decision to change, often caused or inspired by a pivotal moment. That decision must then be followed by another decision to follow through with that intention.

Next, you’ll need good systems to increase your chances of success, but we’ll come to that in my upcoming blog post. If you need any help with mapping out the changes you want to make, let’s have a chat.