Creating the Life You Want Using Decision Making as a Tool for Personal Growth

Christine Li  0:01  
Welcome back to the Make Time for Success podcast. This is episode number 152. 

I believe that mastering the skill of decision making is such an important thing to do in life. I do believe in my heart of hearts that when you make decisions comfortably, securely, confidently, and sometimes quickly, that you get good at just regulating the pace of your life, you get good at moving things forward, you get good at opening up opportunities for yourself. So this episode is going to provide you with lots of different strategies for getting better at making great decisions. I hope you enjoy the episode, I hope you employ the suggestions right away because life is limited in terms of time, but also incredibly enormous in terms of the potential that you can fulfill. So let's use decision making as a great tool for your growth for your success, and for your great life. Let's go listen to the episode together now.

Hi, I'm Dr. Christine Li, and I'm a psychologist and a procrastination coach. I've helped 1000s of people move past procrastination and overwhelm so they can begin working to their potential. In this podcast, you're going to learn a powerful strategies for getting your mind, body and energy to work together. So that you can focus on what's really important, and accomplish the goals you want to achieve. When you start living within your full power, you're going to see how being productive can be easy, and how you can create success on demand. Welcome to the Make Time for Success podcast. 

Hi, everyone, today's topic is how to master the process of decision making. And this topic came about quite organically because I myself have been struggling over the past couple of days over which tasks to do. First, I have a list of preparing for an upcoming launch, I have the list of doing a solo episode and some other things. And I'm sure you've been in this kind of situation before as well. And I thought let's have a conversation about how to develop a good way of making decisions that really supports you your goals, your confidence, and your success rate. I think it's really a very valuable skill to master this skill of decision making. And I really deeply believe that the better you get at making decisions, the better your life will become. So my goal today is to help you to craft your own style of making decisions that will help you to navigate through life's ups and downs, and life's challenges. And the challenges will come of course. So let's get you ready to be a better decision making now I've put together a list of my five top strategies for getting really good at making decisions. So let's get to it. I've listed them in no particular order. But I do believe that each one of these five strategies is very important for you to learn. The first on the list is get good at embracing uncertainty, I feel the reason why we can lose so much time and energy trying to make a decision. We have and we ha and we worry and we ask everyone who will listen. What do I do? What do I do? The reason why we do that is that we have a belief that two things are gonna happen if we make the right decision. One, we're going to be right and there's such a rush when we feel like we've made the right decision, right. And to what happens is that we have this belief that if I make the right decision now, the rest of my future is going to be just golden, I'll be taken care of, I won't have to worry in the future. But the problem with this kind of belief system is that it puts too much weight on being right it puts too much weight on our individual decisions, because who wants to be wrong? And wouldn't we try to be right all the time if we could. But again, when we put all this weight on our decisions, we then lose a lot of time and energy which are very valuable, by the way in the process of trying to make the right decision. So I'm going to suggest that instead of trying to be right all the time and securing our future in quote Securing our future, I want you to save your time and energy. Instead, don't get stressed out about making decisions and trying to be right trying to be perfect in the decision making process. The strategy is really just to understand that most things are uncertain, and that the whole journey of life is an uncertain one. So really try to de emphasize the certainty principle when it comes to decision making. And instead, focus on doing your best and making your decision in the present moment with the information that you have. While believing in yourself and believing that you will get through anything in the future. No matter what this way, you don't get stuck, you don't lose time, and you end up making pretty good decisions. Anyway. The second strategy on the list is listen to your intuition. Your intuition, is your inner teacher, that's literally what intuition means. Your inner teacher is that combination of all the experiences that you've had in the past all your life experiences, and all that natural wisdom that you've acquired, because of those life experiences, all the things that went right, and all the things that went really wrong, that some is your intuition, and the gut feelings that you get when you are faced with a decision, our feelings that you really should not brush aside and you should not dismiss them, you should really listen to them closely. Intuition is that powerful tool that you always have with you that you can use to help you guide you when your logical brain is on overdrive. And you can't think yourself through your decision anymore. And you're just frustrating yourself and you don't know what to do. Check in with your intuition, see what feels right to you. And oftentimes, the intuition really knows the way.

The third strategy on the list is to be really clear with your priorities, know what your priorities are. Knowing your priorities, I think is really great for decision making. Because prioritizing what you value and what your goals are. And sticking with those priorities really helps you to save time in decision making, you can use your priorities, to filter out all the options that just don't align with your purposes or your objectives or your style of working. When you know your priorities, you know which direction to head kind of intuitively. So take some time upfront to say you know what I really value freedom. So let me not go with the job that requires double overtime, and a lot of shift work. And all the things that you don't prefer, go for the job that actually will give you lots of vacation, lots of trust in the workplace, so that you can feel free so that you can feel you're not under anyone's thumb. That's an example of how you can use your priorities to head in the right direction. The fourth strategy on the list is to practice mindfulness. Now mindfulness can conjure up all sorts of things like woowoo, stuff, and meditation and all sorts of things. But for me, very simply, mindfulness just means that you are fully present in the moment. without distractions, and without your feelings and emotions coming to mess with your head, mess with your heart. And for me, that's not woowoo. And actually, if you know me, for any length of time, or if you've been listening to the podcast for any length of time, you know that I really value the Whoo. So try to practice mindfulness. On a daily basis. Make it a habit to practice knowing what is happening in the present moment so that you can make decisions from a calm place from a focused place, from a relaxed place and from a mindful state. This way, you can really assess the information clearly. You can know all your options, and you can avoid making those impulsive choices that we do sometimes. So again, practice mindfulness. Last on the list, but not least, is that you want to recognize the limits of predicting the future, like I said, with strategy number one, embrace uncertainty. The future is anything but certain so instead of trying to work through it every single possible outcome trying to come up with all the worst possible scenarios. Instead of doing all that brain work, save your brain space, save your brain power, and focus on doing what is best for you now, while knowing that you will adapt and you will change, and you will adjust, and you will improve things and you will fix things as you need to as you move forward. And as you receive more information down the line, so conserve your energy in the moment. Be mindful. Use your intuition know your priorities, and really enjoy the decisions that you make. Don't make a decision and then start to set into a panic. Fearing that you've made the wrong move. Because you've made a beautiful decision. It means you've been active, it means you've been thoughtful, it means you're willing to take a risk on improving your life. And I think these are beautiful things. So start to enjoy. These strategies start to enjoy the process of decision making that much more. And I hope this all works out so beautifully for you. Use your decisions as micro tools to craft a beautiful life for yourself. It really can work this way and know that it will all be okay and you will be okay too. So thanks for tuning in. Thanks for listening. Thanks for considering this new practices if you haven't used them before, and thanks for listening to the Make Time for Success podcast. I really appreciate you following the show and for being a fan. I look forward to seeing you next week when the next episode drops. Take care. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Make Time for Success podcast. If you enjoyed what you've heard, you can subscribe to make sure you get notified of upcoming episodes. You can also visit our website maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com for past episodes, show notes and all the resources we mentioned on the show. Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too. You can find me there under the name procrastination coach. Send me a DM and let me know what your thoughts are about the episodes you've been listening to. And let me know any topics that you might like me to talk about on the show. I'd love to hear all about how you're making time for success. We'll talk to you soon!

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