10/19/26: DECISIONS
I think it’s safe to say that everyone reading this has been in a position many times in their life having to make a decision where multiple choices are possible and there is not an obvious best answer. When I was younger and facing these situations, I always felt like I struggled to determine what the good answer was, and what the bad answer was. I was not processing what was REALLY going on when I faced those tough decisions until probably late into my teens or early 20’s.
When I was younger, I definitely saw the world as more black and white than I do today. Some things ARE very cut and dry to me, especially when it comes to morality and religion, but most everything else seems to live in that gray area. So, what was it that I had a hard time processing when those tough decisions arrived?
It never dawned on me that the reason decisions become difficult is not because we are trying to choose between a good and a bad option, we are trying to choose between options that are either similarly good or similarly bad.
It is very easy to make a decision when the choices are obviously good or bad, like rooting for Michigan State over Michigan. It’s harder to decide whether you want Michigan to get blown out or lose on a last second play. Both are good options whose end result only really affects your blood pressure for a couple hours.
It seems cliché for many of us, but I still find that writing down a list of pro’s and con’s and seeing everything literally in black and white is still a great way to tackle the decision making process. When those factors are bouncing around in our head it is hard to keep them straight and weigh the significance of each individual item.
I really feel that training martial arts helps in that process. When we are sparring, we are making thousands of decisions every minute. We only have split seconds to figure out what decisions are even available to us, then which of those options we think is going to be the best at that moment. If we take too much time to decide and ultimately decide to do nothing, that is also a decision we have made. Sometimes, doing nothing is in fact the correct decision. Every decision is going to have an immediate consequence that will cause us to start the process for the next decisions. Whether you realize it or not, you are actively training your brain to make quick decisions and live with the outcomes without looking back on them because you have no time to look back.
Hopefully, this perspective helps you in your own decision making. Just like Lot’s wife in the Bible, try to avoid looking back on your past decisions and letting them hold you back. They are in the past and nothing can be done about them. The only thing you can do is learn from them and work on making the best decisions for you moving forward.
