How To Make Appropriate Life Choices with Ease
By Bill Benson · Jan 16, 2021
Most of us worry about making appropriate decisions. Whether these choices are personal or professional, making the right strategic moves within an optimal time-frame can feel paramount to our well-being.
Life is a series of decisions: Some are unconscious – choosing to turn right or left in traffic or what shoes to wear when walking the dog. Others are carefully scrutinized – Figuring out what job to take, which person to date, or when to speak up at an important gathering.
However, it is often not the specifics of a decision but our approach when making these determinations that lead to positive or poor outcomes. Anxiety around making the “right” choice is often optional. Below are some effective ways to help you determine decisions with ease.
Consider the Counterpoint
Problem-solving involves more process than scrutiny. Albert Einstein once credited his genius to his imaginative abilities. He concluded: “We cannot solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Simply put, Einstein shifted his perspective away from left-brained over-intellectualization and toward right-brained emotionally-based thinking to piece together some of the universe’s toughest theoretical puzzles.
Just as Einstein built a framework of wise discovery from a whole-minded approach, we can use counterbalancing to successfully face our own dilemmas. Using Einstein’s approach; when emotions run high, our best decisions come through awareness and logic; when we are caught in linear thinking and creative flexibility offer our problem-solving rescue.
One of the ways I help clients increase their problem-solving confidence becomes evident in the following illustration:
Imagine you’re an unilluminated light bulb dangling from a socket at the end of an electrical cord in the middle of a windowless room. A dilemma is presented, and you must find a way to leave the room. Helpful objects to your pursuit may surround you but, no matter how much you swing and grasp, the likelihood of encountering this assistance is small because of your limited visibility. You begin to panic, feeling there’s no way out…
Inner-awareness
The solution to this vignette is achieved by countering your emotionality with methodical logic. Realizing you’re a lightbulb attached to a cord, which is a conduit for electricity, you deduce that sparking your filament will light the room. No longer enveloped in darkness, the exit strategies are clear and numerous.
This story illustrates a universal principle that ripples through physics to psychology: You can never dark the lightness, but you will always light the darkness. When you find and then function out of inner-illumination (otherwise known as awareness), the problematic shadows of life evaporate. This, in turn, frees you to see opportunities clearly and make decisions appropriately.
It is not our situations but our perspectives that predicate our successes. There is nothing in the universe that can limit your light – without your permission. The next time a decision is to be made, assure yourself that you are more powerful than any dilemma – Doing so makes the solution possibilities logically obvious.