In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Do you seem to pause to thoroughly weigh every last detail, prior to making your decisions… even the small ones?

Yes, I am speaking to you (the person in line in front of me who cannot seem to make up their mind).

The ability to consider choices, and resolve them to a specific decision is an acquired skill.

It comes from spending time making up one’s mind on the smaller choices in life, and progressing regularly to ever more complicated options, yielding ever more difficult choices as we mature.

But what is it that gives some people an easy path to this experience, while others freeze in their tracks?

It might come from how our earlier childhood choices have resolved for us. In those early decisions, such as a choice of an outfit, or picking what we might want to eat when looking at a menu, or (here’s the hard one) choosing which flavor to get when staring at the finest ice cream or gelato selections, our satisfaction at the results of those choices reinforce our inner confidence as time progresses.

Presumably, if these outcomes have worked out well for us, we matriculate to ever more difficult choices… and in doing so, we continue to refine our process, so that as we are facing the really difficult choices in our personal or professional career, we are armed with enough life experience to review options and emerge with an outcome that suits us in most occurrences.

Eventually we are faced with some of the most crucial choices we are expected to make in our lives. These require focus, determination and a skillset that has been honed over countless minor choices, paired with each of their outcomes and which empower us to do our level best to weigh our options and then ultimately pull the trigger and put a choice into effect.

Contrary to President Roosevelt’s perspective that the worst thing you can do is nothing, I would comment, that sometimes, doing nothing is the very best choice of all. In that choice (which then becomes a choice and not an absence of choice), doing nothing sometimes buys time, allows circumstances to mature, and puts us on a direct path to a resolution… perhaps whether we wish for one, or not.

It is imperative to master these skills, for succeeding in one’s personal or professional life, is entirely dependent upon one’s ability to make rational decisions and rely upon their outcomes.

Given all of this… why is it that when we are so adept at making such a critical choice, that we find ourselves smugly sitting with our prompt decision, whilst another is waffling on theirs, only to discover that when the waitstaff brings theirs to the table, it looks so much yummier than ours??

Make the right decision. Your tastebuds are counting on it!

Happy Saturday!