How to Make Better Decisions: Why Happiness is the Best Compass of Which Direction You Should Go in Your Life.

Decision-making can be excruciating, especially if it's an especially important decision. If you are like me, your mind swirls with worry about making the “right” decision or the “best” decision, endlessly swinging between options like a pendulum out of control. You try to take every possible factor into consideration: “How will this person feel? Am I letting someone down? What will the future be like if I go this way?” (And so on, and so on, and so on...for hours or even days.)

I’m happy to report that I've finally figured out a better way to make decisions, and it's made my life a whole lot easier.

Ready for it? Here goes: 

If you’re happy, keep doing what you are doing.

If you’re not, something is not right and a new choice is needed.

Simple, right? 

Well, mostly. In order to put this into practice, we've got to define happiness. After all, if you don’t define it, it’s pretty hard to use it as a compass that guides you to your best, most fulfilling life.

So, how do you define happiness? What is the recipe for happiness?

That’s the question I started pondering one day. I thought of the happiest times in my life—some family vacations as a child, meeting my husband, our wedding day, my book tour to Romania, adopting our baby girl, the day I helped a person I cared about heal from a serious illness—and tried to figure out what the common elements were that made those events truly happy. 

Here’s what I came up with, and I think it really works: 

In all those moments, I felt truly respected and accepted for who I was. There was also a component of love, whether it was romantic, friendship, or self-love. And, there was always a sense of hope, whether it was hope for the future or hope for a new way of life or just hope in general.

That, to me, is the recipe for happiness:  Respect + Unconditional Love + Hope = Happiness. 

If you have those elements, you have happiness. If those elements are missing, something needs to change, because it’s quite likely that you are unhappy. And if you're unhappy, it can't really be the best situation for you, can it?

It really can't. If you are unhappy in a relationship, work situation, or business, it's time to make a change. End of story. 

Now, let's put it into practice...

Using the recipe for happiness to define your dreams and make the best decisions for you: 

No more sleepless nights worrying over making the right decision for you! Using the 3 elements that compose happiness—respect, unconditional love, and hope—you can KNOW that you are being guided to the right decision every time.

Go ahead; try it now. Pick a current situation that’s causing you stress or difficulty. Then, take a look at whether you are experiencing respect, unconditional love, and hope, using these questions as a guide: 

1. RESPECT 

Do you feel respected in the situation? It doesn’t matter whether it’s a personal, work, or volunteer situation, you’ll either feel like you and your ideas are respected or not. If the answer is “no,” you need to make a change.

2. UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

Do you feel accepted for who you are, or (to put it another way) unconditionally loved? We often think of love as only a romantic notion, but the truth is that unconditional love is an essential element for a good friendship, partnership, or even group dynamic. Unconditional love allows you to be yourself completely and to be safe to do and say what is authentic to you. Conditional love will never lead to happiness––never. So, do you feel accepted? Essentially, can you be who you really are and feel like you are safe to do so? Or do you have to hide aspects of yourself to fit in? Worse, are you put down or made fun of for core aspects of yourself? If you are not accepted in the situation, there is no path to happiness here. Make a change.

3. HOPE

Do you feel hopeful about the situation? When you wake in the morning, do you look forward to interaction with key people or experiences here, or do you dread it? As you look to the future, do you honestly—in your heart and soul, not “what you think you should be thinking”—do you honestly feel that this situation will blossom and grow in a positive way? If there is no hope, if you are weary of everything about it, if you look to the future and see only more of the same, there is no path to happiness here. It’s time to make a change. 

As you look at the situations in your life through the lens of these three aspects that compose happiness, it becomes much clearer when you should stay and when it’s time to move on. It’s also so much easier to define your dreams, because you can make decisions that head you in the direction of what REALLY makes you happy! 

By paying attention to the signs that something’s off and trusting yourself to know how to make a good decision for you, you will begin to lead yourself to a truly happy state of being and situations that are completely fulfilling.

At the end of the day, isn’t that really what we all want? 

I think it is. 

Other posts you might enjoy: 

What to Do When Life Seems Out of Control

I subscribe to the belief that no matter what, you are always in control of your own emotions. 

(There’s a big BUT coming…)

BUT there are times when long-term stress from a myriad of causes can make it seem like you are very much out of control of everything. 

How do you put yourself back in charge of how you are feeling and reacting? Better yet, how do you start changing your life for the better? 

Here are a few ways that work for me: 

1. List the things in your life that ARE in your control.

No matter what’s going on in your life right now, there are things that ARE in your control. Don’t believe me? Here’s a short list: 

• The pace of your breathing. 
• What you decide to look at. 
• What you choose to put on in the morning. 
• What you choose to eat. 

Start making your list. What’s in your control right now? Doing this helps shift you from the “victim” mode (“Why is this all happening to me! I can’t do anything about it!) to the “empowered” mode (“Okay, some of this is out of my control, but I CAN control some things.").

Focus on consciously controlling the small things you can. Then, focus on what you can control in larger, more complicated situations. The more you put your mind in the mode that you are in charge, the more that things begin to feel under control in your life in general. 

2. Realize that, through a series of stressors or shocks, you’ve become programmed to react from a place of fear, worry, and exhaustion.

While it IS true that you are always in control of your emotions, if you’ve been through a series of unexpected stressful events, you shift into reaction mode.

What’s this mean? Basically, you are prepared for battle every moment of every day. You EXPECT the worst is going to happen, so when anything happens (good or bad), you react automatically from a place of fear, anger, or exhaustion. Basically, in reaction mode, you bypass the usual break between the experience and your choice of reaction to it, and instead, you just react. 

On top of that, gone are the days when you made confident decisions; by expecting the next thing to be as bad as the last, each decision is made with anxiety and worry.

I cannot tell you how difficult it is to shift from reaction mode to being empowered again when you are in this out-of-control, my-life-sucks place, but it can happen. In fact, taking back control over your emotions is the key to taking back control over your life.

The first step is acknowledging that you are in reaction mode. The next is to start making empowered, non-rushed decisions. 

3. Start making empowered, non-rushed decisions. 

For me, when I go through an out-of-control period, I fall into “decision fatigue,” and have difficulty trusting my instincts to make even the most irrelevant of decisions. In fact, something as simple as what to make for dinner can have me standing at the fridge for minutes trying to figure out what looks good. 

More often than not, in this decision fatigue state, I’ll make the “lesser” or “easier” choice and, instead of, for instance, making something healthy for dinner, I’ll go out to eat or call for pizza. (Neither are decisions I’d be likely to make if I was feeling clear-headed and in charge of things.) 

Worse, I find that in this state even little things - a colleague asking for help with something, a driver cutting me off on the road, another phone call while I’m in the middle of something important to me - make me react more sharply and angrily than I would ever normally do. 

I’ve noticed this phenomenon in my life for years, but it turns out that “decision fatigue” is a very real thing. In fact, social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, coined the term after discovering that the more decisions a person has to make in a period of time, the more likely it is that the person either makes an impulsive and slightly reckless decision, or, exhausted by all the choices, just stops making decisions altogether. 

It’s basically the cumulative effect of trying to make the “best” or “right” choice a zillion times in a day. When you are going through a period when you have significant stressors - and maybe some of those stressors are because of decisions you made previously that seem to be “wrong” - you will get into a mode of panic. 

For me, this manifests in this kind of thinking: “What if this decision is wrong? What if everything falls apart? What if I put in all this effort and it fails? Maybe I should just take the safe choice. What is the safe choice? Maybe I shouldn’t make any choice right now; everything is just too scary. I’m going to screw this up.” 

As you may know, that is not a fun dialogue to have running through your head; little things seem like life-or-death things. 

If this is happening to you, realize that whatever decisions you made that have lead you to this point are in the past. Yes, you may be dealing with the ramifications of them at the moment, but you can make present decisions that lead you to a better place. 

More so, realize that you made the prior decisions with the best information you had at the time. With new info, you might go back and change it, but you can’t. Instead, use the new information to have confidence that the next decisions will be better ones. 

To start to get out of this mode, make the most significant decisions early in the morning after a good night’s sleep; you’ll be freshest and most able to clearly see what you want to do. Always take a moment to calm your mind and connect with positive emotions - happiness, love, contentment - before making a critical decision. 

Next, if you get overwhelmed through the day, remember that you can always walk away and gather yourself before making a decision. Use the phrase, “You know, I need a few moments before I can decide on that,” and excuse yourself. 

Go somewhere quiet (the bathroom or your car, for instance), and breathe in and out several times. How do you really feel about this decision? Listen to yourself. Make the decision. Expect the best. 

To help with this process, use the retuning statement (affirmation), "I am now in charge of my life. I trust my ability to make empowered decisions for my best." It's a good idea to use the retuning statement when you wake in the morning, by closing your eyes, connecting with a feeling of happiness (imagine a happy time in your life), and then repeating the statement over and over while in that happy state. 

While it does take work, by using these steps consistently, you will reprogram your mind to have confidence in your ability to control your life. 

Put these steps in place today; I’d love to hear your experiences below! 

Overwhelmed? Find Your Way to Massive Success with Small Steps Forward

I'm the kind of person who always has 10 major projects going at once. After many years of finding this frustrating, I've come to terms with the fact that my brain never shuts off and that I will always have more ideas than I have time to complete. 

However, there are moments when the amount of work needed to successfully complete a project can be overwhelming to me, especially if I have a great deal going on personally as well. 

So, how do I move forward when I feel like I have no idea what to do first? And how can you succeed in whatever you are working on? Here's my strategy:

1. Stop everything. 

When you have so much to do, stopping everything seems counter-intuitive. However, I've found that if I just stop trying to push forward on something that just seems too much at that moment and walk away completely, solutions seem to flow in without my conscious effort. 

In fact, some of my best ideas come when I am in the shower, drying my hair, or taking a drive! I always wondered why this was, and it turns out that there's science which backs up why this works. Psychology professor Alejandro Lleras proved that brief interruptions are critical to feeling refreshed and refocused; as Lleras said, "deactivating and reactivating your goals allows you to stay focused." 

2. Break your big goal into manageable pieces. 

If you were faced with the prospect of running a marathon right now with no training, it would not only be completely overwhelming, but also likely impossible. However, if you set a goal to run a marathon in six months, then broke down your training days into manageable chunks, gradually upping your mileage, it's totally doable. Before you know it, you'd be crossing the finish line. 

It's the same for any goal. If you want to make a million dollars this year, that can seem insanely outrageous. If you break that down into how much you need to make a month, then focus on how many clients that takes, then focus on the amount of marketing you need to do to attract that many clients—well, before you know it, you've got a manageable game plan.

Here's how I do this: 

I take my goals, then break each big goal into the steps I need to complete in order to achieve that goal. I write down each step on a post-it note and stick it, in order of first to last, on a poster board. I then estimate the amount of time each goal will take to complete. Finally, I schedule the various steps into my weekly schedule. 

I also have a poster board for things that need to be done each week, such as writing articles for various sites or recording videos. I have a post-it note for each thing that needs to be completed and stick those on the "to do" board. When I complete each, I move it to the "completed" board. 

I do it this way because it helps me to be able to see everything physically in front of me. I also get more satisfaction from moving a post-it note to the completed board than I do just checking it as complete on my computer. 

However, if you are the kind of person that prefers having everything computerized, you can do the same thing with lots of apps out there. For instance, you could do the same with Evernote by tagging something as to-do and then completed. Another I like is WorkFlowy.com, but there are many others that would be just as useful. 

3. Prioritize.

Which goals need to be completed first? Are there steps you need to take before you can get to a certain project? Do you simply feel more inspired by one project than another? 

Look at all your major projects and rank them in order of priority. Then, focus on the steps necessary to complete those projects first. Once you complete those steps, move on to your second priority, and so on. 

4. Be consistent. 

Keep focused on checking things off your list and do so on a consistent basis. Keep your appointments with yourself to complete the steps to your success. 

By doing this, before you know it, you will end up a massive success!

How do you break down your goals for success? I'd love to hear your suggestions! 

Choosing Happiness Even When Things Are Difficult

I am a smiley kind of person; I can't help it. I love people and I automatically smile when I meet someone's eyes.

I stopped at a gas station today and ran in to grab a water. I smiled at the cashier and greeted him cheerfully. He responded, "Wow - you must have a really easy life to be that happy." 

Um, no. In the last 8 weeks, my beloved dog died and we went through two failed adoptions. So no; it's been anything but easy. 

What I am is aware that I - and I alone - control the quality of the moments in my life. What I am is aware that I choose how I react in every situation. 

I choose to be happy because that's how I want to be. Does life suck sometimes? Yep, totally. Do I feel sad about it sometimes? Yep. Do I get sick of the staggering amount of meanness in the world? Most definitely; I truly wish I could wave some sort of magic wand and banish cruelty from the face of the Earth. 

Choosing to be happy despite all that doesn't mean that you don't acknowledge that sadness, cruelty, and difficulty exists. It means that you have decided to take full responsibility for the quality of your life and the things you put your focus on. When you do that, you can actively choose to believe that maybe things are difficult because they aren't the right things for you, and maybe - just maybe - you are being led to the right people and experiences through a series of seeming misadventures. 

The thing is that whatever you put your focus on grows, so when you constantly focus on the bad, the sad, and the wrong, you end up seeing more of that everywhere. It's like when you are looking to buy a new car, and suddenly it seems like that particular car is everywhere on the road. Did hoards of people all decide to buy that car at the same time? Not likely. What happened is that you put your focus on that car as one you might want to purchase, and you suddenly notice it all over the place - you're subconsciously looking for it. 

It's the same with anything you put your focus on. If you focus on the bad, all you see is more bad everywhere. If you train your mind to focus on the good, you'll see more moments of hope, kindness, and love. 

What kind of life do you want? How do you want to feel each day? Focus on that. 

And go ahead; smile at people. It makes them wonder what you're doing right with your life (or what you are up to - either way, it's fun).