The Theory of Decision-making Skills

The single-most challenging thing I’ve ever had to do in my whole life is deciding.

Not deciding about any one thing in particular but deciding about anything and everything!

Where did we want to go eat? Oh god, too many choices!

What did I want to do in life? How should I know? Shouldn’t life show me?

What time did I want to go to bed every night? Uhhh… when I’m sleepy?

What shampoo did I want for my hair? Scrolling for two hours didn’t help, so I guess I don’t know.

Name any aspect of my life and I was indecisive.

What does indecisive mean? It wasn’t that I was just unsure in that moment. It indicated a deeper, more fundamental refusal to commit to living itself.

I was wishy-washy about life and it showed in the small decisions I had to make, which I couldn’t.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s this: everything is a habit.

And so it was with my indecisiveness too. I had made it a habit to not decide, to either let others decide for me or put off decision-making for as long as I could, until I was forced to make a choice. Breaking it was possible but it would be a long road.

How long does it take to form a habit? Research shows 3-6 weeks.

But how long does it take to build a habit? Years. Every time I repeated the habit of not deciding, I was building on it, one block at a time, until I had built a palace of indecisiveness which stood erect, wobbly and wholly uncertain of its existence.

Breaking a habit is never easy. If only we knew the end result ahead of time: it’s transformational. Perhaps more of us would be motivated to form a new way of life. I know I would have done it much sooner, anyway.

Am I fully cured of this habit? Not yet. If something has built up over years, undoing it will take time as well. I’m certainly better at decisions than before which means I’m heading in the right direction.

And that’s all Nature wants of us – to keep moving in the direction our conscience guides us and allow life to take care of the rest.

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