Decision Making

by Gregory Allen Butler

Decision making plays a big part in how successful one’s life is. What to major in at college, what career to choose, where to live, what to invest in, how hard to work, to marry or stay single, to save or to spend. The list is endless as everyday we are confronted with decisions. Some are significant and some aren’t.

Some people put a lot of thought into their decisions and some people are spontaneous, or even impulsive. For example, some people put in days deciding what to pack for a trip and some pack in five minutes. What kind of decision maker are you? When you look back over your life, do you wish you had made some different decisions?

A decision means that you have a choice. For instance, it’s my night to cook. What type of food am I going to make? Here are the usual options:

Indian
Chinese
Thai
Italian
Cajun

To help make a decision among several choices, the importance of a deciding factor needs to be considered. So if something is very important to me, I’ll give that category additional weight. Here is a list of important considerations for me in choosing what to cook:

Nutrition of the food
Passion I have for the food
Ease of Making the food
Knowledge (do I know how to make it?)
How long as it been (I don’t want to eat the same thing 4 times a week)
Available Ingredients

Some of the considerations are more important than others, so I will add additional weight to those that are more important. In this example, I will multiply by 3 points to the consideration of passsion, since to me that is the most important. I will rate every consideration on a scale of 1-10.

baba	Indian	Chinense	Thai	Italian	Cajun
Nutrition?	8	8	9	5	7
Passion X 3?	10	5	10	5	7
Ease?	5	8	5	7	7
Knowledge of?	8	8	8	8	6
Available?	10	10	10	10	10
How long has it been?	5	10	5	10	10
Total Weighted Score	66	59	67	55	61

So, in my example, a Thai dinner narrowly won out over an Indian dinner. But the exercise took into consideration a wide range of perspective. It was a conscious, thoughtful decision.

This tool can be adapted for use in a wide range of decisions, from what kind of outfit to buy, to what type of car to buy, to what type of job to pursue. It brings thoughtfulness into the decision making process and eliminates impulsiveness. Anytime we can increase the level of consciousness in our activities, we are moving towards a more holistic life.

The reason I gave extra weight to passion is because when we are passionate about something, we are more likely to do it whole-heartedly, which means we are living in the present moment. And living in the present moment is the only time that we are fully conscious. Otherwise, we are trapped in the old mind patterns from the past, or we are caught up in dreams about the future. It is passion that feeds joy and happiness.

If passion is a factor, give it a lot of weight in your decision making process. It brings an element of aliveness into what you do.