The gift of decision-making

Making decisions can be frightening. "Should I choose door 1, 2 or 3, should I go left or right, should I say yes or no?". And the scariest part about decisions is not even making one but dealing with the consequences. That is the aspect most people fear. What if after making a decision, you discover that it was not what you really wanted, in fact, what you want is the opportunity you turned down - at least from the outside it appears so. I think the funniest aspect is that we often allow our mind to play tricks on us. Just think about your childhood days. Remember when portions of ice cream were distributed to you and your friends, didn't it always feel like your friend's portion of ice cream was much bigger than yours? Yet, in reality, they were exactly the same size. Therefore, very often the fear of making a decision and later discovering that deciding otherwise would have been much better is mostly just a fragment of our imagination and not based on actual facts.

Making decisions is a continuous process - it never ends. Every single day you have to make conscious decisions. You have to decide to recommit in your relationships, to give your best at your workplace, to stay true to what you believe in and so on.. Some might think that life would be much easier without the responsibility of having to decide on a daily basis, but I truly believe that having the freedom to do that is one of the greatest gifts we've received and we should nurture and develop that gift from the start. Some parents approach parenting by considering it their obligation to make the decisions for their children or on their behalf. In my opinion, at an early stage we ought to teach decision-making to our children, because it will ease the transition from the blaming to the responsibility zone. Why that is a good thing? Because taking responsibility also means finding a solution, whereas shifting the blame to somebody else never solves anything. "But each one must carefully scrutinize his own work [examining his actions, attitudes, and behavior], and then he can have the personal satisfaction and inner joy of doing something commendable without comparing himself to another. For every person will have to bear [with patience] his own burden [of faults and shortcomings for which he alone is responsible]." GALATIANS 6:4‭-‬5 AMP

Decisions are amazing because you can always decide to make things better and change your approach when something didn't work out as you wanted it to. It is empowering and liberating, so embrace it and don't be scared to make decisions. It takes maturity to appreciate the lesson of a bad decision and to turn things in another direction.