Making Great Decisions

I meet people almost every day who are enduring the pain of their poor decisions. As strange as it sounds, many of these people have a hard time really connecting the dots between their poor decisions and their pain. More amazing than that, even when some of them do wearily admit that they are to blame for their own pain, they don't seem to be hopeful about making better decisions in the future.

The impression I am often given is that they hope that nice people, a good God and maybe just plain good luck will rescue them...and maybe it happens just often enough that they keep this hope alive. They seem to genuinely believe that their only hope is to get favours from outside themselves. In other words, they are looking for solutions to their problems outside themselves. To put it a bit more crudely, they are hoping that somehow, they can make the same stupid choices in the future and get different results.

Here is why I am thinking about this today. I am wondering in what areas of my life I might be blindly doing the same thing. Is there anywhere in my life that I am enduring pain because of poor decisions I have made? If so, how do I plan to keep that from happening again in the future? Am I planning to change my decisions? (If so, will I really do it?) Or, am I just planning to keep making the same stupid decisions and hoping that somehow I will get 'lucky' and get different results?

Changed results take changed decisions and changed actions.
Whatever a man sows, he will reap.

I Will Rejoice

Some days, you have to rejoice by willpower. Some days, joy is a choice you make, not a result of our circumstances. As my favourite person in all the world said to me, "Smile today. God is smiling at you, so it's polite to smile back!" :)

Narrow The Focus

There are far too many good things to do. We are incapable of doing them all. Most of us pack too much into our lives. When we do too many things we enjoy them less, we do them poorly and we experience unhealthy stress.

When new opportunities come up we tend to ask ourselves, "Is this a good opportunity?" We reason to ourselves that if it is good opportunity we ought to take it. If our plate is already full, a better question would be, "Is this opportunity better than one of the things on my plate right now?" If it is, we can drop something in order to take the new thing on. If it is not, we can release ourselves from the guilt of saying no to the new opportunity and move on.

We probably need a "to don't" list more than we need a "to do" list.