Making Hard Decisions for a Great Lifetime – Beginning steps
With what is happening in our world and economy nowadays, many of us are forced to make hard decisions. Many without jobs are forced to make the decision to leave friends and family to find work hundreds of miles away or stay without a job. Others are making the decision between bills and food, while others are making decisions to make major purchases, or where to invest. Decisions can make or break our futures and yet so many take little time to look at making solid decisions that will lead to great futures.
1.What’s important to you?
We all make decisions based on what’s important to us. Essentially what’s important to us is based on what we value in life. If you want to see what is important to someone just watch the decisions they make on a daily, yearly basis and see the fruit of it played out in their lives. Where are you today? What decisions are you making right now in your life? Are these decisions forced on you because of poor decisions earlier in life? You are where you are today, in your position, in your location, in your frame of mind because of all the decisions you have made in the past that have led you to this point.
2. What do you value in life?
Every decision you’ve made was made with a set of “values”. We all assign value or a rating to everything in life. Money, family, relationships, work, status, morality, appearance, ego, comfort, all, play a role in how you live and make decisions every day. What you value is very evident by where you are in your life right now. If your marriage, job, and kids are a mess you likely have valued something or someone else before them and are seeing the fruit of that decision. But it’s never too late to make changes in what you value and set your course for decision making on the right track.
3. What kind of attitude do you live by?
Every day, I get up and decide how I will live the day. Do you wake up bored, anxious, dreading work? Do you wake up excited, looking forward to the day? Whether you’re an entrepreneur or an employee or even a domestic CEO, you decide if you’re going to work, what type of attitude you will go with, and how hard or not you will work. Those three decisions decide much of our future. All made every day, within 1-2 hours of getting up. They decide if you and your family will be provided for and will be successful. They decide if you will get fired, demoted or grow stagnant, if your family will go without, if you will improve your life or cause downfall and decline. Choose a good attitude daily and work hard. This decision of a good attitude requires effort, perseverance and some days, determination.
4. Easy, feel good decisions or hard, persevering decisions?
It’s easy to NOT go to work when I don’t feel like it and that’s for those who work at home raising families and those who leave home to help provide. It’s easy to join the complainers and find something to be mad or sad about. It’s easy to not work hard and slack off. Easy, do what I feel like decisions will always ease you into lack, poverty, stress, hardship and failure. The easy decisions led by our personal comfort and emotions always lead to hard, gut wrenching decisions in the end. A friend of mine’s relative decided they couldn’t deal with the stress of their job everyday anymore, but instead of looking for counseling and another job they just quit, with no plan for their future and now they’re facing eviction and bill collectors. When you make decisions based on the best course of action for your future and your family’s future they will require work, determination, perseverance, and patience. Stop letting your emotions run your life.
5. Patience is a virtue and pays in the end
Patience can make us a better person if we let it. The definition of the word is to tolerate delay implying self-control and forbearance. The key is it requires self-control over your emotions. It simply means you don’t get what you want when you want it, which for most people is now. You may want a different job, or a new car now but reality is, it will take time. It’s easier to find a job when you have one than when you don’t. Saving toward purchase of a new car takes time, but keeps you out of debt or gives you a lesser load of debt and responsibility and less stress. Learn patience, learn to wait calmly, patiently and with determination of the goal in sight.
6. Keep speaking the positive outcome
Use words that speak to the end result. Force the daily bombardment of wrong thoughts out of your head and replace them with good. I daily speak scripture over my family and my home because I seek the good, positive, prosperous end result for me and my family and I will diligently pursue it in word until I see it come to fruition. I am living the result now of my past words and it’s VERY good.
In the end, making hard decisions now and consistently, leads to a great future later.
