In This Article
- Why fear, anger, and stress can lead us toward bad decisions
- How emotional turbulence makes it difficult to see our choices clearly
- Why sleeping on a decision can help us separate our needs from outside influences
- How to recognize whether fear or intuition is guiding a choice
- Why inner peace and self-awareness can point us toward better decisions
“Both fear and its cover identity, anger,
are notorious for producing spectacularly bad decisions.”
— Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson, Variable Star
Now, you might ask me, why would anyone want to make a bad decision? Good question. Yet we do it all the time, don’t we? I’m sure you, just like me and like a lot of other people, have made plenty of bad decisions in your life.
Now, of course, on a spiritual or metaphysical level, there is no such thing as a bad decision because everything is a learning experience, or as another author used to say, "another friggin' growth experience". Okay, I acknowledge that. However, there are decisions that lead us on paths that are tortuous, painful, and contribute to stress and unhappiness. And those could be avoided by making a better decision.
So I suppose an alternate title for this article might be “How to Make Good Decisions.” Okay, that works too. But I think to get to that point, we need to examine how it is that we do make bad decisions.
Where Do Bad Decisions Come From?
I think that, at least from my perspective, bad decisions are based on fear, anger, hatred, prejudice, false expectations, or other emotions and beliefs that cloud our judgment. When we look at life through the lenses of fear and anger and prejudice and judgment, we are bound to be stepping on a path that mirrors those same energies.
In order to make a decision that leads to a better conclusion, we need to base that decision on clarity, on a sense of inner peace and inner vision, and on having faith in a better possibility than what the fear and the anger are presenting.
And just as they say that you are what you eat, you are also what emotions you choose to express and to live with. A lot of times, bad decisions are made in the heat of the moment. We’re angry, we’re stressed, we’re impatient, and we make a decision. We jump in with both feet, tangled in all these emotions.
It's important to get quiet enough to know what is actually driving the decision. Is it fear? Is it anger? What is the driving force?
The Murky Waters
I know it’s not always easy, or perhaps ever easy, to stop in the midst of an emotional upheaval and take a few deep breaths and calm down so that we can see more clearly.
It’s a bit as if you’re standing at the bottom of a lake which is muddy. The water is over your head, and you're dragging your feet around. It’s going to be very hard to see clearly. You might not even see which direction you need to head in to get out of the mucky, murky lake.
So it’s the same thing with our turbulent emotions. When they are stirred up, it can be hard to see the way out. The only thing that we can see is the turbulence, the anger, the stress, the impatience, or whatever emotion is being churned around in our head and in our being.
So perhaps the first step to making a good decision is to stop and not make a decision at all in that moment. After all, you don't clear muddy water by stirring it harder; you clear it by allowing it to settle. and that takes time.
So we may need to say to ourselves and to the other person, “I need a little time,” or “Let me think about this,” or simply, “Can we talk about this later?” These may not be easy words to say when emotions are running high, but they may be much easier than trying to take back words spoken in anger.
So, ask for time. Don’t jump in when the waves of emotion are just crashing and turbulent. Wait for them to calm down, and then you’ll be able to make a better decision.
Sleep On It
Or you might say, “I’ll sleep on it, and then I’ll give you an answer.” That’s a good choice. That gives you time to, one, calm down, and two, get clear within your own self, without the other person’s influence and emotions, as to what feels right for you.
It’s so easy, at least for me, to be influenced by the energies around me. And if you’re a sensitive person, as many InnerSelf readers are, you may feel the emotions of people around you even more deeply than you’re consciously aware of.
So that makes it difficult to make a clear decision or to see clearly what’s the best decision because we are picking up and being affected by the energies and by the emotions and the needs and wants of the people around us.
So the best thing to do before you make a decision is to take a couple of steps back. And if you can, ask if you can get back to them tomorrow, that you need to sleep on it. This will give you a chance to get centered in your energy and your calm space and gain clarity as to what is the best decision for you in this particular situation.
Best For Who?
When I say best for you, it also means best for everyone. I believe that the best decision is a win-win decision. It’s not one where one person wins and the other loses, or feels like they’ve been cheated, or they gave in and didn’t get what they wanted.
Now you may say, as my editor just did: "Sometimes what is genuinely best for me is not best for another person. I may need to leave a relationship, fire an employee, refuse a request, end a business arrangement, or establish a boundary. The other person can experience a genuine loss."
Yes, this is true. However, it is my belief that, in the long run, that decision will probably turn out best for the other person as well.
I have numerous examples in my life when the "awful decision" that affected me, later on turned out to be a blessing. When I lived in Jamaica, they refused to renew my visa and gave me 24 hours to leave the country. At the time, I was devastated. Yet now, I realize that without that action, I might never have moved to Miami and founded InnerSelf Magazine.
In the same way, when I was fired from a job when I'd been in Miami about a month or two, that led me to seek an independent way of earning my living where my job security would not be dependent on the whim of a boss' bad temper.
So, I agree with my editor that "A good decision seeks what is right for you without unnecessarily harming or exploiting someone else." I also think that because we can't see in the future, some decisions that appear to be harming someone else, like firing them, or leaving a relationship, eventually will turn out to be a blessing for all concerned.
We can only make the best decision we can with what we are aware of at the time. As Dick Van Dyke writes in Keep Moving: “When you're living life, it's impossible to know what will happen. You take your best shot and make your best guess.”
Ice Cream, You Scream
Sometimes the person may need "no" as an answer. There is such a thing as tough love. Needing something "for your own good" is not necessarily the same thing as liking it.
If you have children, you’re familiar with this concept. Just because they want to eat the whole gallon of ice cream doesn’t mean that they need to or that it’s a good thing to do.
If you refuse your child permission to eat a gallon of ice cream, while the child may not think it’s a win-win, on an impersonal level or from a higher perspective, we know that it is best for the child not to eat that gallon of ice cream, or whatever other example you’d like to use. But you get my point.
Win-win doesn’t mean that necessarily everyone will be thrilled with the solution, but it should be a solution that is best for everyone. And that may not become apparent until later, but it has to feel right.
If any decision you’re making feels like you’re taking advantage of the other person, or you’re not being fair, or you’re getting away with something, it’s a bad decision. Not only because it’s bad for the other person, but it’s also bad for you because of karma. What we do comes back to us -- sometimes multiplied.
We plant the seeds of our future through our choices. And what grows from those choices may be considerably larger than what we originally planted. You plant one seed, but the tree that grows from it may eventually produce hundreds of fruits and thousands of seeds, each year.”
So, if we act in ways that are harmful to other people, those are the seeds that we are planting out in the universe, and that’s what we are going to reap.
So a bad decision is not only one that is made from a place of anger and judgment and all that sort of energy. It’s also a decision that intentionally and knowingly is harmful to someone else.
I remember reading years ago, that you should live your life in such a way that it could be published as the headline of your local newspaper and you would not be embarrassed. So a good decision is one which you would be proud of having everyone know about.
And this includes not just the results of the decision, but your motivation and your thoughts about it. A good question to ask ourselves might be: Would I still make this choice if everyone knew why I was making it?
What Is A Good Decision?
A good decision is one that comes from love, even if it’s sometimes tough love, but still it’s wanting the best for not only yourself but for the other person. That’s a win-win, where both people’s best interests are considered and applied.
Now you might say, well, that doesn’t work in the world. There are all these greedy people and these murderers and blah, blah, blah.
Okay, but that’s their choice. That’s their bad decision. You can’t control their bad decision.
We can only control ours. And we’re only responsible for our choices and our decisions.
If there is a Judgment Day and you have to account for your life decisions and choices, it’s not the other person’s choices that are going to matter. It’s going to be yours. Did you make your choices based on love, on compassion, on caring? Or did you base them on the other side of the scale?
And since none of us are perfect, we will all have moments where we make a bad decision, even if it’s just one that’s in our thoughts. Maybe we were thinking a bad thought about someone or towards someone. We’re human, and these things will happen. But the thing is, we can learn from these bad decisions.
We can learn that we feel better with ourselves, and within ourselves, when our decisions are made from love rather than jealousy, when they’re made from acceptance rather than judgment, when they’re made from faith rather than fear.
“If you let fear guide you,
you end up with a lifetime of regrets.”
— Saul, The Prophecy
Fear is another major source of bad decisions. And this starts early in life when, as a teenager, we want to fit in. So we make bad decisions because we want to be accepted by our peers who are making bad decisions. So it starts with a fear of rejection.
Then it can go on to a choice of career, where we choose our career based on fear of lack.
How do we do that? By choosing a career not because we love it or because it really speaks to our heart, but because it's the highest paying career we can think of. It may even be something that we hate or that "bores us to death". Yet it pays well, and that is our only reason for our career choice.
And as far as I’m concerned, that’s a bad decision. There are many alternatives that would suit us better even though they are not at the top of the pay scale.
Life is too short to be miserable. Life is too short to spend eight hours a day, or more, at a job that we hate, probably with coworkers that we despise or judge or just don’t resonate with at all.
Life's Too Short...
Life’s too short to live someone else’s dream or to fulfill someone else’s definition of success. We have to fulfill our own definition of success, our own definition of happiness, and that will be different for everyone.
For some people, climbing Mount Everest is the ultimate happiness. For me, it seems like a lot of hard and dangerous work and it’s going to be freezing cold, so I’m not interested.
We all have our own definition or our own inner clarity as to what is a good decision for us. Not for anyone else, because we’re not in their shoes. We’re not in their body. We’re not in their heart.
The good news is that the choice is up to us. We have the power and the clarity to make good decisions. We may not control the choices available to us, but the decision among those choices belongs to us.
However, to connect with what is the best choice for us, we need to stop and get in touch with our own self and what brings us joy, what feels right for us, what just feels like a calm center in our being when we think about that decision.
Second Chances
Another piece of wonderful news is that decisions can be changed.
Just because you decide today that you’re going to be a doctor, tomorrow you could decide otherwise. You could wake up and say, “What was I thinking? I faint at the sight of blood. Why would I want to be a doctor? Because of the money? It ain’t worth it. I'll choose something else.”
Good decision.
The Bottom Line
So I guess the bottom line to making a good decision versus a bad decision is awareness. Being aware of who we really are inside, of what we really love, what we really need, not what we’ve been told to desire.
You know how we’ve been told to desire the fancy car, the designer clothes, the expensive jewelry. All that expensive stuff that keeps us chained to the rat race of needing to earn more and more money! But is that expensive stuff really what would make you happy?
Feel inside of your own heart. You’re the only one who can really know what is the best decision for you because it will feel right. Once you make that decision, you will stop going back and forth about it and wondering, “Well, I don’t know. Should I do this? Should I do that?”
It will just feel like, yes, this feels right. And everything else will feel "off".
Your brain and your ego may still step in, and the brain and egos of other people may make you question it, but get back to your center. Get back to your inner being and sit with the calm center and see what feels like something that is right for you. Something that brings you a sense of peace, not turmoil.
And yes, sometimes our intuition will warn us away from a particular action. You might think this is fear. But fear has a different energy. It tightens you up. It is stressful. It stirs up the muddy water.
Intuition, on the other hand, can be more of a question, an insight, a quiet observation.
Fear shouts. Intuition speaks quietly.
Fear demands immediate action. Intuition simply lets you know something isn't quite right.
Fear creates mental and emotional turbulence, while intuition can deliver a clear message even when the message itself is uncomfortable.
Once you sit calmly and listen to your heart and your soul, the muddy waters will settle down and you will be able to see clearly the direction that is calling you home. Home to inner peace, to love, to joy, and to fulfillment.
About The Author
Marie T. Russell is the founder of InnerSelf Magazine (founded 1985). She also produced and hosted a weekly South Florida radio broadcast, Inner Power, from 1992-1995 which focused on themes such as self-esteem, personal empowerment, and well-being. Her articles focus on transformation and reconnecting with our own inner source of joy and creativity.
Creative Commons 3.0: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License. Attribute the author: Marie T. Russell, InnerSelf.com. Link back to the article: This article originally appeared on InnerSelf.com
Related Books:
* Keep Moving: And Other Tips and Truths About Aging
by Dick Van Dyke
Dick Van Dyke shares observations and lessons from a long life about continuing to move forward, remaining engaged with life, and making the best of the choices and circumstances we encounter.
* Variable Star
by Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson
Based on an unfinished outline by Robert A. Heinlein and completed by Spider Robinson, Variable Star is a science-fiction story about choices, consequences, unexpected changes, and finding a new direction when life does not go according to plan. The quotation about fear, anger, and bad decisions that opens this article comes from this book.
* The Overthinker's Guide to Making Decisions: How to Make Decisions Without Losing Your Mind
by Joseph Nguyen
Joseph Nguyen explores how to move beyond overthinking and make decisions from clarity rather than chaos. The book addresses distinguishing intuition from fear, quieting outside opinions, trusting your inner wisdom, and finding greater peace with the choices you make.
Article Recap
Bad decisions are often made when fear, anger, stress, or outside expectations muddy our ability to see clearly. By slowing down, questioning what is driving our choices, and allowing our emotional waters to settle, we can make better decisions rooted in clarity, compassion, and inner peace.
#BetterDecisions #DecisionMaking #InnerPeace
#SelfAwareness #OvercomingFear #TrustYourIntuition
#PersonalGrowth #LifeChoices #EmotionalClarity #InnerSelfcom
