Live Your Life Proactively

Do you live your life reactively or proactively? Is every day a series of reactions to current crises or is each day another series of steps towards your master plan for your life? When faced with a decision to make; do you put it off until the decision makes itself? Or do you tend to make decisions early, maybe before you have all the necessary facts and information? How often do you think you want to do something but then procrastinate until the choice is no longer available?

To create a plan for your life and to live that plan successfully, you have to be a good decision maker. Sometimes people procrastinate related to decision making because they are lazy and just don't want to put forth the effort and time required. It is easier to complain

Again, how much information you need is directly related to the importance of the decision. The information needed prior to choosing a refrigerator will be less than when choosing an area of study to prepare for a potential career. But in neither case will the decision be irrevocable. Very rarely will you have a decision to make that cannot be changed at a later date if you decide the decision was not the correct one. In most cases, when one door closes, another door opens. If you pass on a particular job or a particular vacation this year and find that you regret it, you can probably find something similar next year or the year after. Keep in mind that too much information can cause information overload and fatigue your brain so that your decision making is as impaired as though you had no information. Always consider your thoughts related to your decision making question and examine if your thinking might be flawed by tunnel vision, preconceived ideas or bias? You may want to bounce ideas off of a good friend or mentor to be sure that you are being

Delete or tweak any potential approach that does not fit with your overall value system and your life goals?

4. Delete or change each potential approach so that each possibility meets the criteria you identified for an ideal outcome

5. Under each remaining potential approach, write how you feel emotionally about it?

6. Identify the approaches that seem to be supported by logic and facts?

6. Which approaches does your intuition suggest are the best?

7. What implications will each potential approach have on others such as co-workers, family members, friends?

8. What are the best case scenarios you imagine related to each approach?

9. What are the worst case scenarios possible from each approach?

10. Is it possible to set up contingency plans to avoid the worse case scenarios that you identified?

11. Narrow down your possible decision making approaches and make lists of pros and cons for each remaining approach.

12. Finally: choose a course of action and go for it. There are no guarantees and you must just do the best you can to make good decisions and allow yourself to make a few mistakes along the way. As was stated at the beginning of the article, few decisions are irrevocable. If you make a mistake, you just start over with a new