Here’s Your Guide To Making Tough Decisions

What voice are you listening to?

We all have unique processes that we leverage when faced with difficult decisions. Some of us operate from a stance of morality or principle. Some weigh pros and cons. Some channel past experiences.

All of these are very useful guides for making choices on what we should do in a high-stakes environment. After all processes have ran their course, however, what always shows up to drive home a decision is a voice.

The catch is, there are three. The question is—which voice are you allowing yourself to be moved by?

Head

The first voice that shows up (and is most prominent for the majority of people) is the voice of your head. The same voice that provides most of the running commentary on your life inside your mind, the voice of your head will always tell you what you THINK is going on.

The voice in your head is that of your brain, that of which is responsible for your protection. Given that most of the hard decisions we are faced with every day are dealing with people, leveraging a voice dictated on survival may not lead us to victory as often as we’d like.

Logic, reason, and consideration are the primary languages of the voice in your head. Things such as information, opinions, and worldviews are all referenced here. While these can provide helpful insight during various situations, they often leave many details still outstanding.

Heart

A similar, yet distinctly different voice from the head’s, the heart is a place from which many people naturally operate. Highly emotional and empathetic people listen to the voice of the heart and base many of their primary decision-making skills from this reliance. By listening to the voice from your heart, you’re listening to how you FEEL about something and what the situation is stirring up on an emotional level.

Like the head, always listening to your heart can lead to downfalls. Feelings are not always reinforced strongly enough to base decisions on. Yes, certain feelings can indeed stick around forever like how you feel about your family or spouse. However, most all feelings we experience on a day-to-day basis without deliberate focus, change intermittently.

Just because you’re feeling a certain way about your job today, doesn’t indicate that quitting tomorrow is your best course of action (maybe it is, but it’s more likely coincidental than anything else).

Love, desires, and passions are the staples of the heart and again, while incredibly powerful driving forces, these things can keep us from staying grounded in what’s really going on.

Gut

The final and sometimes the deepest internal voice of reference is that of the gut. Your “gut” voice is telling you all that you KNOW deep inside about a particular bottleneck or opportunity. Your intuition and conscience are in full swing here and by listening to this voice, you remain as objective to all aspects of a decision as you possibly can.

Rather than going off of what we “think” or how we “feel,” we can go off of something a little more substantiated.

As we bypass our opinions and feelings, we put ourselves in a far greater place of empowerment. This isn’t to say that every decision made from this position will be the “right” one (which is subjective in itself, anyway), but does give us the best chance to not leave anything out when it comes to making a decision.

Conclusion

What voice are you listening to when you make key life decisions?

By leveraging our gut voice more often than not, we remove many of the reasons and expectations that crippled us in the first place.

When it comes to making decisions, what always follows is an outcome. The easiest way to take some pressure off of the decision is understand that we will get a result no matter what.

We don’t always have to distinguish it as a “right” or “wrong” decision.

It either produces the result we want, or it doesn’t.

Plain and simple.