Decisions Decisions!

How to Make the Right One Every Time

Steve Coleman

• Publisher: Global Publishing Group
• eBook ISBN: 9781925282269
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

Learn the art of making right decisions. Have any of your decisions ever gone "pear-shaped"? How would you like to cruise through every one of them from now on with ease, clarity and absolute confidence? International author, teacher and personal development expert Steve Coleman shares over 40 years of first-hand experience, giving you the knowledge along with simple tools and strategies to make the right decision every time. You will learn:
- 10 golden rules for making the right decision every time
- The 5 key factors that make a decision a right decision
- The simple blueprint that underpins every decision that's ever been made
- What to do when your decision goes "pear-shaped"
- How to get clarity on what you really want
- How to stay on track after your decision's been made to ensure success
- What to do when your heart and your head don't see eye-to-eye '"Decisions, Decisions!" is a wonderful marriage of pragmatism and theory to help a range of people from diverse backgrounds improve the quality of their decision making and, in turn, improve the quality of life for themselves and the significant people in their lives." - Michael Conn, Principal Ignatius Park College, Townsville, Australia Make every decision a winner. Decide now and read this book today!

CHAPTER 1

E - IDENTIFY THE EVENT ... PRECISELY

Anything to which we give a meaning is an event. An event only happens because there has been a change to which we have assigned a meaning. No change ... no event ... no meaning.

On the surface, an event is something that happens. For something to happen there has to be a change of some kind, which means there also has to be a witness ... a person to register the change.

Change or event-registering happens in the mind and is represented by activity in particular areas of the physical brain. This happens in a sequence: first there is stimulation via a neutral pathway to parts of the brain, then some processing that requires memory-retrieval and clever neural integration where associations are created and “voila,” the event is registered and ready for whatever purpose we have chosen.

Let’s take an example. Let’s say a bird just pooped on your newly-washed car.

Useful questions to ask are, “When or where did this mental picture of a bird pooping on your car start to take shape? Where or when did this registration process start?”

Without digging into the disciplines of neurology and behavioural sciences, a simple answer would be: When energy of one kind or another strikes one or more of your sensory organs, (eyes, ears, nose, taste buds or skin) and is transformed into a user-friendly signal which travels along a nerve to the brain. Your brain does what it has to do and the process of registration is completed. The stored event is ready for deployment, which could be you deciding to get into a “tizz” because you have to wash your car again or ... you decide it’s a sign of good luck because someone once told you about the “bird-poop-good-luck” thing. We will investigate this kind of phenomenon in the next chapter on the Critical Space.

Events of course, are going on all the time ... continuously. We are constantly barraged by incoming energy and it comes in incredible, massive amounts and this poses a very interesting question, “If this energy is coming at us all the time, how come we aren’t aware of everything that’s happening all the time?”

Well we could, if we choose, close our eyes or put a peg over our nose or put on ear muffs or not eat anything or let our hands get nearly frozen to where our fingers are numb and can’t feel anything.

We could easily do all of those things. We could somehow block off all of our senses ... for how long though? Could we stand being in the dark for ever? Would we walk into an oncoming truck or other such massive, mindless, indifferent, terminating hunk? How long could we go without smelling anything or hearing anything or feeling with our fingers and would we really want to die of starvation?

Not a very useful answer you will agree.

The truth, so I’m told, is that we filter out everything that’s not relevant at the time and what we decide is relevant varies, depending on our immediate focus.

If you were a counter-intelligence agent, for example, and deciding whether or not to trust the person you are talking to, you would be noticing as much as you possibly could about them and filtering out a lot less than the yogi who is in deep meditation and focusing on “the void” or emptiness and who will be filtering out just about everything because it’s not important at the time.

So what we focus on decides which events get registered and which events do not. This is a very important piece of information.

Now all the time this event registration is going on, in the endless sea of event energy, there are some changes that don’t get registered straight away, if at all yet they do affect us and are so important that if we did have to consciously process them, we would either be killed rather quickly or suffer inconvenient pain or some catastrophic, physical injury. These are events that potentially threaten our physical wellbeing and even our survival sometimes, for example, when we start to operate in temperatures above or below our safe range of 37.8 – 36.10C, when a bug flies too close to our open eyes, when masses of bacteria attack our upper respiratory organs or when our muscles run out of oxygen as we run up a hill. Our brain instantly “grabs” these events and acts on them automatically. It “trims back” the registration part and fast-tracks them using a very, very clever automatic, fast-track system called the autonomic nervous system: Instantly, more of our stored energy is released to cool or warm our body so that our temperature stays in the safe range, our eyes automatically blink to avoid the nasty collision of bug with sensitive eyeball, a cavalry of phagocytes gets deployed to our throat lining to dispatch the invading bacterial intruders; our lungs and heart get a “hurry-up” message to get more oxygen out to our running muscles so we don’t “run out of steam” and quit the most beneficial part of the workout. This autonomic system goes on all the time we are alive. It never sleeps. It never rests. There are no shift workers. It goes 24/7 on its own. It keeps us operational and if we choose to look after it, it keeps us in great physical shape too.

“But this is all hands-on and physical. Not all events are like that,” you say. “What about when we dream or when we get scared just thinking about something scary?”

These are events too, however, instead of our nose, eyes, taste buds and pain, temperature and pressure receptors in the skin, the brain brilliantly sets up its very own event generator using data and associations that it “borrows” from the store in our memory banks. A kind of internal event loop is created.

For example, when a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) sufferer has an anxiety attack, memories of past trauma do the work of the here-and-now, in-the-flesh “bad guy” event. In this person’s mind, the event is recreated to where it triggers a negative anxiety emotion.

Or maybe you’ve laughed at a joke you just remembered? You didn’t need any of your senses to set that up, just a whole lot of internal memory stored in your brain’s memory banks.

Probably, the most exciting, the most potentially devastating and the most frustrating internal event loops of them all are the ones we set up for the future ... the wedding next week, the Armageddon prophesy, the deciding goal for a series win or the million-dollar payout. These are loops for events that haven’t happened yet and they are exciting, potentially devastating and frustrating because they could happen if we could just do or not do certain things. Therein lies the art and the science of manifesting our dreams, our goals and objectives. (More of this in Part Two)

In between the depression of the PTSD sufferer and your laughing at the joke, there are all of our everyday, internal event loops: our reasons for what we should do and our excuses for why we didn’t do them. There are our dreams and our denials, our self-talk and stories and our depressors and our motivators. These are the loops that ...

Table of contents

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE KNOWLEDGE BIT
• CHAPTER 1: E - ISOLATING EVENTS
• CHAPTER 2: C - KNOW YOUR CRITICAL SPACE
• CHAPTER 3: R - REACTION OR RESPONSE?
• CHAPTER 4: O - OUTCOME
• CHAPTER 5: M - MEASURING THE OUTCOME
• PART II: THE PRACTICAL BIT
• TRANSITION
• CHAPTER 6: WHAT MAKES A DECISION A RIGHT DECISION?
• CHAPTER 7: OLD MESS OR NEW MEANING
• CHAPTER 8: RECONDITIONING YOUR DECISION-MAKING MACHINERY
• CHAPTER 9: REACTION AND RESPONSE QUALITY CONTROL
• CHAPTER 10: GETTING THE OUTCOME YOU WANT
• CHAPTER 11: STAYING ON TRACK WITH RIGHT MEASUREMENT
• CHAPTER 12: TEN RULES FOR MAKING THE RIGHT DECISION EVERY TIME
• CHAPTER 13: YOUR ULTIMATE DECISION
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
• GLOSSARY OF TERMS, COLLOQUIALISMS AND SLANG
• RECOMMENDED READING
• OTHER REFERENCES