The Three Priority Decisions of Your Life

Many people never ask them themselves, What decisions are really important in my life? And when I say really important – I mean really, really important – mission critical in fact. They treat all decisions in the same way; or, worse, they prioritise the wrong type of decisions as being important when they are in truth trivial. What mobile phone supplier should I use? Agonising over that? Or where should I shop, and be seen to shop? And how about, what brand of trainers am I going to wear?

All decisions have consequences, so this blog is not minimising the importance of carefully considering any choice you have to make. But in the scheme of things the Pareto Principle applies: 80% of decisions are pretty low grade, and on 20% of our decisions big outcomes depend.

Drilling down further, what then are the three biggest decisions we are ever going to make in our life that will impact every aspect of it, for our good or for our bad?

There are three that are crucial and they are not perhaps entirely obvious. In order of significance, the first and primary decision that you have to make as a human being is to decide that your will is free. Sounds abstract? The great American psychologist William James put it this way: “My first act of free will is to believe in free will”!

The importance of this psychologically is that it means that you become responsible for your own destiny; you are not a victim – of genetics, of chemistry or physics, of environment, of evolution, of … all the excuses that people make to justify their own failures or behaviours in life. The free will asserts: I choose … This is profoundly liberating.

The opposites of freewill are fatalism and determinism. We see the effects of fatalism in those quasi-religions which lead people to hopelessness and helplessness conveyed in the misused expression, ‘It’s God’s will.’ And we see the pernicious effects of determinism all around us, in the pseudo-science of ‘explanations’, whereby science pretends it is explaining consciousness through chemical processes – and the of course people can’t help what they do since it is physically engineered into them.

As a sidebar, one of the most brilliant religious observations of all time was St Augustine’s on Christ’s nature. He said that we must not say that Christ was unable to sin (to explain his sinless nature), for that we would mean we could no longer impute any credit to him. If he was unable to sin, then big deal that he didn’t sin! Rather, we need to insist that Christ was able not to sin – can you see the difference? Able not to do, rather than unable to do. And this is true for us – we can choose or not choose – we are free. But as soon as we say I had to take the drug (my father was an addict, you see), then you start limiting human potential. In fact the constant repetition of the ‘unable’ mantra becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – we chain ourselves in determinism.

The next most important decision to make is the decision to love our Self. This is not easy. So many people experience guilt, regret, anger, fear about themselves and in any case see loving your Self as a form of selfishness – which they were trained to believe is profoundly wrong. The truth, however, is that unless we do love our Self, then we can never love another.

We can only give love if we have love to give. Thus it is that we need to ask ourselves: how am I loving my Self on an on-going basis? What have I done today to that effect? What am I doing next week or next month? This self-love must not be deferred indefinitely, but must be practised constantly if we are to have high self-esteem, high levels of self-confidence, and the ability to touch, reach out and love others.

Finally, as we mention the word love, the third most important decision of your life is: your choice of partner. On this so many lives founder: marry in haste, they say, repent at leisure! In order to find the right life partner (and I accept of course that there is and always will be a small number, proportionally, of the population for whom a partnership is not desirable or necessary, and so this isn’t relevant to them) one of the central issues is knowing oneself well enough to choose the kind of person who is really complementary. I like the idea here of Chinese Yin and Yang – the balance of forces that create both progress and stability.

Whilst a partner may well stimulate us to greater efforts and achievements, I think it is the stability that the partner provides that is essential for long term success. If you have found that partner, all well and good; if you have not, what criteria are using to pursue love’s dream?

James Sale’s next personal development course is on the 8^th June: contact him for details.