4 Essential Elements to Making Wise Decisions
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Learn the art of wise decision-making, incorporating self-awareness, integrity, truth, and empathy. And discover how this will help navigate life's challenges with ease and clarity.
The Role of Awareness in Decision-Making
Without awareness there is no wisdom. And there are so many ways we can come to this conclusion.
Being aware, it becomes very difficult to convince ourselves that doing things that are out of alignment with our values or out of integrity are justifiable. Without awareness, the things that haunt us – signals alerting us that we’re out of integrity – can be easily buried or ignored.
What Gets in the Way?
We often don’t want to see those signals because acknowledging them could interfere with getting what we think we want. Often times, we’re not seeing the picture because we've blinded ourselves to the price we’ll pay later on.
We can be quite skilled at avoiding or denying these signals from our conscience or awareness.
There’s so much do deal with in our busy lives that we can easily use truly important matters to purposefully distract ourselves from any uncomfortable thoughts we don’t want to experience.
Awareness as a More Conscious Way
We often don’t want to see those signals because acknowledging them could interfere with getting what we think we want. Often times, we’re not seeing the picture because we've blinded ourselves to the price we’ll pay later on.
We can be quite skilled at avoiding or denying these signals from our conscience or awareness.
There’s so much do deal with in our busy lives that we can easily use truly important matters to purposefully distract ourselves from any uncomfortable thoughts we don’t want to experience.
Awareness as a More Conscious Way
Being aware takes into account all of what we sense and feel, what we know, what we value, and what we perceive in the world around us. It helps us see where there are gaps in what we know — crucial input before we make a decision.
Unfiltered, undistorted awareness is essential because it helps us to see what’s really going on. Then, we can make truly wise decisions.
The Foundation of Conscious Living
Those of us doing our best to live more consciously strive to evolve the foundation from which we operate, realizing greater and greater capacities over time.
A few foundational aspects are:
- Dedication to greater self-awareness and being aware of all that is around us
- An imperative to live in alignment and integrity with our deepest values and the principles we hold high
- An ironclad commitment to be in truth with ourselves and others
- An open heart and deep caring for how any decision we make impacts not only ourselves, but our stakeholders and the world around us.
Heightening Decision-Making Awareness
What are some core areas in which we need to raise our decision-making awareness?
Every decision will be better informed when we’re aware of what we and others think and feel; what our needs and desires are; what our patterns of behavior are when trying to meet those needs; and how well we’re aligned with our values as we move through each day.
All of this provides information and insight into the forces involved in any decision, and with heightened awareness, we stand a greater chance of arriving at wise decisions.
Holistic Decision-Making
Wise decision-making requires a holistic view of situations that allows us to see a more multifaceted picture than traditional decision-making — a broader range of potential far-reaching impacts our choices may have on ourselves and our those around us.
With our intent to live more consciously, we recognize and value the interconnectedness of everyone and everything on the planet. Thus, as we endeavor to make wise choices, we also look at how we might positively impact or influence the world around us.
This doesn’t mean that if there is any possible harm resulting from our decisions that we abandon them. We live in an imperfect world. In wise decision-making, our intent is to raise our awareness so that we can take all that we are able to notice into account, weigh what we see, and find ways in which we can mitigate or minimize any possible negative impacts.
The Importance of Emotional Intelligence and Integrity
Taking feelings into account is essential. As we consider our choices, we pause to become more aware of how we and others feel about the various aspects of the decision. This is important data. It opens our eyes to what’s going on within us and others, providing a richer picture of what’s going on.
And raising our awareness of how other’s voices are influencing us can be key as well. While there’s great value in listening to and learning from the wisdom, critiques and creative idea of others, it’s also important for us to notice when we are allowing ourselves to be “over-influenced”.
Addressing fear head on so that it doesn’t unduly influence us is essential. I’m pretty sure that none of us have listed “acting from fear” as one of our values.
Free of fear’s shadow, we can see the landscape of what we’re considering choosing from a neutral vantage point. This allows us to see with greater clarity and increases the odds of arriving at a wise decision.
We’ll also do a gut check and test out how honest we’re being with ourselves about what we’re thinking of doing, checking for any breaches in our integrity that might be flying under the radar and partially or fully blinding us.
Awareness is Invaluable Treasure
Without being aware, we would not have access to this vast treasury of information. Without self-awareness, we would not have access to our internal sense of knowing what feels right in any given situation.
With the clarity and insights derived from awareness, we become far more capable of navigating wisely through all our decision-making opportunities. And truly, awareness ultimately makes our lives easier and less stressful.
Would you like to be more present, feel more alive and connected, with a greater sense of inner peace?
It's my mission to support people in living and leading with greater ease, wisdom, and inner peace. To feel more deeply connected with those around them.
If you'd like to tap into your deeper insight and practical wisdom to live and lead more consciously, feel free to reach out at bodhi@bodhijeffreys.com to set up a time to connect.
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