Making difficult decisions

At times we face making what we find are extremely difficult decisions.

This is how I've tackled this in the past.

First of all, for me, the most important thing to grasp is the following:

It's not the decision we make but how we feel about the decision we make after the event that is important.

The disaster is when we, in the future feel that we made the wrong decision and we become depressed because on reflection we think we made the wrong one.

I do not believe in 'right' decisions - all decisions will be imperfect and all decisions could turn out well . . . or badly. So how can we reach a decision that we will be able to look back on and feel we made the 'right' one:

Our strength of character to come out the other end of a stressful situation with a feeling that we have made the right decisions will lead to peace of mind and that wonderful feeling of being 'grounded'.

First, if you can take your time.

Next follow your gut instincts and not just your reasoning ability.

In the past when I was faced with a very difficult decision I did the following over a period of about a month :

I used my reason to list all the 'for' and 'against' reasons

I then went through them all, using my emotions to weight each reason (say out of ten) and then totted up the emotional points on each side, which then helped me make a decision.

I then, have always felt : this was the best decision I was able to make at the time - and have felt good about it ever since.

Another idea is to take a break away from the problems I'm wrestling with and do something else that is totally absorbing - so much so that I forget for a day about the problem - then return home and weight that list of reasons with my gut feelings.

As human beings we are driven by our deepest feelings about things - our reason then comes to our 'rescue' and makes us feel good about those reasons - we are experts at rationalising what we feel deeply. Reason is not to be relied on - emotions are.