You’ve decided. Now what?

Deciding to do something doesn’t come easy. It’s very easy to decide to do (or don’t do) something, and it’s even easier to break it as if it there was never a prior decision. Inside the mind, it’s one decision merely being overwritten with a reversing decision – also not many times as consciously.

What’s a decision then, really? Does making a decision also enable you to steer by it differently from the past? We all know otherwise. A decision usually first appears as a bright idea at the end of some long chain of thoughts or some observation. Its only difference is that it has a strong bit of inclination from your logic: after then, it’s just resting there. In order for it to become “real”, a reason strong enough to modify and turn your course of life, it needs some serious momentum-building proof around it. An example in legal parlance: making a point aloud doesn’t move the argument anywhere until convincing evidence is produced. Our minds need evidence to begin favoring a decision and create a “sustain” flag around it, most often in the first few days post decision.

Sometimes it’s possible that life puts you in a state or moment of time where a decision and the force for sustaining both arrive together. Such life-turning moments – mostly of shock-and-awe – have been key to remarkable life transformations in history. Gandhi, Teresa are examples that pop up immediately. However, most of our personal experience does not fall under the category of such flash reinforcement: we need an organic nurturing of a decision to strengthen it. Like you choose to grow a tree, you choose to grow key decisions in life.

Little acts can go a long way in building roots around decisions: Leo’s post on 4-line change making explains beautifully how you plant a change, nurture it and raise it to commit yourself to life-turning decisions. Robin Sharma goes a bit even further: he simply creates a flat rule of 21-days repetition for any new activity to be wired as a new default habit.

Once a decision reaches a state of conviction, the mind simply turns around it – you’re a different person now. You don’t need to argue inside your head with reversing decisions that threaten to rollback your efforts. You’d have crossed a gate through which a reversal is going to take, er, a new decision!