What has stopped you in the past from taking action and making a change in your life that you know would benefit you? Whether you want to quit smoking, lose weight, forgive someone, buy a new car or get up earlier in the morning, you will notice that the change will not be made until you first decide to make the change.

What Does it Mean to Decide?

The word decide literally means to “cut-off” any other possibility except the one you want to manifest. Without first deciding to change or do something, you will notice that the change never happens until a clear-cut decision is made. Once you have decided, that is really just the first step. It’s easy to know that you want to stop smoking or start a new way of eating that can increase your health and energy, but a real decision has not been made until you take action. We can’t just wish or hope – that’s not a decision. We have to break through and take action.

So, How Can We Decide?

Have you ever noticed that when you have to do something, or need to do something you usually procrastinate and even never follow through and do it? I have found that it is helpful to say to yourself “I will do this now,” or “I want to do this today.” This will help by changing your focus towards desiring to take action, rather than feeling forced to take action. If taking action was a two sided coin, we would chose the side that had less pain associated with it. We will be resistant to do anything we feel forced to do, especially if there’s something else we would rather be doing (like watching TV) in that moment. To break through this, we need to link up a tremendous sense of accomplishment and positive feelings to taking the action we know can help us succeed and link a tremendous sense of failure and pain to keeping the current action or even inaction that we know will lead us to continue to produce results that are of lesser value.

Final Thoughts on the Power of Decision

When we take action and make a new empowering decision, it is so powerful that it will literally change our destiny! Is it no wonder that the most successful people use this fundamental success principle so well? Before we take action to produce a result, we have to decide. Without a decision, there is no action – and this will stop us from achieving our ultimate goals and desires.

Remember, action is the foundational key to any accomplishment in life. Without making a clear-cut decision we could never accomplish much. Learn to master decision making by evaluating the long and short term effects a potential action could have. We will never know if we made the right decision unless we take action, but that is the choice we have to make.

I’ll leave you with this quote from John F. Kennedy:

“There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”