An effective way to begin deciding what you want, is to get a pencil and paper. It’s time to do some soul searching. Be not afraid! Most importantly of all, be honest with yourself. Ask yourself these effective questions. What do I want to have in my life in terms of personal relationships, personal fitness and personal finance? What is most important to me in my life? What is most important to me in my career? What is most important to me in my quality of life? What is most important to me in my relationships? What is most important to me in my day-to-day living and quality of life? What kind of qualities and skills do I want to master? – Sorry for giving you so many questions, but there is a method to this madness. If you are committed to making a positive difference in your life, you need to be clear of what that is – in all areas of your life. What good is financial success if you don’t feel loved and important? What good is a career, if it’s the wrong one and you’re miserable everyday? There is a secret to life fulfillment. That secret to me is balance. And knowing exactly what we want is the first step to that fulfillment.

It is very true that we cannot be successful in anything unless we first know what we want. We need to have a vision of who we want to be, how we want to feel and what will make us happiest of all. Once we are clear, we can take action!

Creating the self improvement necessary to become a better friend, a better parent or even a better associate at your job is what will help you grow in joy and happiness. Success comes when we positively improve the way we interact with one another. In fact, if your life is not how you want it to be at the moment, how does that make you feel each day? What about that would you like to change? It’s true, that we need self improvement then to change what is not working for us. All success begins within. After all, if we are not the ones who have created the quality of life we currently live, then who did? Many people feel that they are controlled by circumstances that they did not create, but as I have witnessed, these circumstance are no more than excuses. If circumstance have directed your life, could it be that you didn’t decide what you really wanted, and settled into what made you comfortable in various moments of your life? Where has that taken you throughout the years? Most importantly, if you are not happy with who you have become and what you have accomplished, is it too late to change? I believe there are two answers to this question. Yes, if you want to continue in that way. No, if you want to change. The choice is ours to make. So decide what you want – and make it happen!

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.”