Decisions of life!!

The decisions you make dictate the results you have, and the most important decision is what to focus on when things go wrong.

Mostly, people panic and take the wrong decision in the worst circumstances. Later, when the situation gets worse, everyone advises them that they should have stayed calm and not decided so quickly.

What we all forget is that when such a situation arises, the brain stops functioning properly. We go blank. We don’t understand what to do or how to do it. We just want to get out of it, and that is all we know.

It is very easy to advise people. Following that same advice yourself is a different thing entirely.

Why calm advice is useless in the moment

There is a real reason for this, and knowing it helps.

Under genuine stress, the part of your brain that handles careful reasoning is not fully in charge. The older, faster part takes over - the one built to get you away from danger immediately, not the one that weighs options. That is not a character flaw. It is the equipment working exactly as designed, just on a problem it was not designed for.

Which means “stay calm and think clearly” is advice you cannot follow at the moment you most need it. The window for good thinking is before, or after. Almost never during.

So the useful version is not “be calmer next time.” It is: decide in advance what you will do when you cannot think. Who you will call. What you will not do in the first hour. Whether you will sleep on it before sending anything. Simple rules, set while calm, that your panicking self can just follow without having to reason.

Nobody is at fault for a bad call under pressure

We desperately want out of the bad phase, no matter how, but we give it our best. It is nobody’s fault if a wrong decision gets taken. That person will learn something from the mistake, and if the same circumstances come again, to them or to someone else, they will meet it with more calm and more intelligence.

One should not feel embarrassed about a wrong decision.

I want to underline that, because embarrassment is what keeps most people from getting the value out of it. If you are ashamed of a decision, you avoid thinking about it, and if you avoid thinking about it, you learn precisely nothing and are equally unprepared the next time.

The shame is optional. The lesson is not, but you only get it if you can look at the thing without flinching.

Take it as a lesson for life. Every mistake we make and every step we take, right or wrong, good or bad, teaches us something. Life gives us the best lessons. Life is the best teacher.

Trust what you have lived

Just don’t trust what others say unless you have experienced it yourself.

People may be right or wrong, but only truly trust what you have been through. Advice from someone who has not lived the situation is a guess in a confident voice. It might be a good guess. It is still a guess, and you are the one who has to live with the outcome.

That does not mean ignore everyone. It means weigh advice by whether the person has actually stood where you are standing - and then decide anyway, because it is your life and you are the only one who has all the information about it.

After all, life gives us the best. Have faith in it!!

-Kashish