A few weeks ago we wrote about the importance of making decisions (July 17^th blog on Decisiveness).  I wanted to expand on the topic with today’s blog and raise a common challenge around “the other choice” in the decision making process.

Let’s face it; decision making around the important things in life is tough work.  It requires thinking and it requires making a judgment.  At times, many of us would just prefer a checklist that requires little to no thinking and just a robotic like obedience to achieve a certain goal in life.  The reality is that the important decisions around family, education, career, and other areas of service, are all complex.  These decisions are rarely between right and wrong, they usually land somewhere between “pretty good” and “maybe a little better.”

It is easy to talk endlessly about ideas and opinions, but making decisions is the tough stuff that helps to build and strengthen character of which we discussed in the blog on July 17^th.  Some examples of those tough decisions we struggle with are:

• Providing opportunities for our children to learn responsibility and independence
• Financial decisions between spending now and saving for later
• Ongoing education choices for parents and children
• The time and effort between work and home
• The really big choices around our families and our careers

In making these difficult decisions, an important issue to raise is “the other choice.” The “what could have been” debate if we had taken the other path like in the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken.

Psychologists would say much of the mental strain they see today is brought on by our tendency to struggle with the “what could have been” debate in our lives.  As these were big decisions in our lives, there is most likely a fair amount of emotion and perhaps pain associated with the choices we have made in the past.

I will state the obvious – There is no rewind button or do-over rule in life.  Our capacity spent trying to hope for a rewind or a do-over in life is an unfortunate waste of our limited resources.  So the question is, how can we use “the other choice” concern to build and strengthen our character and continue to move forward?  Here are a few suggestions:

(1)    Reality:  We will never know the full outcome of “the other choice.” We have a tendency to overemphasize the potential positives, but disaster also strikes on The Road Not Taken. This is one of the great mysteries in life, we only know for sure what we have in front of us today.

(2)    Understanding: Our most productive use of “the other choice” should be on understanding our thought process around the decisions we made at the time – What drove our decision?  We will become more self-aware of our weak points and our strong points that will help us in many aspects of our life.

(3)    Growth:  We can only press the forward button in life.  There is no pause and there is no rewind.  Our most effective choice on dealing with past decisions is to grow from them.  We can apply those gains to be more effective in our present set of choices and perhaps share our learnings with those closest to us.

As we work to reduce the strain associated with the “what could have been” debate and move towards personal growth based on learnings from our past decisions, we will build and strengthen our character and Character Creates Opportunity® for us to reach our full potential.