What’s a Decision all about?

What do we need to make the decisions we need to face in our daily lives? We hear about movements such as SDM—(Shared Decision Making), a working definition is not yet established.
Yet the process of decision making involves more than one person as they act as partners and this process is of sharing treatment decisions as consumer and health provider and the options of those decisions to be made. Have you learned anything yet? My guess is that as a consumer or client you haven’t got the process of making decisions down quite yet, and require more information. Well, the first thing you must know is that the human creature is always making decisions from birth to death, from sunrise to sunset; it’s a mental process (cognitive)—of knowledge—which is the result of the courses of action we must take which may have many alternative paths. But how do we make a decision?

Attitudes in life that exist can be good or bad, black or white, decisions are commonplace; easy to make. We make decisions by response to habits, or our experiences. It’s somewhat confusing when you’re choosing one absolute over another; the decisions have to be right or wrong in some way and sometimes there are no right decisions only other choices, other than those you may choose. People involved in Mental Health themselves tend to worry much about what to do; they:

(1) Want to be certain before they accept a decision
(2) Believe a decision is good because other people say it is
(3) The make emotional decisions because what is bad is good
(4) Have failed to learn from past mistakes, thereby blaming the failure of the
decision on “Fate” or “Karma” or just plain bad luck

Knowing that you should ask for advice is good, you should treat your decision as if it were a, b, c, not making a first choice is best and don’t treat the problem as if it were odds and evens, for a correct answer. If you are struggling for an answer, know that there are pros and cons to everything. Try not to decide for a certain length of time, a minute, a day even a months’ time, the facts will accumulate for you to weigh the pros and cons.

We make decisions all our lives and at times we don’t know if they are the right decisions, but we can still live with a good conscious. When the decision gets rough, you can trust your instincts, yet you must weigh the consequences, good or bad, right or wrong; though at best thinking too much on a decision can leave us no better off than having made one at all in a hurry. Have some common sense and:
(1) Trust your instincts
(2) Don’t give into temptation
(3) Be imaginative
(4) Know what makes sense to you not someone else
(5) Remember: we are all human!

Written by Donald Sammons