Monday, March 19, 2012

Should I?

Should I take this new job? Should I marry this person? Should I buy this farm? We have answered those questions in our lives and we sometimes get asked, what would we do?

We develop a set of reasoning's or procedures to answer the question, "what should I do?" from birth. What are yours?

Most of us obtain all the facts we can and list the pro's and con's of each situation. Often times we overlook potential major obstacles that will arise when we make various choices.

Some of us rely on our mental powers and others lean more to spiritual answers. I have many friends who use both. If you are Christian or if you are religious, you will ask yourself somewhere in the discourse, what is God's Will for me?

I have one successful young farmer friend I chat with often who is very spiritual and very religious. He would answer my question this way:

I think it's important for family members to stay in the same area of other surrounding family if at all possible. Life is hard and having the loving support structure of other family members to lean on, I believe I can make this life a little bit easier, but I know this isn't always the case for all families. Use wisdom to weigh the pros and cons.

Using these 5 Biblical tools listed below will help one to gain clear wisdom in understanding God's desire/will in a decision that is in need of being made.
~Prayer
~Fasting
~Reading Scripture
~Asking for advice/wisdom from close family members and friends that wants God's best for you.
~Dreams/Visions

This works very well for him but another person who is not so trained, so believing and so spiritual will not understand his way of making decisions. They will use much more pragmatic ways to make decisions.

How do you make a decision? And how will you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is the right one? There are so many ways to make decisions but I think it comes down to your core beliefs.

If you enjoy success, you probably have a learned process that works well for you and you will depend on it to make your decision. Many people's decisions in the past haven't turned out that well and they may find themselves questioning if they should change to a new way of arriving at a conclusion. What do eat today is entirely different than those 3 questions I asked in the opening line.

A year ago, I decided to change the way I live and make decisions. I find myself doing a lot of things I do today the same as I did before a year ago but I have changed many things I do and how I think about them.

After following my own set of decision making skills today and helping family and friends figure out what to do when they ask me my thoughts on their big decision, I have changed.

Have you? How do you make big decisions?

Ed

5 comments:

  1. Some years ago I got the Dale Carnegie book, "How to win friends and influence people," on mp3 and listened to it while farming.
    He has a good process for making difficult decisions.
    I seem to have forgotten most of it. Perhaps I should invest in memory training books-on-tape.
    I know it was useful as I now have 4 friends instead of two.

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  2. Mostly now I make decisions by avoiding people and refusing to answer the phone. Seems to work fairly well..

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  3. These 2 persons seem to stem from highly irrational to highly rational, I doubt I am constantly the one or the other, it's probably a mix of both depending on the question or the circumstances.

    It helps to have a plan for yourself and your family as early as possible. If you know you want to marry and have kids, that question about marrying this person is not about marriage anymore, you've already answered that, but about this particular person and your future couple.
    A plan is really about answering questions before they even arise, so you just do, and therefore achieve more.

    But I wouldn't make it too strict a plan, what you learn straying into the unknown and unexpected is also one of the great joys of life, and every experience adds, influences or can even reset the whole plan...
    Making the right decisions every time would be too boring anyway! ^-^

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  4. Two persons? Oh no! Not those voices again! Aliens! One of those cows is not me!!!!

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  5. Haha, I was referring to the religious and pragmatic persons Ed mentioned, Bud.
    Lazy alien farmers... ^-^

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