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How to Make Good Life Choices

Throughout your entire life, you’re going to be confronted by many different choices that you need to make in life. The choices you need to make in life may be small ones like what to wear today or large ones like which career to practice. Some choices also have moral implications that you should consider as you choose different paths in your life.

Understand Your Personal Values

When you die, what do you want other people to say or think about you? Try writing your obituary and that is going to help you figure out what your personal values are. It can also help to write a life mission statement. That way when you must choose between different actions, attitudes, and priorities, you know that it’s all accurate.

Know Your Personal Life Goals 

When you know what you want to achieve, it makes it simpler to choose. For example, if you want to start a business while you work a full-time job and your personal life goal is to be a business owner you can easily choose to work three hours Friday night instead of going out partying or sitting around watching YouTube.

Learn from Various Experiences

The more you read and expose yourself to other ideas, the easier it is to make choices that work for you. As you experience life, you’ll be able to look back on how you felt and how “that” worked and make different choices or the same choices depending on the results. Fortunately, you can also get this experience by reading and learning from others. After all, you don’t need to get in a drunk driving accident to know that your life values prevent you from driving drunk. Right?

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

We all have gaps in our life education. There are simply things going on in the world that you have no notion about even enough to ask a question about it. When you accept that you need to keep learning because you’ll never know everything, it makes it easier to make good choices.

Visualize the Probable Impact of Your Choices

As you work through your options, envision the probable consequences that are likely to arise due to your choices. Each choice should be in line with your mission, values, and morals. Since all of these things make up your core foundation, it’s best that you incorporate them. It is very difficult to change core beliefs and if you try, you may seem disingenuous to others. If an option goes against your grain, it probably won’t work well for you in the long run. 

Set a Time Limit for Final Decisions 

When you weigh your choices, don’t allow yourself to go over and over the choices. Instead, use a straightforward 3-phase method with deadlines for each, which includes writing down the pros and cons of each choice, weeding out unacceptable options, and making final best-fit decisions. 

Making good life choices really is about knowing what you want (and don’t want), your values, and your life goals. This helps to ensure that the choices you make now lead to the results you want to achieve in the future. When your choices align with the goals you’ve set for your life, it makes it easier to stay on track and succeed.