Confidence, choices and being an active decision maker

I recently asked my subscribers for suggestions on topics they would like me to cover and the resounding answer was confidence and choices - which is great because that's right up my alley.

The response to this is Positive Decisions - a two part resource to help you rediscover your confidence around decision making, and to help you understand what success looks like for you. The idea is that one resource helps you define where you want your decisions to take you, while the other one let's you have more confidence to evaluate the options.

Why Positive Decisions?

During My Year of TED, one of the major realisations I experienced was how passively I had been making decisions in my life - well okay how I hadn't made many of the big decisions in my life. The more I have thought about all of this, the more I have developed a strong belief that this passive decision making plagues a lot of people.Barry Schwartz recently confirmed this for me when I interviewed about his TED Talks (The Paradox of Choice and Our Loss of Wisdom) and how I used them in My Year of TED:

...there is a temptation to let big things happen to you, because people are so worried about how they'll feel if they take ownership of big decisions and they don't work out. It takes courage to own up to the fact that you're in charge of this and you have to decide, and it's not hard for me to understand why people are sometimes reluctant to do that.Fear of a bad outcome just completely dominates the anticipation of a good outcome when it comes to big decisions. People stick with their jobs. They stick with jobs they don't hate but they don't love, rather than risking a new job or a new career. It doesn't feel nearly as much of a decision that you are keeping your job as it would feel if you changed your job. And I think maybe the same thing with relationships.

Positive Decisions is about trying to help other people be more active in the choices they are given in life. It contains a lot of the techniques that I have used to become a more active decision maker, and keep the confidence I've needed to take on the challenges of the last few years.

Part One is ready for you now

Part 1 - The Confidence to Actively Make Choices is now available to dinkylune subscribers, if you haven't signed up yet you can do it here. This contains activities to help you shift any negativity you might have about your capability and capacity to make good choices.

Part two will be released in the next couple of weeks, focusing on success statements.

And because life can be full of serendipity, TED put up a talk recently on choices, Ruth Chang on How to Make Hard Choices, which I only watched on the weekend. The last couple of minutes reinforce my belief on gaining control of decisions, it's a fascinating talk.

Do you struggle with the hard choices in life? Do you think that you are active or passive in your decision making?