Contributed by Stephanie Staples at Your Life Unlimited
What’s your purpose this week?
To get through it. To get as much done as possible?
To stay out of trouble?
To leave your mark on our world.
When my friend Wendy moved from California to Manitoba, her friend sent her off with this inspirational instruction. “Go put your ‘W’ on Winnipeg.”
You see Wendy had left her mark in California, her positive imprint, her progressive and pro-active impression and her friend knew that now was time for Wendy to make her mark elsewhere.
And she has – enhancing, educating and inspiring our community in the short time since she arrived.
What about you?
Have you left your positive, pro-active and progressive mark on your community yet?
We don’t have to start a foundation, donate an organ or give away our life’s saving to have a favourable impact. It can be made in hundreds of tiny but impactful ways.
Think about your purpose this week, think about how you can leave your …insert your initial here…mark on our world.it’s just one more way you can live Your Life, Unlimited!
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This week on Your Life, Unlimited radio …
If there is a decision to be made, look no further than Annette Dubrouillet, author of Make No Mistake: How to make the best decision the first time. Check out Annette’s guest blog post, Grazie, Prego – Thanks for the good decision, below.
Randy Fielding leads up a team that can boasts “Architects, Educators and Change Agents for Seven Billion Learners.” Wow that’s a lot of influence. I was super interested to hear how the future of classrooms can influence our home/office life too.
Enjoy the whole show here:
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Grazie, Prego – Thanks for the good decision.
If you watch any TV at all, you have probably seen at least one – a commercial talking about the decisions we make in our lives. The theme is typically one of three:
There aren’t any real falsehoods in these ads, but there is a hidden underlying truth. We, the television-watching public, have great concerns and doubts about our decision-making ability.
And why shouldn’t we have doubts? The vast majority of us have never been trained how to make good decisions, other than perhaps a simple decision tree or forced-decision matrix. We don’t use a formal process, frequently relying instead on our good intentions. And even if we do use a process, our model typically ends there. We don’t go further and look for the external factors that skew our decisions, much less do anything about controlling those factors. We aren’t even able to describe the personality characteristics that strongly influence decision-making, much less identify our own personality characteristics.
It isn’t that relying on our good intentions is wrong. It’s just that a method that simplistic isn’t always enough, especially with important decisions such as which car to buy or what prescription drug we should take.
With our lack of knowledge, training and competency, we are ripe for the strong stimuli and pressures that a multi-million dollar ad campaign can throw on us. We end up buying what they decide we should buy, instead of what we really need or what will really help us. At best we allow them to sway our decisions or, at worst, have total control over them. And then we pat ourselves on the back for making a “good decision” when all we have actually done is decided to listen to Madison Avenue. Not really a valid process. It may work sometimes but to allow this to happen all the time is to relinquish our ability to essentially make decisions.
How do you regain the control over your purchasing decisions? Of course, knowledge is the answer. In my book, Make No Mistake: How to make the best decision the first time I show how the three components of decision making (7-step process, personality characteristics and external factors) all come into play in decisions. Our acquiring the facts, understanding the theories, having procedures (and actually implementing those procedures), is what makes us strong decision makers. When we do all that then we can honestly say we are buying what we have decided is best for us and that there is minimal if any correlation between a bad hair style you may have tried when you were 20-years old and not choosing the most popular brand of jarred tomato sauce.
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Stephanie Staples, CSP* is the author of When Enlightening Strikes – Creating a Mindset for Uncommon Success, an internationally acclaimed motivational speaker, and the recipient of the 2014 Manitoba Woman Entrepreneur Award for Contributions to Community. Stephanie empowers audiences & clients across North America to bring their ‘A’ game to work and to life. Stephanie has a special interest in working with and empowering nurses and healthcare providers. She happily calls Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada home. You can get loads of complimentary resources to help with issues such as work/life balance, wellness, stress management and happiness in general, as well as find out more information about her coaching and speaking services at http://www.YourLifeUnlimited.ca.
* Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), conferred by the National Speakers Association is the speaking profession’s international measure of professional platform proficiency. Less than 10 percent of speakers have earned this credential and are recognized as some of the best in their fields. Stephanie was one of only five professional speakers in Canada (and the only woman) to attain this designation in 2013.
The post Decisions, Decisions! first appeared on Your Life Unlimited.
