Conscious Choices

 After you've done a thing the same way for two years, look it over carefully.  After five years, look at it with suspicion.  And after ten years, throw it away and start all over.  ~Alfred Edward Perlman, New York Times, 3 July 1958

I follow a financial blog called The Simple Dollar and yesterday’s post was about “Training Your Intuition” and how to basically make good choices you can trust. 

First, you have to take a serious look at the choices you’re making and be willing to say, “Yes, I am making poor decisions.”

Of course, he was speaking mostly of financial decisions but it also lends itself to any decision in life.  In my case, how I spend my time on a daily basis.

look for a single decision that you make regularly in the wrong direction. It could be anything. Maybe you come home from work and vegetate for too long.

This is me.  I make a decision to come home from work and turn on the TV and stay there until it’s time to go to bed - ignoring housework, friends, studying, writing, taking pictures.  All those other choices I COULD be making on how to spend my time.

IT IS A CONSCIOUS DECISION.

Whenever I approach one of those decision points, I attempt to do things as close to my visualization as possible. The goal is to make the “right” way of doing things feel like the natural way of doing it.

At some point, your conscious decision becomes an unconscious habit.  My next goal is to work on consciously changing that old habit.  Visualize the life I want to be living and make appropriate choices on how to spend my time in accordance with the life I want.