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How We Make Wise Decisions

Since we rely to a great extent on our intuition when making most decisions, it is important that we instill in our minds how to make wise decisions

Sometimes we are in situations where we must act very quickly. Some of the decisions we make when in these situations can be life changing. But we have little time to assess the situation and even less time to step through a structured or formal decision-making process. So how do we then avoid making really bad decisions that may negatively affect us for the rest of our lives?

To answer this question, it may be helpful to think about how our minds work. We each come into this world with our own innate personal set of emotions imprinted in our subconscious minds. Attached to our emotions are instinctual tendencies for particular sensory and behavioral reactions to circumstances in which we may someday find ourselves.

Soon after beginning our lives, we become aware of the circumstances that surround our existence. We discover logic, which at its most basic level is simple cause and effect. Then our conscious minds begin building and using our own unique storehouse of knowledge. A part of this knowledge, which we call intuition, is stored in our subconscious minds. It is our intuition that allows us to modify our instinctive behavior. One of the most powerful things our subconscious minds do is enable us, without any conscious reasoning, to react as predisposed by our instinct and intuition.

If we want to depend on our subconscious mind to react in a wise and sensible way, we first must focus our conscious minds on a commonsense way of making good decisions. The diagram below presents one concept of what that might be.

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