The One Skill Needed to Take Control of Your Life

How To Take Control of Your Life

When I was in Basic Training and AIT learning and developing the skills needed to be a successful Combat Medic, our Drill Sergeants and Whiskey Instructors, as they were called, said many things that have stuck with me since, but arguably, the most important thing they said (or yelled) over and over again was. "Make a decision! Any decision is better than no decision!" That phrase has stuck with me all those years, and as they were saying it, I understood the meaning in the sense that in a combat situation, indecisiveness leads to immobilization, which leads to death. That made absolutely perfect sense me, but after I left the military, I was no longer experiencing the highly stressful, simulated combat zone with instructors yelling at me.Yet, the saying stuck.

In the few years after my ETS Date, I carried on with life continuing to be decisive in my thoughts and actions. However, when I started learning about script writing and film making, I gained a much deeper understanding of the implications of that phrase. It goes well beyond taking decisive action to ensure that you and your battle buddies stay alive. While we all make small decisions every day about the little things like what to eat or drink, when it comes to the bigger things, many of us can be indecisive and freeze. When we reach that point, things start happening to us as opposed to us going out and doing things. We become spectators in our own lives because if we don't make those decisions in a timely manner, someone or something will make that decision for us. We lose our agency, and what is life without agency? Meaningless and unfulfilling.

Agency, according to Oxford, is defined as action or intervention, especially such as to produce a particular effect. In order to take control of our lives, we must make decisions and take deliberate actions to attain what we want in life. When we discuss decision making, we usually focus entirely on making good decisions rather than the importance of being decisive. Why is it important to be decisive? We've all heard the saying, "time is money." At some point, spending time deliberating start being counter productive. At the end of the day, it is not our thoughts that ultimately brings about desired outcomes. It is our actions. Even a philosopher must share his or her ideas with others to see anything come to fruition. Luckily, there are things we can do to help us become more decisive:

 

We must realize when we have an overthinking problem. Too often, we spend way to much time thinking about what can go wrong or whether things are good enough. We need to realize that there is no such thing as perfect. Perfection is an illusion. Perfection is fleeting. In reality, constant improvement is the route to success. Come up with something that is good enough, implement it, and continue to improve it over time. We often do not realize the flaws in our ideas until we put them to action. We must spend less time dwelling on the little things that do not matter. Ultimately, it is our deliberate actions that allow us to take control of our lives.