Your decision making - who controls it, you or your story?
Enough has been said about the things to keep in mind when making decisions. However, here is what we want to focus on. Every single time you decide, there's a paradigm that you operate in. There's something that you insist about your style of leadership, or your style of decision-making; on the basis of which you decide.
True, most of your decisions give you great results. True, most of your decisions are driven by a vision. However, most of these results are only incremental. Most of these results are only progressive, but no breakthroughs!
Consider everything you do, comes from something called the core context effect. The core context is a certain environmental factor, an experience, or an incident which may have occurred in an individual’s life, early on, and then caused a significant influence on their life. It usually manifests as a repetitive effect and perception.
For instance, we have all seen people who are conservative in their approach, or others who are adventurous in their approach to decision making. However, each of these approaches, or even others, comes from a key life-experience. It can either cause conditioning or rebellion, but that approach then drives this person’s life. Let’s look at this in detail with the help of an example.
1. A child fails in an exam and is humiliated in front of the class. Now this induces a feeling of pain in their mind and makes them either lose interest in studies, or maybe create a sense of purpose. In either case, this is a story that has occurred in this child’s mind.
2. This pain now, drives a sense of purpose like – Oh I have to be a good student, so that the teacher praises me! or Oh, I don’t care, the teacher doesn’t understand me anyway! The objective of this sense of purpose is to avoid the pain of the humiliation they felt.
3. Now throughout their life, this person will be driven by this opposite (good performance in the class). This opposite becomes their purpose in life and guides them even when they grow up.
4. So a man or a woman with a purpose to perform chooses subjects that lead to others acknowledging their accomplishments, they accordingly choose related jobs, and then the way they work, their lifestyle, and every single decision they make in their lives.
5. Every decision that they take, they take from a place of avoiding humiliation (avoiding the pain), or in order to gain validation from others (the opposite they created).
This incident now becomes their core context and controls all their decision making, and that is where we started from.
This article is nothing but an invitation for you to examine what drives your decision-making, your real self? Or a story you created?