Questions to Ask Yourself On Making Tough Life Decisions

I think we can all agree that life can be a real b*tch at times, as it puts us in situations that require us to make difficult decisions – decisions that, no matter what, would entail heartache, headache, or both. Some of them require a true sacrifice, while others involve big risks.

To help you deal with such trying moments in your life, here are four questions you could and should ask yourself before making the final decision. I hope at the end of the list, you will find the answer that is already in your heart and make the right and best choice. So here we go:

1. “What does my heart say?”

Listen to your heart. Breathe in, breathe out, and listen. If it doesn’t work, try a few more times. Close your eyes, breathe in, breathe out, and listen… Don’t focus on the big mess of thoughts in your head right now. Focus on what your gut feeling tells you. Find that answer and hold on to it.

Always trust your instinct. I’m not saying that your parents’ or your friends’ advice and suggestions are bad for you – and we should always be appreciative of the love and concern from our loved ones, no matter how much they may bug us – but at the end of the day, it is you who knows yourself best.

You are the one who truly understand what you want and what you do not want. Deep down, you know what’s best for yourself.

This is your life. You must be its dictator. Don’t let someone else do your thinking and soul searching for you. The responsibility to seek the truth inside your heart lies in your hands. Don’t let other people’s guesses about your life, or your future, sway or mislead you. Use your own intuition.

It is not always easy to listen to your heart, and it works differently for different people. For some, the best way to do so is to go out for a quiet walk alone; the peace helps them sieve out the more significant things in their minds. For others, running or hitting the gym, and experiencing the pain and the weakening of the physical body, helps to clear up their heads. (This is why many athletes are such clear-headed, focused and determined people.) In any way, always listen to your heart.

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2. “What am I afraid of?”

Difficult decisions come with high stakes. When there is much to gain, there is much to lose. Ask yourself: What am I afraid of losing? Is it money? Love? Reputation? Dignity? Popularity?

Or is it because you’re afraid of disappointment, to lose hope in yourself if you fail? Sometimes we are afraid of making big decisions that involve huge changes in our lives because we fear that if we do fail, we might not be able to pick ourselves up again.

To counter this fear, you need to accept that we all fall from grace from time to time. Know that no one is invincible, or immune to a little misstep here and there, and occasionally, a huge one. We are all humans, not gods. Well, even angels and gods can fall from power.

And yet, as ordinary people, each of us possesses a special gift: the resilience of the human spirit – the ability to bounce back each time we fall. Fall down seven times; stand up eight. When life knocks you down, stand back up and keep trying.

Sometimes, we don’t wish to be the one making the decision also because we are afraid that if we were to be wrong, the responsibility of it all falls solely on us. There is no one else to blame, no one else to point the finger at. However, you should also realize that everyone makes mistake.

No one is perfect, or 100% right all the time. Yes, there would be a price to pay if you fail, but then again, you would also gain something in return: a lesson. Allow yourself to make mistakes. Think of it as meant to be. Be determined to get something out of the decision and the experience that follows, whether you succeed or fail, rise or fall.

A Japanese proverb reads: “Anzuru yori umu ga yasushi.” Its literal meaning is that giving birth to a baby is easier than worrying about it. What it serves to explain is that the fear you experience is probably greater than the danger itself. Your attempt is likely to be easier than expected. So if you are afraid, then do it afraid. Trust me, courage will follow.

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3. “Who/what am I doing this for?”

You have to figure this out right from the start. This is what will anchor you during the fight and the struggle following the moment the decision is made. This is what you will go back to, again and again, whenever you feel discouraged, disappointed or hopeless.

Is it just for passion? Is it also for money, or success? Is there something else? Often, our bigger goals are combined with other small or hidden goals, which we fail to perceive or choose to ignore. Never let yourself be denied of the truth that is already inside you.

One day the suppressed truth will pop up when you least expect it and tell you that everything you’ve worked for is done on the basis of a lie you tell yourself. So be honest with yourself. Know who you are and what you want. Take this as a learning process to get to know yourself better as a person.

When you know what you want, make it your goal. Focus your mind on it, and be happy about it. Remember: Positive emotions will put positive energies towards your goal. This positivity will make your journey towards achieving this goal smoother, as it will attract other good things along the way.

The law of attraction can work in many mysterious ways. Make a conscious effort to stop worrying. Think about the good things, not the worst-case scenarios.

You don’t always need to take great leaps of faith. Sometimes, it’s the baby steps that matter. Take one step at a time; take each day as it comes. There is no shortcut to success. If you want it, you’re going to have to work for it. But always keep in mind: Enjoy life, not endure it.

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4. “If I don’t do this now, will I regret in the future?”

Yes, regrets. We all hate regrets because regret makes us feel empty, like something is amiss in our life. Regret makes us feel like we have done something that we shouldn’t have, or we haven’t done something that we should have. Regret makes you wish that you could turn back time, so there’s a second chance for you to make things right.

Regret can be addictive, because it puts us in a cycle in which we imagine the could-haves, and then become disappointed upon realizing the impossibility of them becoming real. To relieve ourselves of the pain, we go back to imagining again because then, in our minds, we feel powerful and in control once more.

For every decision you make, there is an opportunity cost. Simply put, in life, you win some; you lose some. You can’t have everything. This especially applies to time. You do not have all the time in the world. Life is short. I say this because life is unpredictable; one day you are here and the next you could be gone.

Well, the truth is, we don’t have full control over everything, even if we’d like to think that we do. Lost chances can keep us up all night because they prove that things can come and go without our approval, or without us being at all prepared for their departure. An opportunity does not need your permission before slipping right through your fingers.

When you choose to stay in your comfort zone instead of stepping out of it, you might miss out on an opportunity that will not come by a second time in your life. In the worst of scenarios, regret leads us to hate ourselves. Our lack of courage and prudence makes us feel so small and so incapable of achieving something bigger than our present self.

Regret is a powerful emotion that can topple even the most spirited person. Do not let regret into your life. Let the could-haves be. What is in the past is exactly that, in the past. It cannot be changed.

At the end of the day, we all want to be winners in life. We want to know that we have made the right decisions. Success is a matter of perception, just as happiness is. They are both very subjective. Keep in mind that no decision is purely good, or bad. No matter what decision you make in the end, believe that it is your best choice. Choose to be positive and confident about it.

In ending, I’ll leave you with a quote from Paulo Coelho:

“When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.”

 Listen to your heart. Be bold. Set a goal. Take a chance.

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How To Fall In Love With Someone Who’s Been In Love Before

You have your first relationship, and then you have your first relationship. The one where you finally figure out, beyond all reasonable doubt or concern, what it’s like to be in love. The one where the word “forever”—however impractical it may be—doesn’t seem so far-fetched anymore; the one where the phrase “I love you” finally sounds right rolling off your tongue; the one that sad Lana Del Rey songs will always be able to describe exactly. It could have happened in high school or college or even after, but it’s a time of innocence and beauty and discovery that can never be captured again. It’s like a dream, but like all dreams, you eventually wake up.

You go to different colleges, your paths go different ways, one of you has to break it off. But how can things ever be the same again? How can you ever not feel attracted to that person? Will you ever find somebody as good as them? Is it all downhill from here?

Then you take a walk in the real world and find out that there are still people who can give you things you’ve never had and make you feel ways you’ve never felt. After some false alarms and missteps, you finally do meet somebody else, often in the most unexpected of ways, and you find yourself swept up in this spontaneous and amazing process of falling in love all over again.

It’s so different from your first but the patterns are the same: there’s the first time you stay up all night talking, the first (unbelievably cute) time you spend the night together, the first time you realize the other person’s just as much of a weirdo as you. You feel like this second person, this second love, is so many things that the old person was not. They are another step forward, a progression in life.

But then you grow closer, and for many of us, a little hard seed of insecurity starts to form. It forms and it grows heavier each time you see a blissful-looking picture of them and their ex on Facebook; it grows each time they get a text or message from their ex, however innocuous it may be. The closer you get to them, the more you see the echo of their first love still bouncing around in their life, barely audible but very present.

And this feeling doesn’t go away. You realize that somebody has already landed and left a flag on this person’s heart. You start to feel that this person and their ex shared a bond that you two will never have. And against your will, against your happiness, you start to put their ex on a pedestal, thinking they’re more beautiful or smart or talented than you are.

If you’re crazy and insecure like me, you start to wonder why in hell this person is dating you. That if they had the chance, and the circumstances were right, they would just go back to their ex. And you keep thinking, and you keep thinking, and you start to feel sorry for who you are.

This is where it all falls to shit—but what you don’t realize is that you are in a relationship precisely because of who you are. You’ don’t have whatever made their ex so special, and you never will; you have what makes you special. If you feed this insecurity, your relationship will develop a cancer, one of the most terminal kinds: a lack of full-on acceptance.

Because if you want to truly love someone, you need to accept them unconditionally. That’s not just their present self; that’s their past as well. You need to accept that they fell in love with somebody else once, and no matter what they tell you about them to make you feel better, there had to have been something special and awesome about their ex to make them feel that way.

But their standards are not your standards. No matter how much worse you think you are, this person is dating you for a reason. You’re not worse, you’re not even better—you’re what they need right now.

Putting their ex down in your mind is to lie to yourself; putting their ex on a pedestal is to do a disservice to yourself. You’re you, and the only thing you can do is to work on being the best “you” you can possibly be. And if you feel you’re not up to par, then do something about it. But trust me: 99% of the time, by just being that original person they fell in love with, you are.

You’ve been given an opportunity, a beautiful opportunity to love somebody. To take care of them and make them feel good and give them that special brand of happiness that only you can provide. Yeah, they can still love their ex as a friend—you might be lying if you didn’t think that about your first true love too. But if you think that they’re shorting you, and all objective signs point to it not being that way, then you’re being as unfair to them as you are to yourself.

That’s the mistake I made. I could never accept that my second girlfriend would like me as much as her seemingly spectacular ex-boyfriend. By the time I realized how stupid and insecure I was being, my constant need to be reassured had driven her away. She meant more to me than anything, and by the time I finally accepted that she—at one point—had felt the same way, I had lost her forever.

Don’t make the same mistake as me. This applies not just to second loves; it’s for anyone who’s falling in love with someone who’s been in love before. Never do yourself the disservice of comparing yourself to their exes. You are being loved for a reason—for being you.

Newton said that matter was never created or destroyed in this universe; it stays at a constant. But for some reason, when you add two people that are in love together, you get…something more. A force bigger than the both of them, something that makes life feel more real, more special, more…worth it.

You’ll never be able to truly love someone and experience that type of beauty unless you fully accept them, and that’s everything about them: their past, present and future. I say the future because after you, there will be someone else. Somebody else they’ll stay up all night talking to, somebody else they’ll sleep with for the first time, somebody else that they’ll one day figure out is just as much of a weirdo as them. Somebody else who might one day feel the same insecurities you’re feeling now about you. And when that time comes, the best thing you can do as a human being is to be respectful and never try to make their future lover feel like that.

Relationships aren’t a property game. It’s not a question of owning each other. It’s a thing of passing through someone’s life, loving them, cuddling with them, laughing with them, sharing everything with them from your favorite movies to the same bed at night. And, when it’s all over, it’s about being their friend and accepting whoever will have the privilege of coming after you.If you can let your ego die and accept all of that, then you will have achieved an enlightenment of love that many people will never get to experience. I know it’s hard, but it’s worth it. You are not going to be and you never were their only love. But what you are, is their lover right now, and right now, that’s all that matters.

 

 

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2013/how-to-fall-in-love-with-someone-whos-been-in-love-before/