Taking control: Optimize decision-making skill through critical thinking!

Decision-making is a part of the results of functions of your brain which enables you to quickly internalize a matter at hand and figure out the best way to handle it.  You have been wired to make decision, but you have to learn how to develop and utilize this through informal, non-formal and formal education.

How critical thinking can improve the quality of your decision!

Decision –making is the most water-downed ability yet it is a mechanism that could make or break your life.  You make choices after analysing the situation. The most empowering concept of rationale thinking is critical thinking.  It is defined as the art of analysing and evaluating the matter at hand with a view to find the most ideal direction,  thus ensuring that your thought are clearly reasoned out to enable you to identify values, benefits and consequences in any given situation.   Critical thinking is an empowering concept which steers your mind from auto-pilot mode to understanding underlying motives for your thoughts, words and actions.  Let us discuss the benefits of critical thinking as empowering self-development approach:

Self-directedness: This is an ability to shed off undesirable behaviour the does not support your identified goals. What I mean is that often children are socialized to follow what their parents and or guardians desire of their future and may miss the opportunity to find their social and spiritual.  Consider the following self-talk which applies guiding questions to get to ideal decisions:

·        Nobody really knows what I want in life except me. So, I must assess what my parents and other authorities in my life influence my behaviour.

·        I want to be a doctor and anything else should support that burning desire.  I therefore will not engage in a sexual relationship that could possibly bring pressure regarding married before I graduate! 

·        I got divorced, but I can start-over and build my future just the way I want it! I must not react but respond to my real me! Who am I anyway (strengths and weakness)? Why am I here for? How can I find my purpose in this life (where do I start)? What resources do I need?

Self-disciple: Some children go wild when they leave home for college because they feel they were living a restricted life.  Critical thinking would enable you to set ideal morale standards for yourself:

·        I am away from home; and I can now demonstrate to myself that I want to live and achieve my goals.

·        I can now eat what I want but I must improve on what my mother dictated!

·        I need to improve my grooming because it is part of the self-esteem activities that will project my private and public image.  Exercises will enhance my body shape; I will therefore adopt this as part of grooming!

Self-monitoring:  This is critical action for maintaining self-awareness and high level of integrity.  What I speak and do reveal the nature and quality of my thoughts.  So, I will learn concepts that confirm that I am accountable to my words and will adhere to my identified values.

Self-correction: I have in-build effective mechanism called conscience which tells me when I am about to do something wrong.  I will synchronize my inner self and mind to monitor my social ethics and integrity and will make this part of my affirmation!

Your values content (information) becomes a light that illuminate your environment when you practice them.  You came alone in this planet and you are accountable to your own life! Critical thinking enables you to monitor the underlying reasons for your thoughts, and decisions; thus securing well thought choices.

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Taking control: How do you know that you believe in yourself?

Believing in self is an inborn empowering value, which was destroyed through socialization from birth and limited your ability to discover and identify given talents. This was done when your parents prohibited you and instilled fear when you undertook daring stances in your attempt to discover your environment.

Guiding principles to check whether you believe in yourself!

You may think this is not an issue in your life; nonetheless I encourage you to keep an open mind and walk with me to check and verify that you do believe in yourself:

1.   What is your relationship with yourself?

Your answer should show whether you are a positive person who accept self as is.  It also should enable you to identify your personal goals and challenges in meeting them.  The thinking process should recall moments when you stopped from pursuing that which you believed in, because you judged yourself as being over-zealous. You probably closed the door which could be leading to you ideal future.  The antidote for such an attitude is identifying successful people and learning from them.  You must also take a break when you need one.  Learn to listen to your body and nurture it instead of stressing it.

   

2.   Seek optimum lifestyle – Adopt good habits!

Because you have identified your strengths and weaknesses, you must adjust your goals to be achievable. Often people fail to achieve anything because first, they have not identified given talents and build their goals on them. Please note that you have something good, which you are able to do with ease and is meant to sustain you in this life.  Start with discovering what your physical body needs; do the basic.  What emotional issues are you battling with? Are you a happy person? If you harbor anger; deal with it! Seek professional help; anger drive away people and you need people to take upward economic mobility! It would also help if you could recognize yourself in others.  For example, there is someone you know who has a good voice and speaks well and use that gift to swear and sing at local shabin. There is also someone who likes ports, who did not finish college but is a millionaire because is a professional soccer star!  Do not put yourself down and make sure that you listen to criticism objectively.  Do not procrastinate in finding solution to your challenges; it helps to find a mentor who could walk with you to your success!

  

3.   Build a better you!

After finding answers on who you are, make conscious decision to build a better you! This means you identified how your behavior is less than ideal and sometimes could recall your childhood environment.  It is time to engage in shaping yourself according to you and not blame your parents for both inherited and acquired behavior.  Here you must be guided by positive attitude to yourself; love yourself unconditionally! Take care of yourself; grooming is very important to support your self-confidence building decisions. Do things that challenges your mind; there is a life-changing sense of achievement when you get on top of your mountain.  Note your insecurities and ensure that they do not become anchors.  If they curtail your progress towards your goals, seek help! This means you remove excuses so that you maintain your forward momentum.

You are taking control of your life when you do not dwell in anything that could hinder your efforts towards a better life.  It could be that you are a genius trapped in socialization and other societal norms and belief systems that created fear in you.  Step out of the box; life is what you make of it!

Taking control: Why you do not succeed to achieve your goals?

Parents make tentative goals before they have children and continue to anticipate their success throughout their various childhood developmental stages. Children establish their dreams early in life too; but do we all achieve what we aspire for?

Principles of success and hindrances!

Success is not adults’ subjects; some prosperous people charted their lives when they chose careers.  If you are an adult and only now are seeking to build your financial muscles, you could likely engage in frantic trial and error approach because you pursued a wrong academic career.  You are generally experiencing dissatisfaction and struggling financially.  Let us consider the following principles of success and note where you lost your direction:

1.   Identifying your vision through personal strengths.  We all become aware of what subjects we like and pass well especially in primary education. Ideally parents should be aware of this and be in a position to explain possible career for such subjects.  This early charting of one’s career enable one to focus on personal development and seek to gain deeper knowledge of what is required to climb the professional ladder.

Unsuccessful people have no vision and therefore have no pointers of what direction to take.  They engage in trial and error and therefore waste time trying to find career after they completed higher learning program.

2.   Regard time as valuable.  In principle, daily chores must be done as scheduled and leave room for tomorrow’s incidentals. Procrastination further shortens chances to find personal strengths in order that you could engage in continuing adult education to gain knowledge and skills in identified career field.

Unsuccessful people stay longer in denial to realize that they are unable to gained financial success.

3.   Face challenges and seek solutions. Failure to take immediate action denotes creating a situation that could be blamed for being unsuccessful. 

Unsuccessful people like to blame others and shift their responsibility for working on their success.

4.   Every person has a given talent to build a future from.  This therefore says no one except mentally retarded people needs permanent help from others.

If you have not identified your talents it means you have not yet identified your passion which will point to your strengths. This means you are lukewarm about life and therefore you cannot attract any helpful resources. Remember you reap what you sow!

5.   Regard failures as stepping stones to success.  Keep open mind to learn from mistakes.  A mistake is missing a target and becomes a learning experience when you analyze what and how you missed. The key to success is not being judgmental to yourself or anybody; just keep updating yourself with new knowledge and skills!

While it is ideal to identify your talents early in life, it is never too late to get back on your planning board and chart your life.  Being successful starts with your mindset.  Believing in yourself is very important because it energize you to let go of the fear of failure and place you in a favorable position to regard each day as an opportunity to gain momentum towards reaching your goals.

Taking control: Learn to be compassionate and not judgmental!

Learning to be compassionate is one of the first principles of spiritual enlightenment because its root is love. Compassion empowers you to run in a positive lane wherein negativity is banned. It is a state of humanity that complies with the law of love that governs the whole creation.

The principle of compassion defined!

Compassion is a value which enables a person to assume an ideal state of seeking to apply unconditional positive regard to all people even to unlovable ones. Unlovable people are those who are generally unconscious and may not even be aware that they are negatively charged and bring the worse behavior in other people.  Compassion seeks to see the good in other people and always find ways to bring the best self first and in others.  It starts with deep determination to focus on identifying own strengths in order to increase and maintain the positive energy so that it could be the light that illuminate even the darkest environment.  

The values of being compassionate!

The value of being compassionate is ability to attract positivity in your life because you have saturated yourself with so much positive energy that you:

1.    Attract positive resources such as people who could offer you knowledge or skill or connect you with influential people who could speed up your identified goals.

2.    Get ushered in favorable situations that qualify you and position you to overcome any hurdles that could derail or curtails your progress.

3.    Focus on spiritual growth that ensures connectivity with the Higher Source wherein you access deeper wisdom and knowledge of your purpose, which brings personal fulfillment and intrinsic motivation to continue to pursue good.  

How to be compassionate!

You cannot give what you do not have! The first step is to identify if you have a potential to be a compassionate person:

1.    On a scale of 1 to 10 how often do you ‘catch’ yourself describing yourself with negative words? How often do you do the same to other people?

2.    Recall your childhood environment and try to describe it as objectively as possible; writing down happy and unhappy incidents and the people in them.

3.    Recall your attitude towards your teachers in various stages and how you view their inputs in your life and write down short sentences so that you do not get caught in cover-up sentences that confuse you in assessing how you really feel.

4.    Generally, are you introvert or extrovert person? How do people affect you generally?

5.    What is your attitude about the role of people in your life currently?

6.    What is your desire regarding your relationship with other people?

Helpful tips about developing compassionate attitude!

1.    The guiding principles of ideal life are to love your Creator with all your heart and to love others as yourself! If you do not know how, consider finding out who you are and you will learn that your Creator is love and you have potential love because you are made in His likeness!

2.    If mankind is energy, it means the other person is also energy and therefore if you project negative energy you are harming yourself. 

3.    You are what you believe!  If you see yourself as loving, powerful and seeking to empower others into being compassionate, you have found a way of life that honors your Creator whose mission is to not judge you, but love you unconditionally.  The starting point is seeking your true identity as a spiritual being whose Creator is a Spirit and therefore become aware that compassion is a spiritual function and being judgmental in not who you are.

You take control of your life when you stir yourself from the deep sleep of unconsciousness and engage in learning about your true identity.  You cannot become your best self when you do not even know your make-up.  Mankind is a powerful being because he resembles the Creator of the whole universe which you are part of. 

Taking control: Watch out for your psychological attachment!

Psychological attachment is a negative outcome of experiences that become a belief and influence undesirable behavior which includes unhappiness, stinginess, hate of authority and controlling tendencies.  Such beliefs tend to be anchors that could deter you from experiencing positive or full life.

Identifying your psychological attachment!

Attachments are the main cause of your inability to interact or maintain ideal relationships. For you to understand the concept, let us discuss a few examples of situations that challenges you and you are unable to change:

1.    Unhappiness: Often you may blame your hormones if you are a lady and yet there is a deeper emotional baggage from your childhood socialization.  If you were raised by parents who uttered “no” more than “yes” you may unconsciously feel deprived of unconditional love and feel generally confused about loving other people unconditionally.  You have developed a behavior of striving to please someone to earn his/her attention or love.  This will work against you when you exit into adulthood and look for a life partner. Actually the only qualifying person for you would be one who is vulnerable and would give in to your manipulations and controlling habits.

Solution: First identify if you are an unhappy person.  That is, if your happiness is conditional on someone making you have positive feelings.  Unhappy people preempt undesirable situations so that they can maintain their unhappiness. In other words you need a coach that would help you to expect situations that would make you happy.  You must learn to be happy!

2.     Stinginess: This refers to hoarding on what you possess. This is a form of insecurity which says you may never come across this, so keep it and make it last! When children hear lack more than conditions associated with prosperity, they learn to hang on stuff! They get fixated on the lack mode.

3.    Solution: Planet earth was created to be a resource for all living and non-living and mankind is in charge of it all! Again, you must develop a new mentality through coaching and replacing socialization and cultural myths with facts about the abundance of the universe. You must learn to share and to replace poverty mentality with abundance. 

4.    Hate of authority: You can be a hater of authority because you had overly controlling parents.  Do you have subtle dislike or resentment of your parents when they express their opinion; your teacher who demands submission of assignment; your pastor who reminds you to honor your parents; boss who sets production targets? If so, you are classically conditioned to dislike anybody who exercises authority over you.

Solution: You must learn that authority was established with creation and it is meant to establish orderliness and accountability. For an example, your teacher must ensure that you learn and pass well for your own good. He/she is also accountable to meet a set pass rate of the school.  When you understand this, you will learn to love your teacher as someone who is dedicated to assist you to meet your personal goals.

Taking responsibility over your life includes assessing your own behavior and noting lack of control on certain regular incidents.  It is easier when you do this rather than hearing it from another person because you are likely to be defensive.   Try self education on this subject and set a period beyond which you will seek professional help if you cannot loosen your anchors!

Taking control: Ideal period to relinquish parental power over your children!

Relinquishing parental powers over teenager children is a debatable parenting principle that is determined by societal values and norms. It is also influenced by whether the parents are educated and living in urban areas or uneducated and living in rural setting.

What doe education has to do with relinquishing parental power?

In the context of Lesotho which is located at the Southern African region, there are two types of parenting approaches: The first is a traditional one wherein parents never actually relinquish power over their children in the sense that they expect to be part of their major decisions even after getting married. For an example, they approve the number of children and their spacing. Actually a son will not make any decisions that oppose his parents.  

Secondly, there are educated parents living in urban areas who have moved from the traditional way of life. Education changes behavior because it enables a person to be open-minded and question principles behind beliefs and values systems. In this case the central question would be; at what point would you let your children gain experience and live their lives? The guiding principle would be to regard parenting as coaching your children from birth to learn to be adaptable to the fast changing world and be independent and seek the best in life.  They can only achieve that if they do not duplicate their parents’ lives; rather they should improve on what they experienced and use available resources to build their own legacy.

The impact of tight controls on your children!

Tight control tends to produce ‘robot’ children who operate from fear rather than from understanding the rationale for acquiring life skills.  Tight controls also tend to subdue children and suppress their free will to think and follow their hearts; thus depending on adult person to chart the course of their future.  For an example, your son may be a potential engineer and fail to pursue that course because he depended on your unqualified advice. How? By believing in you not because you are an authority in the field, but due to the fear of disappointing you for suggesting career counseling.  Such dependent attitude is harmful because it would encourage such a child to not think outside the box. 

If you want your children to live like you, it means you are not empowering them because life itself is dynamic and ideal change is growth.  It is normal to let your children build on whatever informal education you exposed them to and formal one they undertook to experience upward economic mobility. Another danger of tight control over your children is depriving them opportunity to learn from their mistakes. A mistake is an opportunity to review and improve your original motives and strategies.

Ideal period to relinquish control over your teenage children is when they have been empowered to take responsibility of their actions.  It is being there to offer support to heal from emotional wounds and pick themselves up to start over; never letting go of what they believe in. When parenting becomes overwhelming, it does not build an ideal attitude but it suffocates children to the point of non-growth.  It is therefore ideal to coach your children and not run their live to an extent that they do not feel responsible for their failures.

Taking control: Watch out how hallow effect affect your relationships decisions!

A relationship is a result of merging social and spiritual interests and responding positively to ensuing attraction. It is actively building a list of things you like about a person and weighing the importance of those that do not conform to your values.

How to overcome the hallow effect!

The hallow effect is the positive first impression impact which overshadows the person’s blemishes.  It is a powerful feeling of liking a person and renders your judgment skewed because you have already been won over by a particular action or behavior.  In jobs interviews, it is one element that human resources experts watch and would assist others in a panel to avoid because it would affect how they assess knowledge and skills of all interviewees objectively.  In relationships, we tend to ignore this phenomenon and fail to assess our own emotional state when we meet people who have powerful charisma.  We even disregard our gut feelings about certain cues that point to subtle negative blemishes.  You could overcome the hallow effect by considering the following pointers:

1.    Are you vulnerable? In order to evaluate your own emotional state, you have to watch how you preempt response to your questions.  For example, if you are a lady and you ask this physically attractive man what he is doing for a living and you already have potential answers, you are under a hallow effect!  In other words you will not listen objectively and therefore fail to pick cues about overstated successes or gaps on personal background.

2.    Are you under pressure to meet your personal goals? Often we set goals like these: I want to get married before I am thirty and I want to have two children by age forty five!  It is good to have goals; however when you are approaching the set dates you become anxious and desperate.  A desperate woman will attract a desperate man! I am sure this is not what you would like.  The fact is that, you have set yourself up for a disaster! You will cancel guiding principles of long-term relationships in order to validate this person whom you are attracted to.

3.    Is spirituality key and qualifying criterion? When you are emotionally vulnerable, issues of spirituality are first to be removed from the list of qualifying factors because your emotional needs have been won over! You believe a lie that when you win this man over; your love will make him give in to your spiritual needs also.  This is a vital mistake! Issues of spirituality are critical and must be agreed upon because they will affect your offspring and your parenting styles!

Marriage binds two individuals under the spiritual blood covenant.  When a couple does not worship together, the relationship develops cracks which gradually create serious communication gaps.  It follows therefore that spirituality should be key and a deciding factor to tie the knot.  You take control of your life when you are spiritually clear because that would dictate your lifestyle.  Should your spirituality be compromised because your flesh needs have been met? This is a matter that should be devoid of a hallow effect!

Taking control: Does financial challenges impact on your relationship!

The subject of wealth and relationship raise varying degree of disagreement across social groups in urbanized societies.  It is believed that it is an important resource that enables us to access things that contribute to our needs, wants and happiness.

Why money matters in relationships!

Ladies! Have you ever evaluated your feelings towards your partner when financial barometer hit zero?  I am referring to ladies because it seems natural for man to feel down and powerless when they are not able to provide for needs and wants! It is ladies role therefore to normalize men’s lives by not expressing any lack.  We have learnt early in life that money enable us to get things that we aspire for and was the motivating factor to learn and follow particular careers.  Its absence is likely to matter because parents (especially mothers) express their expectations of financial success as they persuade their daughters to seek affluent suitors.  Many young ladies therefore frequent particular places where the cream of the society buys and dines.  Is this proactive approach bad? Not exactly! This is your personal preference which only you can honestly answer! Nonetheless, if this criterion was a deciding factor, it will significantly affect your affection when financial challenges set in.

The safe route on issues of wealth and relationships!

The safe route is one where you empower yourself as an individual to create your own wealth so that it would not be a deciding factor when you seek a life partner.  In other words ladies, do not seek your happiness outside you!  Have your own success goals and pursue them before tying the knot so that money will not be your deciding factor.  Anytime you look for someone to complete you in a relationship, you are setting yourself up for disappointment! The ideal route is to find someone who is whole and is looking for a whole person like you to share time and other resources with.

The safe route is one in which you spend your money wisely; that is, safe more than you spend!  Money affects relationships because of the following:

1.   Sharing accounts is ideal and ensures transparency; nonetheless, it restricts and forces you to compromise on its ability to avail things you like especially when your partners has a controlling behavior.

2.   One party is likely to safe at the expense of the other.  For an example, your partner may buy less often but spend more than you.  Again there are a few men who would spend on kitchenware, yet would enjoy the luxurious atmosphere of adequately accessorized kitchen.

3.   Whether or not you marry in community of property, it is unlikely to share expenses equally.  For an example, long-term expenses like insurance, house mortgage or car loan; tend to raise concerns that could lead to arguments.  If your partner convinced you to sell your car, it would gradually limit your movement to work and home only.  He will be the one picking up mid-month groceries, and you will become a home person who cooks and do all chores because he will have excuses of not doing his agreed roles. Think about it!

You would be taking control of your life if you ensure that things you like that money buys remain as they are.  Better express your needs and wants than develop resentment when your toys are regarded as unnecessary.  In other words, do not demand anybody to change for you, so that you can live a fulfilling life with this particular person as he is.  Living a lie will catch up with you! Besides, are you willing to change who you are and what you like for another person?