What aspects of your SELF contribute to your decisions? Here are the top 10 (more exist!), in no particular order:

Your emotions

Your morals

Your past experiences

Your psyche

Your peer influences

Your media influences

Your parental influences

Your personality

Your culture, race, ethnicity and spirituality

Your mind/body connection (your ability to control stress, etc.)

Your decisions define for yourself and those around you exactly who you are. (That’s a big deal.)

Each time you ponder a choice (Will I go to the movies with Kristen even though I know it will be past my curfew when I get home? But my parents are always asleep so I won’t tell them…) you check in with almost every single one of those self-aspects listed above. Don’t believe it? Check it out:

Your emotions (I will feel guilty for going, but I will have a great time. The guilt is too overwhelming. I will not go.)

And you may just figure it out based on one part of yourself. Or, you may continue:

Your morals (It would be wrong to lie to my parents.)

Your past experiences (My brother did this once and got away with it, so maybe I can, too. But I always feel bad when I let down my parents.)

Your psyche (This isn’t the way I normally behave. I don’t know why I am having such a difficult time with this decision.)

Your peer influences (Kristen is begging me to go and I really want to hang out with her.)

Your media influences (I am dying to see this movie!! It’s the hottest movie out there.)

Your parental influences (They will be so upset with me if I am not honest.)

Your personality (I like to go with the flow, but this feels like I am stuck.)

Your culture, race, ethnicity and spirituality (I was raised to be honest and fair and to respect myself and others. But I really want to go with Kristen!)

Your mind/body connection (your ability to control stress, etc.) (I will totally stress over this if I go and then I won’t enjoy the movie. Worse, I’ll probably eat junk to make me feel better and then I’ll feel even worse!)

All of these aspects of your self can influence your decision-making process, sometimes you are aware of that influence and sometimes you might not be. Sometimes decisions are easy and you don’t need to go through all the stressful torment. Sometimes decisions are harder and you need to check in with all the different parts of YOU to figure out what is best (what is best is unique to you and will likely feel right). Even when you take the time to check in with all these parts of you, decision-making is not always easy. Life is full of hard choices. The next few sub-posts will help guide you in the process of decision-making to make sure you do the best that you can to make decisions that reflect who you are and where you want to go….