The amount of time we spend seeking happiness in the future is mind boggling. We spend exorbitant volumes of time doing things that will supposedly make us happy at some future date.

• We educate ourselves to attain a better career.
• We work long hours to have more money.
• We exercise our minds and bodies for greater strength and intelligence.

We improve for the sake of improving that somewhere, at some distant point down the beaten road we’ll find happiness.

All the while we’re chasing happiness, we don’t realize the fatal, vicious circle we place ourselves in. We’ve habituated ourselves into placing our happiness in the future. We’ve conditioned ourselves into allowing happiness after some level of achievement, that never comes.

We fail to realize a fatal flaw in our logic: what matters most is how you feel. Now.
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If you think about it, your decisions are the only things you are truly accountable for in your life. Everything you say or do is a result of a decision you have made.

In order to improve the quality and confidence you have in the decisions you make, as well as developing more trust in the decisions others make, consider the impact your emotions, vision and needs have on your decision making process.

Manage Your Emotions

Decision making is an emotional event. Emotions bog you down and cloud your ability to make good decisions. Medical science has shown that we make decisions emotionally, not rationally. The data behind this theory points to a small, almond-shaped part of the brain called the amygdala.

The amygdala receives the information before it is passed on to the cognitive part of your brain. The amygdala is primarily responsible for controlling our “flight vs. fight” responses.

Its purpose is to help us react quickly, without really thinking through the situation. This is good if you are confronted by a hungry tiger, but not so good if you are faced with deciding which job offer to take or any other life-changing event.

Based on this theory, science also suggests that 78% of what we think is wrong. Therefore, controlling your emotions and changing how you think is a big contributor to making better decisions. To do this, you must work on your emotional state. If you sometimes struggle with controlling your emotions, try these ideas:
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Discipline is freedom. You may disagree with this statement, and if you do you are certainly not alone. For many people discipline is a dirty word that is equated with the absence of freedom. In fact the opposite is true. As Stephen R. Covey once wrote, “the undisciplined are slaves to moods, appetites and passions”. And in the longer term, the undisciplined lack the freedom that comes with possessing particular skills and abilities - e.g. to play a musical instrument or speak a foreign language.

Self-discipline involves acting according to what you think instead of how you feel in the moment. Often it involves sacrificing the pleasure and thrill of the moment for what matters most in life. Therefore it is self-discipline that drives you to:

• Work on an idea or project after the initial rush of enthusiasm has faded away
• Go to the gym when all you want to do is lie on the couch and watch TV
• Wake early to work on yourself
• Say “no” when tempted to break your diet
• Only check your email a few of times per day at particular times

In the past self-discipline has been a weakness of mine, and as a result today I find myself lacking the ability to do a number of things which I would like - e.g. to play the guitar. But I have improved, and I can say that it is self-discipline that got me out of bed this morning at 5am to run and then write this article. Believe me, I would love to be curled up in bed right now, but this desire is subordinated by my inner sense of purpose.

If you struggle with self-discipline, the good news is that it can be developed. For example, it is only in the past two years that I have trained myself to wake early. The following are what I have found to be the five traits of self-discipline:
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“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

We all know that true motivation stems from being passionate about what you’re doing. But there will still be times when your motivation will wax and wane. If there is one way to “hack” your success, remaining consistently motivated would have the biggest impact. A highly motivated person is likely to take action consistently. Without action, there are no results. Duh.

Some days we will inevitably feel more inspired than others. Especially when we’re not getting the results we want, or things are taking longer than we expected.

Here are some reasons our motivation tends to fluctuate:

• We’ve started to do what we love for a living (our passion has become work). We associate all the negative connotations we previously had with dispassionate work.
• We feel since we’re doing what we love as work, it’s become a must, rather than a want.
• The pressure of needing to produce has stifled our creativity. We start to avoid doing what we love.
• We’ve lost sight of the reasons we started our goals in the first place. We’ve become our own taskmasters and have lost touch with our original inspiration.

If we don’t exercise, our muscles will atrophy. In the same way, if we don’t regularly replenish the source of our inspiration, it too will begin to fade. The cure for this common ailment is to regularly regroup and remember why we started in the first place. We need a place we can refer back to, to cultivate our inspiration.
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