Believing we have a sense of purpose in life is the foundation of developing our instincts and making decisions in the moment. Most importantly, the thing to remember In order for us to trust our instincts and make decisions in the moment is we can’t be in turmoil and confusion, or have unresolved issues that mask pain. There can be a lot of work to do on ourselves before we get to the point of making decisions based on our instincts. In essence, we have to be disciplined to not be focused on the past or the future. Neither can we rehearse what we are going to do or say. Our minds have to be calm and relaxed. There is a time and a place to analyze things and a time and a place to rely on our basic instincts. In order to make decisions based on our basic instincts we have to trust and believe in ourselves.
Developing our instinctual decision making process and just being present in the moment is an experience we feel, it cannot be experienced from an analytical frame of mind. Analyzing makes it impossible to experience making decisions based on our gut feeling or getting to a place of feeling and compassion in order to make an instinctual decision. The saying from Nike “just does it “is really appropriate saying to remember when trying to respond and talk from the heart. In order to allow ourselves to just feel we cannot rehearse what we are going to say, nor can we worry what other people’s response is going to be. This is also another way for our warmth and inner personality to shine through.
Making decisions based on our instincts is very effective when perhaps we don’t know the answer. We can get so used to having lists and being prepared for things however, we lose sight of acting in the moment and being spontaneous. This kind of logic is responsible for us being in a speeded up frame of mind and we end up making the wrong decision since we are stressed out and out of tune with ourselves. When we work on making spontaneous decisions, in time we learn that there is an intelligent flow under the surface that we have to re-connect with. We discover that the opposite is true; we think more clearly and are more happy and productive in the moment. The harder we work on letting go of our analytical thinking, the more room we have for being spontaneous and experiencing our basic instincts. The work on staying in the moment actually produces another more intelligent way to make decisions. .
The researchers -- led by UCL psychologist Dr. Li Zhao ping -- recruited 10 volunteers for their study. The participants were shown a computer screen with more than 650 identical symbols -- including one upside-down version of the symbol -- and asked to identify on which side of the screen the inverted symbol appeared. Li and colleagues found that when the participants were given a fraction of a second to look at the screen, they gave the correct answer 95 percent of the time. However, when the subjects were given longer than a second to examine the screen, they were only 70 percent accurate.
According to Richard Carlson the author who wrote the book Slowing Down to the Speed of Life, making decisions based on staying in the moment has two basic advantages, the first one is it allows us to slow down to the moment and attend to what is happening in the here and now. This allows us to enjoy our lives no matter what. The second advantage is it puts our most intelligent thinking to work on issues that we have no immediate answer for. Like I said earlier in this article, the only way to experience this is to actually work on these issues. In time we internalize and make decisions in the moment automatically. This is a result of consciously working on this first. It becomes automatic in time. Comments made to this article on this blog are confidential.
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