If You Feel Inner Peace You've Made the Right Decision

That feeling of peace that you have now shows that you have made the right decision. It may not be the right one nor the most logical one according to other people. In fact, it may not even be the best one. However, what is clear is that it is the option that makes you happy, bringing together your values, essences and feelings …

Sigmund Freud used to say that making a decision is like riding a racehorse. The animal would represent our emotional side, instinctive, almost haywire. Then we have the rider – he is the one who holds the reins of reason, and who guides and brakes and directs. So, which of the two wins the battle? In most cases it is our fascinating emotional design which is stronger when we have to make decisions, and that is where hundreds and hundreds of these races will take place every day …

Life is full of choices. In fact, we spend much of our time practicing the art of decision making: coffee or tea, elevator or stairs, to call or not to call, take that train or let it go by … To make a decision can give us the same sensations as if we were about to jump into a void. And so when we really have to take them we need great big doses of courage and responsibility.

Read on to find out more…

The right choice does not exist, just the desire to be happy

Henry James wrote an exceptional story called “The Happy Corner.” In it, he introduced us to Spencer Brydon, a young man who, after having achieved success and fortune in the United States, returned to his native England.
In the solitude of his now empty home, he starts to wonder if he had chosen well and if leaving his roots and his family was the right decision. In the midst of all these doubts, his alter ego suddenly comes to the surface, his “other self”, that shows him, bit by bit, what would have become of him if he hadn’t taken that decision.

The question of whether we have made the right choice or not is something that will always remain with us. Now, as Henry James teaches us in this story, to make a decision we first of all use the heart, but following on close behind we have responsibility. We use our emotions, then our reasoning and, above all, the duty to be the architects of the paths we wish to take.

There are not always right choices or paths with neon lights showing us where the path to happiness is every day. The wisest decision is the one that offers us peace, which goes hand in hand with our conscience and which, in turn, invites us to continue making coherent decisions based on these elements.

The art of making wise decisions from the heart

We already know that when deciding between one option and another, the emotions are like our stars amid the oceans of doubts. It is also good to know that the brain structure that radiates the most light in this process is the amygdala.

The amygdala has hundreds of connections throughout the brain; it is a finely tuned and fascinating structure that acts like a type of watchman, capable of evaluating any stimuli, conscious or unconscious thinking, experience or event. After that analysis, the amygdala issues a judgment, a decision that will later be carefully analyzed by our frontal cortex.
Since we now know that many of our decisions are taken through our emotional channels, we’ll now see how these decisions can be a little wiser, more accurate and responsible.

Keys to decision making

In order to be happy you have to be able to make decisions and go beyond the fear barrier. It’s true that this is something that we sometimes find very difficult, because by deciding to do things we also, at the same time, have to decide to leave many things behind.

• When our heart asks us to step in and then fear appears, what we must do is to rationalize that fear and try to understand it. After feeling this emotion of fear, we now turn to reason, because it is logic and conscious thought that must ask us to be courageous and tear down the walls of our fears.
• When your emotions tell you to take a certain path, ask yourself if you are being realistic. It is a question that you must ask yourself, and no one else. If you think it could be feasible, if it makes you happy and you believe it’s possible, then don’t let anything or anybody stand in your way.
• Accept the possibility of failure. Accept and come to terms with the fact that things may not go well, but at the same time you should also understand that to find the path to happiness one option is not enough. It’s just a door that show you a number of possible paths to take.

The art of being happy is knowing how to decide each day, listening honestly to the voice of our heart, accepting we’ll make mistakes and gradually find our best paths, our paths to inner peace.