Following from the last article on the skills you need for tertiary education, this week's column focuses on decision-making – another crucial skill you need to 'pack' and take along (especially if you won't be living at home while studying).If you're a typical teenager, your life has largely been decided by your parents or by whoever takes care of you. Somebody else owns where you live, takes care of the house, decides what, when and how the household will eat, handles all major finances and has essentially taken responsibility for all major decisions. Perhaps you got to choose what colour your room would be painted, but someone else initiated the whole redecorating project. Thus, tertiary education may be the first time you have made major decisions about your life: what to study, where to study, where to live, and those will just be the first of many! It's a good idea to know what kind of decision-maker you are. Ask yourself if you give answers like these to the following:
Do you make decisions on impulse?
• "Why not?"
• "What the heck!"
• "Might as well."
Do you go along with what everyone else wants or seems to want?
• "Well, okay, if you think so."
• "Sure, if you want to."
• "Yeah, I'm in."
Do you depend on someone else to make your decisions?
• "What do you think?"
• "What would you do?"
• "What do you think would be best?"
There is an art to making good decisions. A 'good' decision is one which will have productive, healthy consequences for you and your life. A poor decision is one which will have unhealthy, undesirable consequences. Therefore, what constitutes a good or a poor decision to you will often depend on your life situation. For some young people at the end of secondary school, for instance, entering into tertiary education is a good decision. For others, it's a poor decision. Good decisions are made by looking in two directions at once: backward and forward. You look back at past experience and your own past behaviour to see what you've learnt, how things worked out and how you behaved in similar situations before. Then, using that information, you look forward to see what may be the consequences of your decision. Can you live with those consequences or do you have a plan to deal with them? What's your plan for a worst-case scenario?
If you ignore either the backward or forward directions, there will be problems. Failing to look back to past experience means that you don't learn and that you continue to make similar mistakes over and over. People who do this often declare that they are 'free' because they don't 'hold on to the past'. They 'wipe the slate clean' and 'move on'. That's an illusion, because, far from moving on, they usually find themselves caught in a frustrating, repeating cycle. Unless there are some very lucky coincidences to change things, they'll keep winding up in the same place. Those who don't look forward to possible consequences lay themselves open to all sorts of problems. They usually end up in a situation which they didn't want, for which they didn't plan and which they can't handle. They're often aggrieved about life in general because things they don't like keep happening to them. But if the method doesn't change, neither will the result. Their only hope is to be rescued by luck. If you choose not to work on your decision-making in order to make better decisions, then you're choosing to rely on luck and you're also choosing the consequences you don't want. Luck is precious because it's unpredictable and rare. Bad consequences are much more common.