The only way that you can purposefully influence anything in your life is by your decisions. Your decisions empower you to enhance the quality of your life and the lives of your family and friends and to make contributions at work in businesses, organizations, and government. We all develop decision-making habits early in life, and most of us continue to use these habits. Very few individuals learn to make decisions and then practice what they learned to become proficient, which is how most of us learn most other skills. The critical first step to learning to make better decisions is identifying all of your values for a decision. These values identify what you want to achieve by making the decision and should guide all of your effort to solve it. Additional key skills to develop concern how to create better alternatives and how to identify decision opportunities that you want to address to improve your life.

The distinction between decision problems and decision opportunities is very important, but it is not recognized by most decision-makers. Decision problems are decisions that you must face as a result of others’ decisions and/or circumstances beyond your control. Decision opportunities, as I define them, are decisions that you create for yourself. You must reactively solve decision problems, but you can proactively pursue decision opportunities. When a decision problem occurs, it degrades one aspect of your quality of life. Therefore, the purpose of solving a decision problem is to get your quality of life back to where it was before the decision problem occurred. A thought about something that would make your quality of life today better is what stimulates the recognition of the decision opportunity. Pursuing it directly enhances the quality of your life. In addition, it often lowers the chances of certain unwanted decision problems occurring in the future and reduces the extent of the downgrading of your quality of life if they do occur. Guidelines for creating desirable decision opportunities are provided and illustrated with examples.