How a vision and small decisions can change your life

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Keeping your life on course.

Lifestyle Design is all about looking forward and making progress toward a goal or vision. As I look back over my life, I see so many times when I lost my way. At the time, I didn’t have a guiding vision and made decisions based upon whatever seemed important at the time. Mostly those were small decisions that didn’t seem important one way or another at the time. And the judgment I used to make those decisions was haphazard. It wasn’t grounded in a long term plan because I didn’t have a long term plan. I was steering my life on a whim.

Of course, that is the judgment of today when the consequences of not having a plan are day to day obstacles for the lifestyle I want to live. These days I have a vision. Today I know the value of making those small decisions in the framework of the perfect day I want to have. You can’t change the past. I was making the best decisions I knew how to make and no one along the way had ever made me understand that I needed a vision for my life.

Better Late than Never

My life would be different today, if I learned this lesson earlier. At least I know it now. My present situation is what it is. I can’t change it. What I can change it the future and I change it by making one small decision at a time. Each of those decisions, however, needs to be guided by a vision for my life and the lifestyle that I choose to make mine.

If you don’t have a plan for your life, you can’t make the right small decisions. You will overvalue the short term benefits and fail to appreciate the long term consequences. Without the vision of a healthy, fit body in your future, the decision to have a doughnut with your morning coffee seems unimportant.

“Why not.” you think. “It’s only one doughnut. It won’t make any difference.”

It’s easy for the occasional doughnut to become a pattern and make you fat. And you either accept your new bulk as normal or make a serious effort to lose weight and then drift back to the pattern and have another doughnut. Without the vision in your mind of the lifestyle you want to live, your life will go out of control and you will waste time and resources on emergency programs to attempt to fix the problem that result. This is why diets don’t work. They are temporary detours.

Now I have a compass.

I’ve been a slow learner in life and spent many years drifting without a vision. Now, I’m committed to setting my course and sticking to it by rejecting short term decisions that take me away from my goal. Even in retirement, I don’t intend to lose focus. There is still time to make things happen.

Maybe you learned this lesson early on and kept your life on course. Or maybe you changed your vision and set a hew course. Or maybe you are like me and deciding to stop drifting and take control of your life with both the large and small decisions. Are you having success?