I was twittering on Twitter the other day and I read someone’s tweet that went along the lines of “Don’t beat yourself up for making the wrong choice”. Grrr! For some reason that really quite irritated me – or, to put it another way, I chose to allow it to irritate me!! “Now why was that?”, I asked myself. Hmmmm – taken me a week to think this through.

Let’s look at choices and life. Are there wrong choices? I know there are times when, in hindsight, we can look back and think that we made a wrong choice. When playing a game of cards where we have to choose which card to lay down to win (or lose) a trick we may think after playing the card that we’d made a wrong choice. But did we? Did we really?

My model of the world is quite simple – There are no wrong choices. There is just feedback. (which is taken from a quote of someone I admire who uses it slightly differently and says “there is no failure, just feedback”. Man’s name is Trevor by the way ☺ ) Anyway, back to choices. The way we learn in life is by making choices and decisions. It is the outcome of those choices and decisions that helps us to learn and grow.

Sometimes we have to make snap decisions without having all the facts or information – that’s one place for me that I find quite stressful. However in life we cannot guarantee that we’ll always have the information we need to make a decision. We also need to trust our intuition and instincts. Now, once made, the choice sets in motion a range of other things whereby we may need to make other choices as a result. We cannot always know what will be the result of our choices until they have been made. Once made, there is absolutely no point in regretting it. The choice was made. Circumstances changed as a result, and then we need to deal with the outcomes.

So in this game of cards, you lay your card to try and win the trick but miscalculate. But is that necessarily wrong? My answer to that is no. BUT, you have learned something in terms of how the other person/people play cards and that will help you decide what future cards to lay in the game. So you see, sometimes the choices we make, which may seem ‘wrong’ at the time, actually may lead us to understanding something a little better. And, in a game of cards, give us the edge we need to win the whole game! Life is a bit like that too. We make choices and then deal with the outcomes which help us to grow and develop. Only we can decide really what choices we want to make.

You can decide to ignore this “Thought for the week” or you can choose to allow it to prompt you to think about how you choose. You can choose to allow it to help you view your choices in a different way and ease up on yourself when deciding things. At the end of the day, no choice is wrong, but when you make a choice, stand by it and learn from the outcomes. Don’t ever beat yourself up for your choices. Congratulate yourself on having the courage to deal with the outcomes!