Week 17 · Lesson 1
Decision Making and Emotional Awareness
Week 17 of 23 · Decision Making and Emotional Awareness
What is the last decision you made that you cannot explain?
Something you did that made no sense the next morning. Not a big philosophical thing. A regular one. Sent a message you should not have sent. Went somewhere you knew better than to go. Said yes to something you did not want.
You could not explain it after. That is worth understanding, because you are going to be in that same spot again.
Key ConceptYou Do Not Make Decisions, You Make Them Out of a State
The same person makes different decisions depending on what is running in them at the time.
Tired makes decisions. Hungry makes decisions. Embarrassed makes decisions. Lonely at eleven at night makes decisions that the same man would never make at two in the afternoon.
Nobody teaches this, so people think a bad decision means something about their character. Usually it means something about their state.
Before you ask what should I do, ask what am I right now. The second question decides the first one more than you know.
Journal Question
Take the decision you could not explain. Write what state you were in when you made it. Tired, hungry, embarrassed, alone, angry, high, needing money that day. Be exact.
Teaching PointFour States That Cost the Most
Nothing wrecks judgment faster and nobody counts it. When you have not slept, everything feels more urgent and every option looks worse, and both of those are lies your body is telling you.
This one is behind more damage than anger is. Somebody made you look a certain way in front of people, and now the decision is not about the situation, it is about the feeling. And embarrassed wants speed.
Hours with nothing in them, everybody else somewhere, and whatever you have been outrunning catches up. Almost nothing good gets decided between eleven and three.
When something has to be solved by tonight, your options collapse to whatever is fastest. A man with one week of room and a man with none are looking at completely different menus.
Activity
Four states. Write which one is most dangerous for you, and write the rule you are going to have for it. Something simple. No decisions after eleven. No answering that when I am tired. Write the actual rule.
ScenarioThe Same Question, Two Times of Day
Somebody calls you at two in the afternoon with something. You have eaten, you slept alright, nothing happened yet that day. You hear the whole thing and you can see the holes in it, and it is easy to say you are good.
Same person, same offer, eleven at night. You have been up since six, something happened earlier that you are still hot about, and you are by yourself.
The offer did not change. You did.
And afterward, everybody including you will talk about it like it was a decision about the offer. It was not. It was a decision about eleven at night.
Spiritual Takeaway
He was crushed, He said so out loud, and He still chose
The night before He was killed, Jesus went to a garden with His closest friends and told them plainly that His soul was crushed to the point of death. Those are His words. He did not perform strength for them.
Then He went a little further and got on the ground and asked God if there was any other way. He asked three times. Luke says His sweat was like drops of blood.
That is the Son of God, asking to be let out of it. And nobody in the story treats that as weakness.
Then He said the sentence that decided everything. Not my will, but yours.
Look at the order. He felt all of it first. He said it out loud to people. He took it to God honestly instead of pretending He was fine. And then He chose.
That is what emotional awareness actually is, and it is the opposite of what most people were taught. It is not not feeling it. It is feeling all of it, naming it, and then choosing anyway with your eyes open.
James 1:19 says be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to get angry. Slow is the whole instruction. Everything in your life that went wrong went fast.
Pick your rule and write it somewhere you will see it. Then the first time your state is off and a decision shows up, put it on tomorrow. One time. Just to prove that tomorrow exists.
Take it one week at a time.
Defining Narratives · Week 17 Lesson