Life is full of decisions. We make decisions all the time and most of these are subconscious and made with little thought. In fact if you had to stop and think about every little thing you did, you'd go nuts. Practice and habit have a lot to do with it. You get up in the morning and fall into a routine - the automatic pilot takes over and you glide along doing ordinary things while your mind is charging along in many other directions.

But there are also many situations that demand a bit more thought; sometimes we make the wrong choice, while at others things work out perfectly. After a while, or to put in another way, as you gain experience (i.e. grow older) you can find a pattern emerging.

Similar situations repeat themselves and the choices you make are similar - and those you remember are the ones that went wrong. And the decision taking moment was usually without much thought and perhaps implied less effort than if you had taken the difficult choice. Breaking the pattern can be a good thing.

You will find examples of this at work, at home, in relationships, when taking risks, in matters of the heart - and more critically at those crossroads in life.

A decision moment implies there is a choice. (And this always means a risk - what will vary is the degree of risk.) Always a choice, always more than one and even if that other one is doing nothing, it is still a decision based on a choice. If there wasn't it wouldn't be a decision, just a fact of life. Just like problems. For something to be a problem there has to be a solution - even if it is not the one you want - if there isn't a solution, it is not a problem. It just is. Decisions work the same way.

All decisions have consequences, and this has a lot to do with analyzing beforehand and with follow-through. You decide to marry and so you pop the question. You're accepted. The follow-through is all important, for both of you. There'll be good times, bad times and down right awful moments. The follow-through is what makes the difference. An easy right could mean breaking up (a decision in itself) - a hard left making it work. And if you are true to the beginning, the whys and wherefores, the end will be a destination and the journey will be the reward.

A rule of thumb for making decisions (and just to make it more interesting this means it doesn't always work but it does mean life should never be boring) is to go for the tough choice, the hard left; the other choice, the easy right, will give you back as much as you put into it or worse. A simple example - home grown as in I own it. At one time I was rather fond of a drink or three. The easy decision was "have another", which I did with a lot of dedication and continuity. And then one day I decided to take a hard left. That moment was the tough one, the continuity was demanding, but the result: the correct one.

So what do you think?

A hard left or an easy right?