Making Decisions

There are a lot of decisions you have to make if you want to be independent. That means you have to think about and explore a lot of ideas -- things like where to live, whether or not to live with someone else, whether or not your job can support you. It’s easy to take this stuff for granted when you’re growing up and your parents take care of things. But becoming independent means you have to start making decisions about these things. So you have to start learning skills for good decision-making. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

But how do you learn to make good decisions? There are lots of ways to make decisions:

• You can guess and hope you are right (not good).
• You can ask someone else and then do what they say (Now, why would you want to do that?).
• You can ask for advice from a bunch of different people and then try to pick the answer that sounds right (getting a little better).
• You can talk it over with someone you trust (good idea).
• You can practice with decisions that aren’t too important so you can start to feel more confident (great idea).
• You can talk it over with someone, list the ideas that sound the best, do some role playing, then pick the best solution based on your information gathering (okay, this sounds excellent).
• You can just sit there and let the world pass you by and let others make all the decisions for you (if you picked this answer, we have some serious work ahead of us).