As you know, we are all about being and becoming more self-sufficient. Recently, we have had someone ask, how do we decide what we need to do? We are starting a three-part series on How to make the best decisions for a self-sufficient lifestyle for your family. We try to do one or two things every day to improve our personal self-sufficiency.

Basically, everything starts with a decision. Today, we will go through some simple steps and general ideas on how to make the best decisions for a self-sufficient lifestyle for your family.

We did a multi-post series sometime back on How to start a self-sufficient lifestyle and How to start a self-sufficient food supply. You may want to check out those posts for more info and ideas as well.

One of the biggest things about being or becoming more self-sufficient is knowing what to start with and how to make a plan.

This may seem very simple but the first and probably most important part of this process is making decisions. You can not really do anything: make a plan, learn new skills, or collect things you may need, until you can decide what those things are.

You have to make decisions every day and about almost everything you do. So knowing how to make a decision first is key to success.

This is true in just about everything in life. If you have business decisions to make, or just what to buy at the grocery store on your way home. Almost everything you do starts with you making a decision.

There are, of course, a few things in life where a decision is not needed. There are times when the decision is already made for you. And, of course, there are times when the decision is or should be obvious. Should I hold my breath until I pass out? That should be obvious, no. Unless there is harmful gas about, then, yes, hold your breath as long as you can. But that really should not be a decision, that is just logical if you want to continue living.

Sometimes, just thinking about things in a logical way, will lead to a decision. If this is the case, go with it. But if you are not sure, there are steps you can use to come up with the best option for you and your family. This does hold true in a self-sufficient lifestyle as well as in other everyday situations.

Of course, there are times that you just want something. If that is the case and it is not going to cause problems and is not going against your principles, then have at it. Sometimes, you just need to make a decision that is fun, just because you want it.

But if you are talking about making the best decisions for your family for a self-sufficient lifestyle, you will want to think things out. You will want to have the best plan and make the very best decisions for that goal.

What is a decision really made of?

It may be a good idea to first note, what a decision actually is.

To some, life is simply a series of choices, good or bad.

This is, in some sense, true. Except that it’s not that simple, because life itself is not that simple. Life can be complicated. This means that the choices the average person makes over their lifetime are just complicated. These choices range from simple survival decisions (Should I eat that mushroom? Or should I give away my last chocolate bar), to difficult moral choices (Should I take a different path and increase personal risk?) Obviously, the one thing that all these decisions have in common are the option of choosing an action and hopefully the outcome. However, because your action choices, and their potential outcomes, vary wildly, no one strategy can cover the process of making those decisions. This is where an understanding of what a decision is becoming more important.

A decision is, of course, the action of deciding something. A person faced with a choice actually makes a choice.

Here is where a “proverb” helps with understanding.

The most basic example of this is the proverbial fork in the road. When facing a fork in the road, you have the choice of going left or going right. You stop for a bit while you think it over. Next, you make a decision to go either left or right. Once the decision has been made you take the path you’ve chosen.

That is straightforward and obvious, right? Well yes and no. To become a more efficient and more sure decision maker, you need to understand all the steps that went into making that so-called simple decision. There are 5 general steps to this process.

The Problem:

First, there was a problem. The path you were walking on was divided into two.

Second, there was the nature of the problem. Because the path was divided, you were forced to go either left or right to reach your destination. You have to decide on a solution to the problem. You can not wait for a solution to present itself.

Action to take:

Third, you had to use your experience, knowledge, skills, and intuition to weigh the options as to what is best for you.

Fourth, you need to make a choice between the options in order to continue.

Fifth, you actually make the decision. That is the actual action on your part. Then just do it.

Finally, you continue moving forward based on that decision.

You can see, that even the simplest of decisions take a number of steps to get there. In many cases, people handle these steps subconsciously, without really being aware of actually doing it. When the decision we are faced with is simple, this “autopilot” method of choice isn’t a problem. However, when a more complicated decision needs to be made, it is not understanding the process that can cause the most problems.

This is the first part of our three-part series on How to Make the Best Decisions for a self-sufficient lifestyle for your family. We hope this talk has been informative and helpful to you. Please stay with us for the second part How to Sharpen Your Decision Making Skills and the third part How to Keep Going When You Made Bad Decisions. It is our goal to give you useful tips so you can start moving toward your own self-sufficient life for you and your family.

Thank you for visiting and please come again for another edition of Out Standing in the Field.