Liberty – Right to change your decision

Body Bruises – When we are hurt in our bodies, like bruises, nicks and cuts – we take care of those injuries whether with home-remedies or a visit to the doctor of Allopathy or Ayurveda and so on.

Feeling Bruises – In the last few decades, we are more aware that our feelings can also be bruised and now seek help by confiding in a friend or visiting a therapist or through a workshop and so on.

Today, I want to focus on ‘Thinking Bruises’ – which seems to affect our thinking-will

When we engage in any conversation, discussions, we usually share our points of view at those times and usually we are either agreeing or disagreeing with the statement of the discussion. Sometimes we take decisions, make a choice about something and later we realise we were wrong about our decision or choice and still stick with it even if it’s wrong or harmful for us in the long-run.

Example: Let’s say your friend says lets go on a trip (not exactly a story for the corona-time), you agree and then on returning home, realise that you have this work assignment that you need to submit in a week’s time and going on this trip will affect the quality of your work.

Then exercise your liberty – The right to change your decision – and before you change your decision, reflect on it for a while, even a good-while if you require and then if you feel you must skip this trip then go ahead and call your friends and let them know about it.

But you must not keeping changing back and forth then you will come across as fickle minded, this happens when you haven’t put sufficient thought into it when changing the decision – sufficient thought does not necessarily mean taking long time like 7 hours or 7 days although it helps. In some situations even 7 min or even 7 secs can be long enough time to reflect and change your mind.

When you make a decision or make a choice or hold to an opinion then your thinking-will has put some effort or done some work on these choices before letting you know about it. When we refuse to change the decision after knowing it’s not good for you or your organisation and give in to it – by doing it, then the ‘Thinking will’ is embarrassed with itself and questions its ability to make a good decision for you and if it keeps getting bruised like this then soon it will give up making a choice and ask the other person to make it for them, because it doesn’t trust it has the capacity or ability to make a good decision for themselves.

If you had exercised the “Right to change your mind” and used it to change, then thinking-will knows it makes mistakes at times and you’re ok and later when thinking-will got more time to reflect, it advised you differently. You will be empowering your thinking-will and bruising it less and healing past wounds to your ego.

At sea, during navigation, there are many crunch navigation situations where we take a decision based on certain factors, soon realise that was a wrong call, deliberate a little (like 7 sec or 7 min) and take a counter-call. Nobody bats an eye, because this is an established process and at that moment, the navigator thought a particular action was the right one, then deliberated and realised the error and changed (but this does not mean change again and again, then there is certain to be an accident). No one on the team, will think that person is fickle-minded and the thinking-will gradually gains confidence in its ability to take better navigational calls.

Once you start using this process, you may become conscious and it may seem to you that you’re changing decisions often, but given time your thinking-will grows stronger since it knows it can use the right to change option if it comes down to it and such instances will reduces. Get comfortable with this idea and don’t start feeling guilty that you changed your mind. However, the thing to remember is that you don’t yo-yo between decisions repeatedly and that would be fickle.

Dictionary – Liberty is the ability to do as one pleases – free will (more on free-will later)

To explain to young adults and mentors, I had coined this word ‘Thinking Bruises’ for want of a better word to express this concept, you may replace it with anything else if you prefer.

Today is the time to reflect on your decisions in the last couple days and see if you had any similar experiences and whether you changed or did not change a decision even though you realised later that it wasn’t good for you.

*Use your Liberty – Exercise your right to change your decision*

Capt. Preetham Madhukar

Skills Beyond Education