The Power of a Decision

People always say things like, “Yeah, I need to lose 20 pounds,” or “One of these days I’m going to learn to play the piano,” or “I should get my stuff together for the impending zombie apocalypse.”  These words get said, but I’d venture to guess that only about 10% of the people who say them actually do anything about it.

I’m one of those 90% who talk a lot and don’t usually follow through.

You know, the type that talks about losing weight and then decides that I need ice cream more than anything else in the world at that moment.

I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in the world that is this weak willed.  Really. Sure of it.

BUT, during my time in this life, I have learned a few key lessons. One of them has been this:

If you want something, you have to go after it

 Or, if I could steal from Nike for a second:

Just Do It

As I mentioned above, I am a weak willed person when it comes to food.  I’ve been especially naughty with it over the past few months, and all of my efforts toward losing weight (my knees can’t take much more) have been completely thwarted by, well, me.  So I decided I would do something drastic.

Something insane.

Something no woman in her even mostly wrong mind would do.

I gave up chocolate for a month.

I’ll give you time to digest that, become appalled, circle back around to confused and finally decide to read on. If for no other reason than to listen to my chocolate withdrawal symptoms and convince yourself that this is a terrible idea.

In the beginning, I thought I was off my rocker. I had my boyfriend take all of my Girl Scout cookies out of the house, along with anything else I could find that was chocolate and was mine.  His receding footsteps down the front stairs felt like I imagine the clang of the prison door shutting behind you does.

I imagined it would be hard. I imagined clawing my way through to the candy jar at work somewhere around the 12^th due to a great need for chocolate. I imagined myself being really, really grouchy.

Much to my surprise, none of these things happened.  It wasn’t at all hard to walk by the candy jar, refuse chocolate silk pie or politely decline a brownie.

Although I must admit to eating a few bites of some pumpkin chocolate chip bread the other day and not even realizing there was chocolate in it until I’d swallowed.  This is how fried my brain is, people. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I’d done drugs at any point in my life.

So I’ve been thinking about this whole experience, and wondering why it’s been easy.  And as I pondered, I went back to some of the other big things in my life looking for correlations.  I found a simple answer.

I made the decision to do whatever it is I wanted to do.  I moved out of my parent’s house. I lost 50 pounds. I wrote a novel. I decided to write a novel with the purpose of getting it published. I got my black belt. I read the Old Testament.  And many more.

The key really is to make that decision. In your mind and in your heart and in that place inside of you that you can’t lie to.  Once the decision is made, the choice is already made and you don’t even have to think about it.

So if you’re hesitating on something, or wanting something but not doing anything about it, do some soul searching and figure out what you’re willing to do for it.

Then do it.

Don’t look back. There’s too much right ahead of you to look at!