Taking Advantage of The Decisive Moment

I was reading James Clear’s book on Atomic Habits when I cam across what he shared as ‘ The Decisive Moment’. I decided to read more about it and eventually write this because of how relatable it was!

Days when I manage to make that decisive moment to wake up early when my alarm sounds, It’s certain that I will make myself breakfast, or else I would have bought breakfast outside or not even have breakfast. When I took that decisive moment to change into my workout attire, it’s certain that what comes next is automatic. I will do my stretching, put on my shoes and go for a 30 mins run. Sometimes when I walk to the corner of my room on a small chair, that decisive moment will change how I spend my next 30mins to an hour. I will for sure grab my book and start reading automatically.

Interestingly, the decisive moments are the moments that actually shape our day, factor that decide whether our habits will stick and moments that form a productive or lazy day. How so you may ask?

Make Or Break

The decisive moments as I mentioned are one of the factor that decide whether our habits will stick or break, our day to be productive or lazy. These decisive moments are usually short moments, that 3–5 seconds when we make a decision. However the magic of these moments is what actually comes next. Make it or break it, and it depends on that short couple of seconds, it is also a day changing or even life changing few seconds.

How They Shape Your Day

As mentioned, these moments though short, can change how we spend our day. We ought to realise the importance of these small moments that we live by. And why again am I repeating this point ? Because more often than not, I blame people, I blame the weather, I blame the environment, I blame the cat, I blame the internet and never myself. Never myself for not making the right decision, during that decisive moments. Every day, we are expose to many small decisive moments that we can take to shape our day, and to our advantage. But we often fail to take the opportunity because we procrastinate and seek for instant gratifications instead. As a result, opting for the other side of the spectrum of the decisive moment is like choosing to open up YouTube.com instead of grabbing a book. The result? Our day will end up with 3 hours of YouTube videos instead of 3 hours of reading.

As simple as it may seem, the couple of seconds during our decisive moments can definitely change hours and hours in our day, days and days in a week and weeks and weeks in a months and also months and months in a year or even years and years in a decade… we get the idea.

Creating Habits

Alright, how exactly can we use this to our advantage. What else other than creating habits! This moments can definitely be flipped to our advantage. It’s like having 3–5 seconds of decision making to make what comes next more naturally and easy. For instance, making that decision to sign up for a gym membership will help us create the habit of going to the gym. Though we may or may not lose weight within the first month, because going to the gym doesn’t equate to a good diet or good workout. But that is the first step for sure!

These small moments seem small and insignificant but more often , they make a large part of our habits, especially when forming good habits. They can also help us make better decisions.

Going On Auto-Pilot

This is the main point of decisive moment — auto-pilot. Going autopilot is very crucial in forming good habits, and can also be very destructive when we have bad habits. After each decisive moment, we often know what comes next automatically and what should be done. It’s like how we often go to a frequent mall and we get the idea of which shops we are visiting. (at least for most guys). When we make that right choice during our decisive moments, it becomes easier for us to walk into the path of good habits. It may feel tough and unpleasant at first, but it becomes something that we don’t think twice doing it after each attempts. And as time goes by, step after steps, it gets easier and we go to the state of flow, or what I call as “auto-pilot”.

In addition, I like to also see this as being programmed. Just like how putting on our workout gear usually equates to woking out, because we affiliate workout attire as workout, and we are programmed with that code in mind. The code goes like this

— (Workout attire + good weather = workout)

And this, is the power of going auto-pilot with our decisive moments.

Building Our Second Brain

This is one of my favourite while using the decisive moments to our advantage. Many things happen in our day, we have work, we have people to meet, media or email to consume, interest to cultivate and commitments after commitments. Because of this, we often get fatigue before noon or late evening. We forget about our meetings and we don’t seem to do much even though we did. I realised that with the decisive moments that we take advantage on, we seem to think less on what comes next and the reasons behind why we are doing certain tasks. We do them as natural and conveniently as possible. It reduces overthinking

After each tasks and habits are performed for the first time, we just have to take each decisive moments to execute the same habit or routine again. I remember back in my school days, my decisive moments were usually after each classes that ended earlier than expected. If I made a choice of going home, it would meant going back for an hour nap, study for 30 minutes and watch my YouTube videos for the next few hours. If I chose to stay in school,I would walk towards the North South direction (which brings me to the school’s library), I will study for the next 3–4 hours, head down the stadium for a 1 hour exercise before I head home for dinner.

It went to a point where how my day is turning out is fixed, and well expected after I made the choice during that decisive moments… Unless, a girl came to me while studying in the library, and I might actually just skip my 1 hour in the stadium. But no, that never happened before.

“Once we make that first attempt to push through a decisive moment, what comes next is pre planned”

Make It Count

At the end of the day, though we are sure to encounter many of these small decisive moments that shape and form our days or what comes next. It is up to us to take in control of these moments and make them count.

There is nothing wrong with spending our day lazy, unproductive for hours in front of our screens on YouTube. Similarly, days and hours just in the gym and in front of our screens working aren’t healthy either. It is important that we take the decisive moments to our advantage but also find the balance between what that matters in our life, and make our next decisive moment count!

Make yours count today! Maybe now.

References:

Atomic Habits by James Clear: https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits

SARINANA, J., 2013. The Decisive Moment And The Brain. [online] PetaPixel. Available at: <https://petapixel.com/2013/08/12/the-decisive-moment-and-the-human-brain/#:~:text=The%20decisive%20moment%20is%20a,essence%20of%20the%20event%20itself.> [Accessed 26 July 2020].