how to make the right decisions, every single time free report

From www.spiritualselfhelp.org


Introduction

The decision-making methodology that’s going to change your life

Hi, I’m Rivka Levy, and this is the free version of my new online course called ‘How to make the right decisions,

every single time.’

When I was putting this course together, I started to get really, really excited about all the amazing insights,

tools and techniques it contains to help you really understand how all the different parts of your body, mind

and soul are working together, when it comes to being able to make the right decision, every single time.

If you ever wanted to know why you start to freeze up and get overwhelmed when you need to make a big

decision, this course will tell you exactly what’s going on – and it’s also give you a bunch of fast and effective

tools that can help you overcome those issues.

If you’ve ever pondered why the ‘right decision’ you made just doesn’t feel right to you, or why you’re lacking

motivation to carry it through, or why can’t seem to stick to the choice you made, long-term, you’ll find the

answers to those big mysteries here - and in the process, you’ll also discover how you can make choices that

feel good, really solve your problem and that you’re genuinely excited about, like:

Where to live

What career to go for

How to raise your kids

And even smaller stuff, like what brand of washing machine, or make of car to buy

You need to get buy-in from all the different parts of your brain

Making the right choices depends on you being able to get buy-in from all the different parts of your brain,

and to get your subconscious mind onboard with your decisions – and this course will teach you exactly how

to do that.

But here’s the problem: as I was putting it together, I realized that there was so much good stuff in here that

most people just don’t know about, when it comes to making the right decisions, which means I had a big

‘information’ issue on my hands.

If you don’t know what you don’t know about how to make the right decisions, how in the world are you ever

going to be able to fix that problem?


After a bit of head-scratching, I got a flash of inspiration: Put together a free version of the course, that will set

out all the insights and background and science about how the decision-making process actually works, so

that people can get informed!

(You know sometimes, my flashes of inspiration are so good, they’re actually a bit scary.)

Then, if they want to know how to apply all the stuff that they’ve just learned to their real, actual lives, and

their real, actual decisions, they can go ahead and buy the full version of the course, which will set out the

easy and effective decision-making methodology they need to start making the right decision, every single

time. And if they don’t, they’ve learnt some very useful things about how the decision-making process actually

works.

Elementary, my dear Watson.

So here it is, the free version of the ‘How to make the right decisions, every single time’ course. As you’ll go

through, you’ll see I’ve flagged the resources, task sheets, mind maps and bonuses that will help you to take

apply everything you’ve learned to transform your decision-making process.

Do you know how much peace of mind you have, when you make the right choice? Do you know how your

life can literally change overnight, when you start to make decisions that are really in-line with who you are,

what you believe, and where you want to get to? Do you know what a great feeling it is, when you stop

worrying about all the choices you have to make, and you can confidently start to enjoy your life more?

Well, keep reading, because you’re about to find out!

I hope you enjoy this, and I’m very happy to hear back from you, if you have any questions or comments.

Sending you my bestest,


Workshop 1:

Why making good decisions is so crucial for your mental and emotional health

Module 1: Why being able to make the right decision is so

important

Hi, my name is Rivka Levy, and welcome to the first workshop of the ‘How to Make the Right

Decisions, Every Single Time’ online course, from Spiritual Self-help.

In today’s workshop, I want to lay out the groundwork a little bit, and explain why being able to

make the right decisions is a key part of overcoming negative emotional states like anxiety,

worry and depression, and how it can help you to move forward in life, and to develop your

innate potential, with confidence.

Do you know how many decisions you make every single day?

First, let me ask you a question: how many decisions do you think the average person makes, in

any single day?

The mindboggling answer, according to the latest research is that the average adult in the USA

will make 35,000 decisions over the course of 24 hours (or less, if you consider that for at least

some of that time we’re actually asleep.)


I know that this figure sounds impossibly large, but that’s because most of the decisions we

make are so small, we don’t normally register them consciously. To get a feel for how many

decisions we’re engaged in almost every moment of the day, let’s take a look at what’s required

to make and drink a single cup of coffee.

First of all, you have to decide you want a cup of coffee. You also decide that you want to make

it yourself, instead of getting it from Starbucks. So next, you have to figure out how much water

you’re going to boil up, and whether you’re going to stick cold water or hot water in the kettle.

(I know, gross as it sounds there are some people out there who use hot water straight from the

tap – every time you don’t, that’s a DECISION you’re making.)

Next, what type of coffee are you going to use, Turkish, instant or freshly ground gourmet? Or

maybe, you’re in the mood for a flavored Nespresso? What are you going to put the coffee in?

Paper cup or chinaware? The big cup or the small one? The huge one with a handle, or the more

sleek handle-less design? How much coffee are you going to spoon into the cup? Are you adding

sugar, or sweetener? How much? Milk? Soya, almond, goats or cows? How much? What’s order

are you going to do things, milk and sugar first then hot water, or vice-versa? Are you going to

stir the coffee, or just let it kind of fuse together naturally? What are you going to use to stir it,

big spoon, little spoon or plastic stirrer? Are you going to drink it straight away, or leave it to

cool down? Gulp it down in one big shlook, or sip it delicately?

Even if we just stop the process of drinking a cup of coffee there, we’ve already engaged in more

than 20 decisions to get the coffee from thought to actuality. And that’s over a fairly innocuous

process that most of us do many times a day.

When we can’t make a decision, we can’t get anything done

If at any point we’d get stuck on any one of these decisions – like whether to order it in, or

whether to use paper or porcelain cups, or what sort of milk we want to stick in it – the cup of

coffee simply wouldn’t happen the way we want it to, because each decision builds on the

previous one.

It’s a simple example, but I hope that it makes a powerful point that being able to decide things

is a key part of being able to set goals, achieve outcomes and move forward in life. When people

can’t make decisions, or aren’t comfortable with the decisions they make, or decide things

impulsively, without properly thinking things through, or try to avoid making decisions

altogether, that’s going to hold them back from doing and accomplishing a whole bunch of

things in life – even simple things like making a satisfying cup of coffee.

Being able to make good decisions, and to carry them out, has a profound impact on our quality

of life, ability to set and attain goals, and peace of mind. In fact, decision-making is such a crucial

function of the healthy human brain, that many psychiatric diagnoses have an inability to make

good decisions as one of their main criteria to show that something isn’t working quite right.


What happens when we can’t make the right choices?

When people can’t make good, solid decisions, the following things can happen:

They feel overwhelmed and shut-down, usually preferring to ‘do nothing’ – even if doing

nothing is keeping them stuck in an unpleasant, uncomfortable or even dangerous

situation.

They feel anxious, worried about the decision they need to made – even if they’ve spent

a lot of time trying gathering and evaluating a lot of information about what decision to

make.

Post-decision, they often feel dissatisfied and regretful about the way things turned out,

even beating themselves up and blaming themselves (or others…) for making the wrong

decision.

They decide things on impulse, without properly taking into account the long-term

consequences of their decisions.

They develop an unhealthy reliance on other people’s decision-making abilities, to the

point of following that advice slavishly, even when it conflicts with their own innate

sense of what’s actually best or right for them.

As you’re here learning this stuff with me, I’m pretty sure that you’ve experienced at least some

of these reactions, at least some of the time, when it comes to making decisions, and that

you’ve realized that there has to be a better way for you to make the choices that are going to

affect and shape your whole life in profound ways, both big and small.

Anyone can learn to make good decisions

The good news is, that there is! Anyone can learn how to make good decisions, every single

time, once they realize the different factors that are actually going into that process. It’s not just

a matter of being organized, or having enough willpower, or being able to sift through large

amounts of information to come up with the right choice – although all those things have their

place.

Making the right decision is a science, but it’s also an art, and you’re about to find out how

much of the decision-making process is really in your hands, and how much is being guided by

other factors like your subconscious mind. It’s often a very complex, difficult process,

particularly when there’s a strong emotional component to what’s being decided.

There are some rare individuals who seem to be able to make the right decisions naturally,

without having to break the process down to understand it. But most of us aren’t in that

position, and we need to know what’s really pulling our strings, and what obstacles, vested


interests and fuzzy thinking might be skewing our decision-making process, and also crucially,

how to overcome it.

That’s what this course is all about, and in the next module of Workshop 1, I’m going to outline

exactly what we’re going to cover, and exactly what you’re going to learn as you progress

through it.


Module 2: What you’re going to learn in this course, and how it’s

going to help you

Workshop 1: Overview and introduction

The first workshop is going to set out the stall a little, and tell you why being able to make good

decisions is such a crucial part of enjoying your life and fulfilling your potential. Then we’ll get

into a general course overview, so you know what sorts of things you’re going to learn, and how

this information is going to help you to start making the best decisions, ever.

Workshop 2: Defining what makes a decision ‘good’

Once we’re done with the basic overview and introduction, the next Workshop, Workshop 2 is

where we’re going to start defining what a good decision looks like and feels like, so that it’ll get

much easier for you to recognize when you’re on the right path, and when you might need to

make a detour in your decision-making process.

We’re going to examine the role the subconscious mind and our emotions play in making good

decisions, and explore when it’s best to rely on your gut feelings, and when you actually need to

apply some brainpower to help you figure things out.

I’ll also introduce you to some of the most common cognitive biases that could be skewing your

decision-making process, even when you’re convinced that you’re choices are completely

objective and rational.

Workshop 3: How to overcome the emotional knee-jerk reaction

In Workshop 3, we’re going to start getting more practical, and we’re going to look at the main

attitudes, responses and patterns that could be preventing you from taking, and / or sticking to

your decisions.


I’ll introduce you to the fight-flight-freeze stress response, and explain how it can hijack your

ability to make good choices. I’ll also give you some specific strategies and exercises you can do

to dismantle your internal roadblocks, disperse the brain fog, antsy-ness and irritability that can

often accompany big decisions, and help you clear the path to making better choices.

Workshop 4: The decision-making methodology that can transform your life

In Workshop 4, which is definitely the biggest and most in-depth workshop of the entire course,

you’ll learn the basics of how to start mind-mapping, if you don’t know how to do that already.

But that’s just the jumping-off point for learning a rigorous decision-making methodology that

will take you step-by-step through the process of:

defining the decision you’re trying to make

identifying the realistic options that are available to you

acknowledging how your subconscious is impacting your decision-making process, and

how to make the necessary adjustments that you may require, as a result

giving you all the practical tools you need to be able to harness the power and insight of

your emotional brain, together with the logical and rational input of your cognitive

mind, to come up with the best decisions, ever, in real time.

Workshop 4 will also walk you through some real-life examples of how the methodology works

in practice, and teach you how to apply the principles to your own life, and your own decisions.

You’ll get checklists for how to make the right decisions, Powerpoint presentations showing you

every step of the decision-making process, plus a bunch of other useful techniques, guides and

bonuses.

(Please note: all the ‘extras’ mentioned here and throughout the rest of the report are only

available with the paid version of the course.)

By the end of that Workshop, you should be in a position to recognize when your emotional

brain is pulling the strings behind your choices, how to challenge your own false assumptions

about situations, and how to recognize whether any given choice is really going to be a true

solution to your problem, or just some sort of sticking-plaster response, or knee-jerk reaction –

which usually don’t translate into good decisions.

Workshop 5: How to know if a decision is ‘good’

In the final Workshop, Workshop 5, we’ll cover the spiritual dimension to the decision-making

process, which is usually mostly ignored by most people, even though it can literally make all the

difference in the world to a decision panning out, or not.

In that workshop, we’ll also start to pull everything else you’ve learnt together into one neat

package, and give you the principles, tools and techniques you need to start applying your

knowledge to optimizing your own decision-making process.


What this course is going to teach you

By the end of this course, you’ll have the following things under your belt:

You’ll understand the links between good mental and emotional health, and the ability

to make a good decision – and how they’re affect each other.

You’ll understand the different factors you have to take into account, before you can be

certain that the decision you’re making is the best possible option.

You’ll be aware of how your subconscious mind is affecting your decision-making

process.

You’ll know when to harness your ‘gut reaction’ to optimize your decision-making

process, and how and when to over-ride it and decide things more rationally.

You’ll be able to identify and overcome specific issues and obstacles that are currently

preventing you from making and taking the right decision, or making your decisions

‘stick’, over the longer-term.

You’ll learn some invaluable practical tools that will enable you to make good, solid

decisions that take as much guess-work as possible out of the process, and that

accurately reflect your authentic desires, needs and concerns at every level of your

mind.

You’ll learn how to make decisions in a way that will give you peace of mind, confidence

to try new things and to move forward, and help you to minimize any negative fall-out

from the decision-making process.


Making the right decision doesn’t mean you’re going to win the lottery every week

Being able to make the right decision doesn’t mean that the option you choose is always going

to work out exactly as you’d hoped or planned. I’m not teaching you some magic, no-lose

formula for how to pick the winning lottery numbers every week, for example, (if I knew that, I

probably wouldn’t be teaching this course!)

But what this course is all about is being able to make the sort of decisions that enable you to

sleep at night, and to like yourself, and to have peace of mind and no regrets – even when the

decisions themselves don’t turn out how you hoped.

How does this work? It’s like this: when you can reassure yourself that you’ve made the best

possible decision that you could, with the information that was available to you at that time,

then there’s no place for all the regrets, second-guessing, guilt and blame to land and ‘stick’.

Sure, if you could accurately predict the future, then you might have something to feel bad

about, but if you’ve done your homework, if you’ve followed the methodology set out in the

course, and you’ve made your decision in a good, healthy way that took the long-term

consequences into account – then you’ll always the peace of mind that it was a good decision,

even if the outcome isn’t exactly what you were hoping for.

And that’s what I’m going to teach you: I’m going to teach you how to make the best possible

decisions you can, that will enable you to continue to move forward, and to grow, and to try

new things and enjoy your life, even when the outcome isn’t what you hoped for or wanted.

It goes without saying that when you apply this system to most of your decisions, you’ll normally

get all these benefits PLUS a positive outcome, too, but it’s important to state up-front that

there are no guarantees in life. Uncertainty is something that you need to be able to factor in to

your decision-making process, so that you’re completely comfortable and at ease with the

decisions you make, even when the outcome is really out of your hands.

A word about Task Sheets

As you go through the course, I’m going to give you a range of task sheets and checklists to help

you really get to grips with the main points you’re learning, and bring these principles into your

real-life choices.

The checklists and task sheets are also available as separate PDFs, that you can print out and

work on at your own leisure.

Task Sheet for Workshop 1 – ONLY AVAILABLE WITH THE PAID VERSION OF THIS COURSE

I’ll see you in Workshop 2, where we’re going to get stuck-in to defining what makes a decision

good. I’m Rivka Levy, and I’ll see you there.


Workshop 2: Defining what makes a decision ‘good’

Module 1: What makes a decision ‘good’?

Welcome back to Workshop 2 of the ‘How to Make the Right Decision, Every Single Time’ online

course. I’m Rivka Levy, and today we’re going to find out what makes a decision ‘good’ –

because it’s not always so obvious or clear.

First of all, we need to recognize that none of us can actually predict the future 100% accurately,

so we have to ensure that our decision-making process is based in reality, and also takes into

account that fact that the outcome of any decision we take may not be the one that we

expected, or planned for.

If we’re making decisions from a place of thinking that we’re infallible, and that we’re always

going to guess right, or make the right predictions – even if we’ve had a pretty good track record

so far – then actually, we’re not making a good decision. We may be making lucky decisions, but

they’re not ‘good’ in the way we need to try and define it in this workshop.

What makes a decision really ‘good’?

That’s the question we’re going to be asking ourselves today, and by the end of this module

you’re going to have a much clearer idea of all the different factors you need to be aware of,

and all the insight you need to have, before you can be sure that you’re really making a ‘good’

decision.

Like everything I teach, either on my spiritual self-help website, or through my books and other

courses, before we can really define what makes a decision ‘good’, we have to first break the

process down into the three main areas of body, mind and soul.

I know that probably sounds a bit weird, because it’s easy to think that your brain, or mind, is

really the only bit that’s relevant, when it comes to deciding things like what job to take, what

house to buy, or even, what you want to eat for supper.

But in reality, it’s not like that. Our body and souls also need to be included in the process if we

want to be sure we’re actually making a good decision that truly reflects the real us, the

authentic us, and is going to lead to a good outcome. So let’s start by exploring these

connections a bit, to see how they all fit together, and how they might be affecting our decision-

making process.


The body’s role in the decision-making process

Let’s start with the body. A few years’ ago, molecular biologist Candace Pert wrote a great book

called ‘The Molecules of Emotion’ where she basically described how her research had led her

to the amazing discovery that the body is effectively the home of the subconscious mind. I’m

not going to go into all the science that proves that concept here, but if you’d like to learn more

I highly recommend you pick up a copy of her book, and read it for yourself.

But in a nutshell, Pert and her colleagues were discovering that the chemical processes that

keep the body going – that affect your breathing, your heart rate, the amount of stuff you sweat

out, how hungry you feel, how stressed you get etc – all that stuff was directly connected to

your emotional state.

It’s a mind-bending idea if you haven’t heard it before, but our emotions are chemicals. When

someone feels sad, for example, their body starts to manufacture ‘sad’ chemicals that affect the

way the body is physically functioning in a whole bunch of ways – and also, vice-versa.

If we don’t exercise enough, for example, then the chemicals and hormones that can make us

start to feel down and blue build up in our physical system, and can literally make us start to feel

depressed.

Acknowledging the power of the ‘gut reaction’

So as you’re probably expecting, this interplay between our physical responses and our

emotions has a direct impact on our decision-making process. Before I get into all the specific ins

and outs, let’s see if you can relate to the following scenario:

Let’s say, you’re trying to find somewhere new to live. You’ve done your research, you’ve

narrowed it down to a couple of likely locations, and now you’re at the final stage where you’re

actually physically visiting the places, or houses, you’re considering buying.

On paper, the two locations stack up almost identically, yet there’s something about the first

place that you just like a whole lot, it makes you feel good, while there’s something about the

second place that doesn’t feel so homey, or nice to you.

When that feel good factor kicks in, nine times out of ten you go with it, and you pick according

to what your gut feeling is telling you.

That’s how your body influences your decision-making process.

But now, let’s see what’s actually occurring behind the scenes. While acknowledging your gut

reactions are often a crucially-important part of being able to make the right decision, the more

you understand about what’s creating that gut reaction in the first place, the more you’ll be able

to figure out those occasions when you actually need to over-ride your gut, and go with a more

reasoned, logical response instead.

So here’s what’s happening:


The three parts of your brain

Your brain is split into three main parts, normally referred to as the reptilian or primitive brain;

the limbic system, and the neo-cortex. The reptilian brain is the oldest part of your brain, and

it’s responsible for all the basic things that keep your body alive and functioning, like breathing,

sleeping, eating, temperature regulation, sensation and elimination of toxins and other waste

material.


The next part of your brain, the limbic system, is responsible for emotion and perception, and it

starts developing the minute you’re born. The limbic system is shaped by your experiences. The

more encouraging, caring, nurturing experiences you have, the more it becomes hardwired to

experience the world as a safe, loving place – and the opposite is also true.

The more difficult, threatening, unpleasant or traumatic experiences you have, the more your

emotional brain perceives the world as being full of danger and threats.

The last, and final part of your brain is your neo-cortex, which is made up mostly of your frontal

lobes, or the part of your brain that lies directly behind your forehead. This part only starts

developing from the age of around 7 on, and it’s the part that enables you to think before you

act, choose to go against your more base urges and desires, and to make rational, logical

decisions. It’s also responsible for the development of things like empathy, and enables you to

interact with other people in a productive, sociable way.

So far so good.

How your stress response can skew your decision-making process

Now, here’s how things can go off line, and mess-up your decision-making abilities at a

subconscious level that most people aren’t even aware of.

Your limbic system is responsible for sifting through all the sensory input that you experience

through the day - whatever you smelled, heard, saw, felt or experienced – and then deciding if

anything looks like a potential threat or danger. It feeds that information down to another part

of your limbic system, called the amygdala, and also forwards it on to your frontal lobes, where

the information will be processed in much more detail, and in a much more rational, logical way.

But here’s the thing: you amygdala, or emotional brain, works much faster than your frontal

lobes, because it’s not looking at the details, it’s just looking at the rough shape of things. If

something in all the sensory information it’s processing resembles a threat or danger (even if it

only bears a very small resemblance) then the amygdala can immediately throw the switch in

your body that sparks off the ‘fight-or-flight’ response to approaching danger.

The usual example given is that you see a coiled rope, and jump back in alarm because initially,

you think it’s a snake. That’s because whenever there’s a potential danger or threat involved,

your gut reaction kicks in way before your rational brain has a chance to figure out what’s going

really going on.

And that’s normally a good thing! There’s no time to figure out whether that bus is really going

to hit you, you need to react and move out the way ASAP.

When the amygdala hits the ‘alarm’ button, it triggers your body’s stress response, your fight-or-

flight response, and a bunch of stress hormones immediately start coursing through your body,

affecting your breathing and heart rate, and giving you a burst of adrenaline so you have the

energy and ability to run away from the problem or fight it off, if necessary.


But here’s the problem: at the same time that you go into ‘fight or flight’ mode, your rational,

thinking brain, including your frontal lobes, shut down and go offline, until the danger has

passed. For as long as you’re having a fight-or-flight reaction, that means that your emotional

brain is calling all the shots, and that your cognitive processes have disappeared.

This has some big consequences for your rational decision-making process, particularly if your

emotional brain is keeping the pedal pressed down on your panic response. When that happens,

you literally can’t think clearly; you’ll feel overwhelmed and stressed-out; and you’ll feel like

your head is full of a dense fog that is making it impossible for you to decide what to do.

So the first key thing to know when you’re making a decision is to recognize if the decision is

being made by your subconscious, emotional brain, or your rational, cognitive brain.

You’ll hear more about this as we go through the course, but the last thing to say about this

‘body-based’ element of the decision-making process is that it’s often right – but not always.

And you need to be able to figure out when to listen to your gut, and when to ignore it, if you

want to make the right decisions.

In Module 2, we’ll take a look at what the mind is doing, while all this physiological, body-based

stuff is going on behind the scenes.


Module 2: The mind’s role in the decision-making process

If someone asked you to describe your decision-making process to them, you’d probably tell

them that you sit and think about the choice to be made, try to weigh up the pros and cons, try

to find out as much information as possible about the different options, and then go with the

one that looks like it has the best chance of giving you the outcome you’re after.

In a nutshell, that’s the basic description of the mind’s role in making a decision: it sifts through

all the information you’ve collected, assigns various values and importance to different bits of

the information, then measures it against your goal, to figure out which of the various options

available to you fit the best with your stated priorities and aims.

It all sounds pretty straight-forward, and most of the tips and suggestions that you’ll find out

there about how to make good decisions will concentrate on this section of the process.

Later on in the course, in Workshop 4, I’ll also give you some tried-and-tested tips for how to

make the most of your rational thinking abilities, when it comes to making a decision. But what

so many people don’t understand is that if the emotional brain is invested in the decision, and if

it feels threatened by some of the choices you’re considering in any way, your ability to think

rationally in this way will be severely compromised, right from the start.

Modern psychology has acknowledged this problem, at least in some ways, and has identified

around 20 cognitive biases that can affect your decision-making process, as a result. I think it’s

useful to know what they are at this stage, because then when we get to the more practical

modules, you’ll see how the decision making system I’m teaching you takes this biases into

account and neutralizes them.

Also, as part of your bonuses for this module, I’ve included a nice infographic that you can

download and look at, that sums up this next section very nicely. (The readable version is

available with the paid version of this course.)


The 20 cognitive biases that can affect your decisions

Ok, so let’s quickly run through what these 20 biases are, and how they can impact your ability

to make a good decision:

1. The anchoring bias. Which basically means that people often get stuck on the first piece

of information they hear. For example, if someone is trying to sell their house, if the first

agent tells them it’s worth 2 million bucks, then even if the other guys give them a

different figure, that first amount will resonate the strongest with them.

2. The availability heuristic. This is where what a person’s seen with their own eyes holds

greater weight for them, then what they may read about, or hear about from others. To

stick with the house example, the house seller knows of someone down the road that

sold for $2 million a couple of years’ ago, so now even though everyone is telling him

that the bottom’s dropped out of the market and that’s no longer possible, he discounts

that information and sticks with what he knows.

3. The bandwagon effect. This basically just means that when everyone believes that the

world is flat, you’ll find it much harder to convince them that it’s actually round – even

though that’s true.

4. Blind-spot bias. This means that you believe that your own decision-making process is

completely rational and objective, and free of the cognitive biases we’re describing in

this section.

5. Choice-supportive bias. Relates to the idea that once you’ve picked a certain option or

made a particular decision, you’re invested in it, and it becomes ‘yours’. Once

something is ‘yours’, it’s much harder to see the flaws or problems in it – which is one of

the reasons you need to make sure you decision is the right one, before you throw

yourself behind it 100%.

6. Clustering illusion. This is a tendency to see patterns in statistically random events. Like,

if it snowed the last three years in a row, it MUST snow again this year, or, it MUST be a

warm winter, this year.

7. Confirmation bias. Instead of evaluating all the information objectively to see where the

truth really lies, confirmation bias happens when we cherry-pick the bits of information

that fit in with our preconceived notions.

8. Conservatism bias. Happens when the old way of doing things, or the ‘tried and tested’

approach, or the old information, is given more weight, and is trusted more, than a new

piece of information that could change the whole picture.


9. Information bias. This is the mistaken idea that more information helps you to make

better decisions. We’ll return to this idea a little later on, but for now it’s enough to now

that information overload actually overwhelms your frontal lobes (yes, those again!),

making it much harder to reach a good decision.

10. Ostrich effect. As the name suggests, it’s the tendency to ignore any information that’s

perceived as dangerous, negative, or that could take you out of your comfort zone.

11. Outcome bias. Occurs when people believe that a successful outcome justifies a bad

decision. For example, just because someone managed to survive a trip down the

Niagara Falls in a barrel, doesn’t mean that’s a good idea, or a guaranteed outcome, for

everyone else.

12. Overconfidence. This is more of a problem for ‘experts’ (including self-proclaimed

experts) in whatever field they’re operating in, but it’s when a person starts to believe

their decisions are always going to be the correct ones, because they know more, or

have had so much success to date.

13. Placebo effect. Another way of describing this is that often, what people believe

actually happens. They bring that reality into the world. This can be used for the good,

and for the bad – but the key is to understand what you’re underlying beliefs really are,

and how they could be affecting your decision.

14. Pro-innovation bias. Often, the useful aspects of many new inventions are more

immediately obvious than their more negative drawbacks and limitations. Nuclear

reactor plants sounded like the dream solution to the world’s energy issues – until

Chernobyl and [JAPAN] happened, which underscored that risks that weren’t really

addressed or properly considered at the innovation stage.

15. Recency. This is where the latest bit of information your receive is given more attention

and weight. You could have 200 messages telling you your stock is tanking, but if the last

one suggests it isn’t, that’s the one you’ll pay more attention to.

16. Salience. Is where we tend to focus on easily recognizable features and details, and not

pay too much attention to the other stuff, even if it’s more relevant. Branding is a great

example of this, as companies have figured out that if the bottle looks expensive

enough, that’s enough to convince the consumer it’s a quality product, regardless of

how cheap the contents actually are. You could also call this the ‘judging a book by its

cover’ tendency.


17. Selective perception. The most biased of the cognitive biases, it means that what we

expect to see is what we see. If you expect to have a bad day at work, then even if the

boss gives you a raise you’ll still find something to complain about.

18. Stereotyping. Is where you judge a person, or product, or group to have a particular set

of attributes or qualities remotely, without checking things out for yourself, first-hand.

Like, ‘all lawyers are pedants’, or ‘all new mothers are nervous wrecks’.

19. Survivorship bias. Could also be called ‘success bias’, where we base our perceptions on

the success stories we hear, and don’t take into account that for every success, there

could easily be 100 failures that no-one talks about.

20. Zero-risk bias. Human beings love certainty. Unfortunately, the only things that are

certain are death and taxes, so if you have a zero-risk bias playing out, you’re going to

find it really hard to make any decisions until you’ve dealt with it.

That’s a quick overview of how your innate biases can be skewing your decision-making

processes without you even knowing about it. In the task sheet at the end of this module, I’ll

give you an exercise you can do to start catching what biases may be operating in the

background of your own decision process, because it’s useful to be aware of what’s really going

on.

That said, I don’t want you to get too caught up in all the terminology, or too obsessed with

tracking down which of these biases you may have, as the system you’re going to learn is going

to bypass most of them.

But the key thing to take away here is that even when you believe that your rational brain is

100% in the driving seat when it comes to making a decision, that still doesn’t mean that you’re

guaranteed to make the right choice, or the best decision. The more you get to know yourself,

and your inherent biases, the easier it’ll get to sideline them, and to develop a more objective

picture of what’s going on.

I’m going to teach you how to do that, but it’s a process and you’ll definitely need to work on it,

and to hone it and refine it over time.

In the next module, we’ll take a look at the soul dimension of the decision-making process. This

is something that I’m going to come back to in much more detail in the final Workshop,

Workshop 5, but it’s important to introduce the main concepts at this stage, so you go into your

decision-making process fully aware of the different elements that are affecting your choice.


Module 3: The soul dimension to decision making

OK, we’re arrived at the last module in Workshop 2, and we’re going to be discussing the soul

dimension to decision making.

Before we get into it, I want to tell you a quick story about someone I knew who was going

through a messy divorce. The man had managed to get sole custody of his kids, because his ex-

wife was going off the rails and the court decided he’d be a more stable caregiver.

A few months’ after the divorce, he met another woman, fell in love and proposed to her. There

was just one problem: she lived in a different country, and she wasn’t willing to relocate. So the

man decided he’d take his family, and move to be with his future wife.

Which is when he hit the next massive obstacle: he couldn’t take his kids out of the country

unless his ex-wife agreed, and there was no way she was going to say yes.

So now, the man hit probably the hardest decision of his life: stay and look after his kids, but

give up on marrying the new love of his life; OR, leave his kids back with his ex-wife in the old

country, and move and start a new life for himself.

I won’t tell you what he ultimately decided, because this isn’t a class on ethics. But I’m sharing

his story with you because sometimes, we hit decisions where the moral dimension weighs the

most heavy of all the other considerations.

Why?

Because on some level, if we make decisions that are not aligned with a moral code for living,

and if our decisions repeatedly take us away from the destiny, life and path that God designed

for us, then even if every other aspect of the decision is ‘good’, it’s not going to be a good

decision in the long-run.

We see this happening all the time: people decide it’s in their best interests to steal something,

or lie to someone, or do something dodgy, or hurt someone in some way, and then spend the

rest of their lives feeling laden down by guilt and regret.

Short-term gratification vs long-term consequences

Often in the heat of the moment, the short-term satisfaction we think we’ll get by cheating on

our wife, or ripping someone off, convinces us that we’ve made the right decision – as long as

we don’t get caught.

But these decisions aren’t taking the soul into account, and they don’t acknowledge that when a

person does things that go against the natural and innate sense of justice that God created each

of us with, the long-term outcomes of decisions like this are anything but good, even if we do

manage to get away with it.

When you go against your innate sense of justice and fairness, you end up paying a huge price.


Let’s go back to our story: if the man decided to dump his kids and make a new life for himself,

superficially that could seem like the correct decision. But if he hadn’t thoroughly checked his

decision against his own innate sense of fairness, and against what he believed God was

expecting from him in that circumstance, then he could end up feeling permanently guilty and

even start hating himself.

Sometimes, like the man in this story, there are no easy answers, and no obviously ‘right’ choice

to make. Life is complicated, and we’re often faced with situations and turning points where it’s

very unclear what the right decision actually is.

Let me give you another example: say the firm you work for is going bust, and is trying to sell off

its assets to cover its debts. Let’s say you’re the person who’s responsible for getting the best

price for each asset, and closing the deals. Let’s also say that there’s a nice car in the firm’s fleet

that you know you could get for a song, if you some how ‘forget’ to include it on the official list

of assets, and buy it privately yourself, for any sum you set.

In that circumstance, what’s the right decision to make?

If God and the spiritual dimension are not in the picture, it’s a no-brainer: buy the car for a

pittance and break out the champagne! I mean, it’s not really hurting anyone else, so what’s the

big deal?!

But when you factor in the question of what’s morally correct, it becomes a no-brainer the other

way.

Our world would look so very different if more people included the moral and spiritual

dimension in more of their decisions, instead of just basing themselves on logic and personal

gain.

You have to feel good about your decisions, for them to be ‘good’ decisions, long-term

But that’s not the main reason why the spiritual dimension has to be factored into our decision

making process. It’s like this: we have free choice, and we can make decisions that go against

God’s plan for us, and our own innate sense of right and wrong, all the time. But if we do that,

there’s always a price to pay.

If you can’t live with the consequences and the long-term fall-out of the decision you made,

then it’s not a good decision. Full stop.

Often, when people are duped into making these sorts of problematic decisions, they quickly

develop a guilty conscience and a lingering sense that they’re not very nice people. If the

problem isn’t caught and addressed, this can easily become a subconscious belief that they are

‘bad’ people who ‘deserve’ bad things to happen to them, and then they start working really

hard to make that come true and to punish themselves.

People with guilty consciences, or who are full of regrets and self-loathing typically don’t have

very nice lives, regardless of how much money, success or luxury they enjoy.


But even if you don’t feel bad about going against your own innate sense of right and wrong,

God has a funny way of doling out to us the same problems and difficulties that we cause

others. Sure, you got away with diddling your customer out of $500 for a repair job he really

didn’t need, but now you’ve got hit with a massive $5000 bill for an unexpected repair that you

DO really need.

That’s how the world works, a turn for a turn. Give out good, and you’ll get it back some way.

Give out bad, and that’s what’ll come back to you.

So I want to end this module on defining what makes a decision ‘good’ by encouraging you to

also factor in the spiritual and moral dimension, too, because that can often transform the

whole picture.

RECAP of the main points from Workshop 2

We covered a lot this workshop. Let’s just do a quick recap of the main points, then I’ll tell you

what your homework is.

Making a good decision depends on the following:

You have to take into account your physiological gut reactions, your subconscious

emotional responses, your cognitive biases, and the moral dimension, too.

If you’re making a decision when you feel pressured, panicked, angry or scared in some

way, it’s very unlikely that you’re making a good decision. (Btw, that’s often why sales

people pile on the pressure to get you to ‘buy now!’, as they know that when you’re

feeling harassed, your rational mind takes a hike and you’re more likely to buy

something you really don’t need or want.)

There is no such thing as a completely objective decision. The key is to identify your own

biases as much as possible, and try to compensate for them.

Gut reactions occur much faster than rational thought processes – and more often than

not, they’re correct. But not always – and being able to work out when you should go

with your gut and when you should ignore it is one of the biggest elements of being able

to make a good decision.

If you can’t live with the fall-out from your decision, then it’s not a good decision,

however it might look.


Task Sheet for Workshop 2 – ONLY AVAILABLE WITH THE PAID VERSION OF THIS COURSE

As part of your downloads for Workshop 2, (THE PAID VERSION) you’ll find a ‘Good decision

Checklist’ that you can start to use to double-check that your decision really is the right one

across the board. I recommend you print that out, and keep it somewhere handy for whenever

you’ve got a big, potentially life-changing decision to make. If you work through the Checklist,

it’ll help you to flag any areas you might not have considered, or that are in your blind-spot.

In the next Workshop, we’ll start to unpick what might be going on at the subconscious

emotional level and why, and how you can start to understand and manage the subconscious

impulses that could be hijacking your decision making process.

I’m Rivka Levy and this is the good decision workshop from spiritual self-help, and I’ll see you

over in Workshop 3, when you’re ready for it.


Workshop 3: How to overcome the emotional knee-jerk reaction

Module 1: Understanding the role of the subconscious

I’m Rivka Levy, and we’re back for the third workshop in the ‘How to Make the Right Decision,

Every Single time’ course.

In the last two workshops, I’ve been explaining many of the things that are going on behind the

scenes in your decision-making process. So far, you’ve learned why being able to confidently

make good decisions is so important to your mental and emotional health, and how it really

holds the key in so many ways to being able to move forward in life and achieve your goals with

the minimum stress and anxiety.

And you’ve also learned what elements are required in order for a decision to truly be a good

one. By this stage in the course, you already know that your emotional brain has to be on board

with your decision if you want to have complete peace of mind, but that your rational brain also

has to be able to check out the logistics a little, and rubberstamp them, in order for it to not be a

rash and impulsive choice.

Lastly, you learnt that the spiritual dimension of making a decision is also crucially important to

whether it’s honestly going to be a ‘good’ choice for you to make or not. That’s really talking

about the bigger social and global context that we make our decisions in, and is tapping into the

idea that what we put out into the world, we get back. If we’re trying to put ‘good’ out into the

world, we’ll reap a lot of good from our decisions – and the opposite is also true.

This is all good stuff, and it’s very important that you have all this background before we move

on to the more practical things I’m going to start teaching you from this module on, because if

you don’t understand all the different factors at play, and all the subconscious issues and

obstacles that could be affecting your decision-making process, you can start to get pretty

frustrated with yourself.

Why making good choices requires more than just willpower and the right information

There’s a common myth that all that’s required to make and stick to a good decision is for you

to do the legwork you need to sift through all the relevant information, make your choice, and

then stick to it.

That’s a very superficial view of the decision-making process, because it doesn’t take into

account all the things I’ve been teaching you about in the previous modules, like the emotional


brain being able shut-down your cognitive processes if it’s invested in the decision, and the fact

that try as we might, we’re really not in charge of the outcome of our decisions, even though

most of us would really like to be.

It also doesn’t take into account the cognitive biases I talked about in the last module, and how

difficult it can be in practice to actually get the clarity and objectivity required to make a good

decision.

So it’s really important that you take a moment to internalize all the things you’ve learnt in the

last two modules before you start moving forward with the practical things you’re about to start

learning. If you’re finding it hard to make good decisions (and you probably are, otherwise you

wouldn’t have bought this course) – you need to be clear up-front that there are some very

good reasons for that.

It’s not about blaming yourself, or thinking that there’s something wrong with you. What’s

happening is that there are a bunch of hidden processes going on that are derailing your ability

to make good decisions. They’re not conscious, and they’re operating under your radar, so you

have no idea why you head gets full of fog, or why you start to feel panicked or irritable, or why

you think you’re going to throw-up, when you need to make a particular decision.

But in this Workshop, we’re going to start identifying the main obstacles that are stopping you

from being able to make a good decision; we’re going to find out where they’re coming from;

and then I’m going to teach you a bunch of easy and effective things you can do to overcome

them.

This is a big Workshop, because by the end of it, you’re going to have a much clearer

understanding of what’s really holding you back in this area of your life, and how you can start

to make some real progress here.

The main obstacles that prevent people from making and implementing their decisions

We started discussing this in the last module, but especially when it comes to the big decisions

in life, like which house to buy, or what place to live, or who to marry, your rational brain is

really only rubber-stamping your final choice. The real decision on these big ticket items is being

made by your gut, or your emotional brain, and it’s then passing that choice up to your rational

brain for the formal sign-off.


I know it doesn’t always look like that, because the rational brain is very good at coming up with

a whole bunch of justifications and rationalizations as to why the decision you made is the best

ever, even if really it isn’t. That’s the source of all those cognitive biases we talked about, back in

the last module.

Let’s use a couple of common examples, to show what I’m talking about here. Say, someone is

addicted to cigarettes. At the emotional level, at the physiological level, they feel they need the

nicotine, that the nicotine is filling some sort of emotional need. (Technically, they’re right,

because people only get addicted to substances in the first place because on some physiological

level, they enjoy the sensation it gives them and end up craving more of it.)

Now, you can take the cigarette addict, and you can show them all the stats showing how many

smokers die from lung cancer, and from emphysema, and all the other nasty diseases. Then, you

can show them how many hours of their life they’re wasting every day stuck in the smoking

room, or out by the front door of their buildings. Then, you can give them a huge pie-chart

clearly spelling out how much many they’d save if they quit their habit; and how many people

they may be poisoning with the second-hand smoke – and it won’t make a blind bit of

difference.

What’s going on here is that all of these arguments are being made to the rational, cognitive

brain, and they’re all good, watertight reasons to stop smoking. The smoker themselves will

probably agree with you 100% that quitting would be the best decision they ever made – but

unless and until they get their emotional brain onside, they simply can’t get there. Because it’s

the emotional brain that’s really pulling the strings, and we first have to find out the real reasons

that person wants to carry on smoking, and to frame the argument in those terms, if we really

want to get somewhere.


The same thing holds true for any addictive, negative or self-destructive behavior or habit you

care to mention. You can make as many rational arguments as you want to about how junk food

is bad, and exercise is good, and how important it is to work on reducing your anger, and

reducing your anxiety and stress, and getting more motivated, but until you start talking the

language that the emotional brain understands, you’re going to be stuck at square one, unable

to move forward.

This is such an important point, I’m going to repeat it: Rational arguments are great for the

rational brain. Your frontal lobes loves all the statistics, and the research and the information,

and the facts you’re filling it up with. But especially on the big decisions, your rational brain is

not the one who’s in the driving seat. Your gut, your emotional brain, is the one calling the

shots, and until and unless you recognize that fact and start talking to the emotional brain in the

language it understands, you won’t be able to get out of the gate, when it comes to making a

good decision and sticking to it.

In the next module, we’re going to discover what language the emotional brain speaks, how to

understand it, and most importantly of all, how to start communicating with it, so we can get it

on board in our decision-making process.


Module 2: Feelings: the language the emotional brain understands

In this module, we’re going to be learning how we start talking to our emotional brains, and how

we can start to understand more where it’s coming from, what its main concerns are, and how

we can start to work with it more, to make excellent decisions that fully reflect the real us.

Again, when people make rational decisions that don’t have their emotional brains onboard,

then either they can’t follow them through; or they don’t feel good about the decision they

took, and are constantly worrying about it and feeling regret, or they carry their decisions out

like robots, and don’t invest any of themselves in the choice they made, which doesn’t give it

the best chance of working out.

These are all forms of subtle self-sabotage that we do to ourselves because we don’t include our

emotional brains in our decision-making process, and you can see this happening all around you,

every single day.

I want you to be 100% behind your decisions, committed, confident, realistic and ready-to-go.

And that’s what this course is about, it’s about teaching you the tools you need to get to that

place, and to be making decisions that take all three levels of body, mind and soul into account.

When people don’t do that, they get frozen, they get overwhelmed, they get angry, worried and

anxious, they feel dissatisfied with the direction their lives are taking, and then they start

looking around for people to blame when it all (inevitably) starts to go wrong.

Learn how to speak the same language as your emotional brain

So learning how to talk the same language as your emotional brain is vitally important, and the

language it uses is this: emotion. Feelings.

Whenever you start describing how you feel that’s the emotional brain talking, and it’s the most

powerful motivator you have. If you never talk about your feelings, or if you simply don’t know

what you’re feeling, that’s usually a strong indication that you got cut-off from that feeling part

of you somehow.

It’s actually very common to find that happening today, particularly in the Western world, that

puts far more value on thinking than feeling. Being able to make completely rational decisions

that are devoid of emotion is great if you’re a lawyer, or a scientist, or a town planner. But when

that’s happening in your own life, it’s a recipe for making bad choices and for going through life

like a zombie.

You have to be really connected to your feelings to be able to access your emotional brain, and

to be able to harness the power and the ‘feel good’ factor that it can put behind your decision-

making process. If you’re not, if you’re cut off from your feelings in some way, then you’re going

to find it very hard to make the sorts of decisions that give you peace of mind, and satisfaction

in life, and that you’re committed to and believe in.


I’m going to give you a lot of tools to start communicating with your emotional brain in this

course, but there are levels and levels you can get to with this stuff. Visualizations are great,

meditation techniques are great, energy psychology can be really useful for accessing the

emotional brain, and if you’re interested in learning more, I teach a lot of these things,

particularly in my ‘How to be Your Own Shrink’ course.

But for now, let’s take a look at the main messages your emotional brain is sending you, when

you’re trying to take a decision that it’s invested in, in some way. Let’s choose buying a house,

as that’s often a big choice for most people, and something that most of us have to deal with at

some point in our lives.

“I want to buy a house”

A house serves many functions: internally, it’s a home, a base, a safe space, a place for your

family to grow, a place for you to chill out, or entertain your friends. But houses can also have

external functions, too, as a status symbol, or proof that you made it, you’re a success, or as a

financial investment.

There’s a lot at play here, there’s a lot at stake, which is why buying a house is definitely a big

decision for most people, and also usually a very complex one that brings all the elements into

play that we’ve been talking about.


Let’s do a quick exercise. Take a clean sheet of paper, and just write that sentence ‘I want to buy

a house’ at the top of the page. Now, without overthinking it or stopping to analyze what comes

up, just start to free associate around that sentence, and write down everything that comes to

mind.

Already, this easy exercise is showing us which way our emotional brain is going, on the whole

idea of buying a house. If your piece of paper is full of words like:

Exciting opportunity

Good investment

Home sweet home

Quiet space

Place of my own

Independence

Then, that’s a good indication that your emotional brain has bought into the premise, and feels

positive about the general idea of buying a house.

By contrast, if your piece of paper is full of things like:

Can’t afford it

Huge mortgage

Ball and chain…

Enormous debt

Then that’s already showing you that your emotional brain is slamming the brakes down on the

idea. It’s worried about the notion about buying a house, and it’s feeling threatened and wary.

This is a simple exercise, but it underlines how the emotional brain is calling the shots. If a

person is consciously telling themselves that they really want to seal the deal while their

emotional brain is panicking about how it’s going to pay the mortgage, then until they

acknowledge that issue and deal with it, they’re going to get stuck.

Remember what we said, that the rational brain just rubberstamps the big decisions, and finds

justifications and excuses for what the emotional brain already decided. So in this scenario, if

the second person hasn’t worked out what’s going on, they’re probably going to put a lot of

work into finding properties, and viewing them, and arranging the financing, and they may even

get up to the point of making an offer. But then the whole process will probably stall; they’ll

start to have second thoughts, they’ll tell themselves the house in question is not quite right, or

it’s overpriced, or the mortgage has got the wrong terms, or it’s the wrong location – like I said,

the rational brain is a genius when it comes to manufacturing excuses.

All this stuff will sound logical and factual and correct but really? It’s the emotional brain that’s

pulling the strings. It’s not happy about the whole idea of buying a house, it hasn’t bought in to

the decision, and until and unless is does, nothing is going to move.


And the opposite is also true. The first person is so excited about the idea of buying their own

home, that they are motivated to do whatever it takes to make it happen. In that case, the focus

needs to be much more on the technical details, to make sure it IS the right place, it IS a good

price, that the financing is the best option out there. But the basic decision to buy the house is

in place, the emotional brain is on board, and sooner or later, the deal’s going to happen.

The main objections thrown up by the emotional brain

While the emotional brain is very powerful, it’s also pretty basic. If you remember what you

learned in Workshop 2, what gives it its main control over the decision-making process is the

fight-or-flight response that kicks in when the emotional brain starts to get worried that

something dangerous, threatening, frightening or unpleasant is about to happen to you.

The emotional brain wants to feel good, and calm, and happy, and it wants to avoid you being

hurt, scared or troubled in any way. For as long as its alarm detector isn’t tripped, the emotional

brain leaves you alone to do what you want to do. But as soon as it sniffs a potential threat, it

shuts down your cognitive, rational brain and takes over the reins.

When that happens, you’ll find yourself reacting in some version of the following three ways:

Fight

Fight

Freeze

Fight is when you get angry, irritable, aggressive or defensive.

Flight is when you try to run away, avoid the problem, feel panicked or anxious, find excuses

why things can’t happen, or you can’t think about stuff, or deal with anything right now. When

you spend months trying to gather every bit of information you can instead of making a

decision, that’s a ‘flight’ reaction. It can also be when you act on impulse, to get the situation to

go away ASAP.

Freeze is when you get so overwhelmed, you shut down, go completely blank, and can’t think or

do anything.


What your reactions are really telling you

There’s an art to understanding your emotional brain, and while it’s easy to learn it, you have to

practice it a lot before it’ll become second nature, especially if you’re one of those people who

typically doesn’t experience or talk about their feelings. Let’s go through each of these in turn,

to see what the impulse could be saying to you.

FIGHT When Mr or Ms Angry shows up, that’s a sign that you’re feeling threatened in some way.

On some basic level, you’re worrying that the decision, whatever it is, spells bad news for you.

Perhaps you feel torn between keeping someone else happy, and doing what’s best for

yourself?

Or you might feel like you’re being manipulated into doing something, in some way.

Or, you might feel like your ability to make a free choice is being over-ridden by

someone else’s expectations or guilt-trip.

When anger shows up, it’s often boils down to some basic idea of you being able to do what you

really want to do, or being unable to say ‘no’ to something that doesn’t feel like it’s aligned with

your best interests. This often happens when the decision has a lot of guilt or manipulation

going on around the edges, somewhere, like when you’re being pressured into doing something

you don’t want to do by other people.

FLIGHT When you feel very anxious, panicked, worried, or want to run away from the decision,

that’s usually a sign that fear has entered the building. Some very common fears include the:

Fear of failure

Fear of the unknown

Fear of being blamed or criticized by others

Fear of letting other people down

Fear can come in many flavors and varieties. When it comes to decision making, it often shows

up as self-doubt, pessimism, and a huge aversion to taking risks, even sensible, normal ones.

FREEZE Is what happens when you’ve gone past fight or flight, and now you’re feeling

completely overwhelmed, confused and lost. You don’t even know where to begin. When you’re

reacting with FREEZE, you can’t even begin the decision-making process until you’ve got yourself

unfrozen, physiologically.

Energy exercises can defuse the fight-flight-or-freeze response

As one of the bonuses with this module, [WITH THE PAID COURSE] you’ll find a bunch of easy,

fast and effective energy exercises you can do to begin that process. These exercises work

directly with the body’s own energy pathways, often called ‘energy meridians’, and can move

out the blocked feelings that are contributing to your sense of overwhelm.

If this is the first time you’ve experienced FREEZE, maybe because it’s a hugely-charged

decision, you’ll find the exercises will work pretty fast, maybe even after the first time, to get


your cognitive brain unfrozen and your emotional brain calmed down enough to get back to

work.

But if FREEZE is something that happens to you a lot, then you’ll probably have to have a bit

more patience, and to stick with doing the exercises regularly every day for a couple of weeks,

before you feel calm enough to resume your decision making process.

The energy exercises I’ve included with this course will also help you with any fight or flight

responses you’re experiencing, too.

Remember, when you’re stuck in the fight-flight-freeze mode, your rational brain goes offline,

and that makes it very hard to make a good decision. Until you get this part cleared up, you’re

going to struggle, so getting your fight-or-flight response to calm down has to be your priority

before you continue with the rest of the course.

Once your emotional brain has calmed down, your rational brain will start functioning again so

you can figure out more objectively if your emotional brain really has a point, or not.

In the Task Sheet for Workshop 3, I’m going to ask you to do an exercise that will start to

identify which of these three main knee-jerk reactions, fight, flight or freeze, could be derailing

your decision-making process, so watch out for that at the end of the next module.

For now, we’ll pick up the theme of ‘fight or flight’ again in Module 3, by taking a look at how it

can play out in real life.


Module 3: Fight or Flight in practice

The ideas we’ve been discussing in the last couple of modules can be hard to grasp theoretically,

especially if this is the first time you’ve ever heard about the intrinsic connections between your

body and mind, so let’s come back to our house buying example, to see how this can work in

practice.

Understanding how the emotional brain thinks

Let’s say that the person who’s all gung-ho about buying the house, let’s call them Buyer A, is a

first-time buyer with a good salary. They’re ready to get on with the next stage of their life, they

have no prior bad experiences, or emotional baggage, associated with buying a house, and they

have enough income to cover a mortgage.

The underlying emotional component of their decision is positive, and their cognitive brain will

be in charge of the process of finding the most suitable place, for their budget. Of course, some

emotional brain stuff will still kick in at some point in the process, like when they’re having to

decide between a nicer apartment that’s further away from their parents and family, or a less

nice apartment that’s much closer to their family, for example. But these are usually not

fundamental ‘deal killing’ issues, and they should be able to navigate their way through to

successfully buying an apartment without too much difficulty.

The second person, Buyer B, is older, and recently went through a difficult financial patch which

resulted in their last house being repossessed by the bank. They are still trying to recover from

the experience of not being able to pay their mortgage, and the immense shame and

embarrassment they felt about getting ejected from their family home.

Buyer B’s emotional brain is now stuck on the idea that owning a house is a dangerous, risky,

unpleasant business – and until and unless Buyer B can convince their emotional brain that’s it’s

OK to try again, and to take a mortgage again, it’s going to press the emotional override button

on any attempt Buyer B makes to become a homeowner again.

Buyer B is probably still so traumatized from their previous experience that even the thought of

getting back into homeownership is very uncomfortable for them. They are nowhere near being

able to talk to a mortgage broker, or to start viewing properties, until they get past this

emotional block.

Now, if Buyer B’s spouse starts pressuring them to look at buying another house, Buyer B is

probably going to respond with some sort of fight-or-flight response: either they’ll get angry and

irritated, and go on the attack in some way, OR, they’ll get panicked and anxious and keep being

‘too busy’ to discuss buying a house, or doing anything to move that idea forward, in any

meaningful way.

If after all that, the spouse still presses Buyer B to start looking at buying another house, they’ll

probably now respond with FREEZE, where they just shut down and there’s literally no-one to

talk to.


This can be an incredibly frustrating experience for both parties involved, but once Buyer B and

their spouse understands what’s really causing the roadblock, they can start to work together

constructively to overcome it.

Remember: energy exercises can defuse fight-or-flight really fast

If any of these scenarios are ringing bells for you, take a look at the energy exercises [AVAILABLE

WITH THE PAID VERSION OF THIS COURSE] that will really help you to get on top of the body-

based fight-or-flight response that I’ve included as a bonus with this module.

If you’re having a fight-flight-freeze reaction to making decisions, that’s the first place to start,

because until that’s acknowledged and dealt with, you’re going to have limited success applying

the rest of the tools that I’m going to show you in the next module.

These exercises are tried and tested, and they’ll help you to get some amazingly fast traction in

dealing with the problem, and understanding the underlying obstacles that are blocking our

path to making effective, good decisions. If you’re still feeling pretty stuck after doing them,

then you may need to go deeper to work on the underlying emotional issues, and to get your

emotional brain on board again. There’s a lot of things you can do to make that happen, but it’s

beyond the scope of this course.

But there are things you can do, like energy psychology techniques, visualizations and

meditational tools, that can help you to crack this stuff, once and for all, so don’t despair.

RECAP of the main points from Workshop 3

OK, we covered a lot of ground in this module, and it’s a pivotal workshop, so let’s just recap the

main points, and then I’ll have a Task Sheet for you to do, that will help you to pinpoint which of

your own decisions are getting hijacked by the fight-or-flight response.

We learnt this module that if there’s a strong emotional component to your decision, and

particularly if your emotional brain feels threatened or endangered in some way by the decision,

that it’s going to close the whole process down before it even really begins.

It does that by setting off the fight-or-flight response that takes your cognitive brain offline, and

puts your gut reaction and emotional brain firmly in the driving seat.

I also taught you some easy ways you can use to figure out which of your decisions are being

taken down like that, and how you can spot if you’re going into fight-flight-freeze.

I gave you some ideas to explore about why that’s happening, which is the beginning of getting

your emotional brain onboard with your decision making process, and I also gave you some

energy exercises to do, as a bonus, that are going to give you some fantastic, effective tools for

getting your emotional brain to calm down and behave, so you can start to figure out what’s

really going on.


Task Sheet and Exercises for Workshop 3 – AVAILABLE WITH THE PAID VERSION OF THIS

COURSE

There’s a few different things I’d like to ask you to do to start internalizing what you’ve just

learned in this module.

Talk to your emotional brain

I want you to list at least three big decisions that you’re struggling to make or implement. It

could be ‘big ticket’ stuff like we talked about, like buying a house, or moving to a new city, or

getting married. Or it could be day-to-day decisions like eating healthier, or getting enough

sleep, or getting a better work/life balance that just don’t seem to be panning out or going

anywhere.

[EXERCISE MISSING]

I’ll teach you how to start decoding these clues from your emotional brain in the next module.

The last thing to do in this Workshop is to try at least one of the energy exercises I’ve included

as the bonus, and then to see if it’s made a difference to your reaction, when you come back to

work with your decision sheets again.

What’s changed? What’s improved? What’s got worse?

Sometimes, particularly when you’re stuck in the FREEZE state, you’ll find yourself shifting into a

more angry (fight) or fearful (flight) response when it starts to move. That can feel a little

unpleasant and scary, especially if you’re not used to actually experiencing your emotions, but I

want to reassure you that it’s actually a very big step in the right direction.

Usually, just acknowledging the underlying feelings of anger or fear are enough to calm them

down again, so you can actually start to deal with them properly and learn the lesson they’re

coming to teach you.

But if it gets overwhelming at any point, then take a time out and try the DEALING WITH

OVERWHELM Exercise that I’ve also included for you, as a free bonus [only available with the

paid version of this course.]

Task Sheet for Workshop 3 – AVAILABLE WITH THE PAID VERSION OF THIS COURSE

OK, that’s it for today. I’m Rivka Levy and when you’re ready to continue, I’ll see you in the next

workshop, Workshop 4, where I’m going to teach you some amazing decision-making tools that

will help you start to pull together and apply everything you’ve been learning to your own, real-

life decisions.

It’s the biggest one of the entire course, so when you’re ready for it, I will see you there.


Workshop 4: Introducing the world’s best decision-making methodology

Module 1: The Basic Guide to Mind-mapping

Hi, I’m Rivka Levy, and you’re up to Workshop 4 of the ‘How to Make the Right Decision, Every

Single Time’ course.

This is the workshop where the rubber really starts to meet the road, and you’re going to learn

how to start applying the things you’ve learned in the last three workshops to your own real-life

decisions.

As we’ve been learning, good decisions work across all three levels of body, mind and soul. In

the previous two workshops, I introduced you to the idea that your emotional brain, or gut

feeling, is a huge part of your decision-making process. How you really feel about the decisions

you’re making, and the choices you’re taking, is the key to making them work out in real-life. So

the last two workshops were all about giving you the tools and knowledge you need to start

discovering and acknowledging your gut feelings about things, so you can start to include that

information in your decision-making process.

In this module, we’re moving on to the conscious mind’s input into the decision-making process,

and I’m going to teach you a very effective and easy-to-learn method for linking up your mind

with your gut reactions, to give you a much more realistic, truthful picture of what your

preferences really are, what beliefs you’re really holding, and what you actually want to be

doing, which is really what making a good decision is all about.

Your Basic Guide to Doing Mind Maps Bonus

Before we get into the meat in this Workshop, I want to ask you to press pause, or to stop

reading, and to take a look at the ‘Basic Guide to Doing Mind Maps’ PDF that you got as one of

your free bonuses with this course (available with the paid version of this course). If you

already know how to do mind-maps, and you’re comfortable with how they work, then you can

probably skip this part. But if you’ve never done a mind-map before, of if you’ve never applied

mind-mapping to intangible things like feelings and emotions, then I think you should definitely

take a look at that guide before you continue, and get comfortable with the basic mind-mapping

methodology.

There’s loads of mind-mapping sites out there that you can take a look at too, if you want more

information on the technical side of things, or if you’d like to do your mind-maps electronically.

Personally, I’m a big believer in physically writing my mind-maps down, and using all sorts of


different pens and pencils and getting really creative. I think there’s just something about doing

a physical mind-map and drawing and writing that gets the more creative and intuitive right side

of the brain fired up and participating. But I know other people prefer to do things online, and if

that’s you take a look at the following sites, which all have easy to use, mind-mapping software

with a range of free or paid options:

[AVAILABLE WITH THE PAID VERSION OF THIS COURSE]

They’re adding new sites all the time, so check these out and see which ones you like the look of

best, and try them out. You can also find lots of basic ‘how to’ information on these sites, too,

about mind-mapping, so go and do that homework, so that you get really comfortable with the

concept of mind-mapping, before you continue.

It’s impossible to do mind-maps ‘wrong’

If you’ve never done a mind-map before, you might be feeling a little overwhelmed right now.

That’s OK! Don’t sweat it. Mind-maps are really, really easy to do, and you can pick up the basics

of how to do them in literally half an hour. Once you understand that mind-maps are really a

way of organizing your own thoughts, your own ideas, and that they just reflect what’s going on

in your head back at you, then you start to understand that it’s actually impossible to do them

wrong.

However your mind map comes out, it’s going to teach you some really useful stuff about

what’s actually happening at the ‘mind’ level, and it’s going to give you some huge insights into

the beliefs or issues that might be blocking your progress, or holding you back.

If the overwhelm is hitting epic proportions and you’re feeling the fight-flight-freeze reaction

kick in, take a break before you continue, and go back to the energy exercises that I gave you in

the last workshop, to calm that physiological response down, and get your emotional brain back

on board.

If you’re still feeling stuck after you do all that, that’s also useful information. It’s telling you that

you probably have to dig a bit deeper, and that there’s probably some big fear, or self-limiting

belief that’s starting to surface as you’re going through this process. That’s actually great news!

Because whatever it is that’s clogging up your decision-making process, that’s also holding you

back in life, and sabotaging your efforts to move forward.

I know it can feel like really hard going when that stuff actually starts to surface, and you start to

acknowledge what’s really hiding under the surface, but once you’ve managed to get these

deep-seated beliefs and fears to come out of hiding, you’re already more than half way to

eradicating them for good.

You can’t fix something if you don’t even know what’s broken, so remember that whatever

comes up in this process is useful. It’s showing you what the real problems are, it’s telling you

where the bodies are really buried in your subconscious, and whatever is coming up for you

now, there are tools and techniques you can learn to deal with it, and overcome the issues. I

cover this stuff in a lot more detail in my flagship course ‘How to be your own shrink’, so there’s


definitely things you can do, and a lot more to learn, if you’re getting stuck and want to go

deeper.

But before you continue with the other modules in this Workshop, it’s really going to make

things much, much easier for you to understand what’s going on if you take some time to really

get comfortable with how to do a mind-map.

Read through the Guide, do a couple of the examples included there to get a feel for how they

work, and to start developing your own mind-mapping style and preferences, take a look at the

Powerpoint presentations that will really bring them to life for you, and then when you’re ready,

we’ll continue with Module 2.


Module 2: Applying mind-maps to decision making

OK, so today, I want to show you how to apply the basic mind-mapping technique that you’ve

hopefully already mastered to making the right decisions.

As I’ll show you in a minute, a lot of people can go wrong with mind-mapping their choices,

because they don’t take their cognitive biases and emotional brain into account. They can spend

hours crafting an amazing mind-map that seems to spell it all out, but still not come away with

the sense that they’ve got any further forward in deciding what to do, or that they’ve got any

more clarity about what’s really going on, and what they really want.

When that happens, it means that something key element is missing from the ‘good decision’

checklist that I gave you back in Workshop 2. Usually, what’s going on is that they’ve mind-

mapped what they think they should be thinking, as opposed to what they really think, or really

feel about something.

It’s a common problem, and it happens to a lot of people, even the mind-map whizz kids that

are great at using the technique for organizing events or processes or structures, or any of the

more logical, rational uses for mind-maps. So bear in mind as you’re going through this

workshop that the mind-maps I’m going to show you how to do are using the same basic

principles, but that the methodology is completely different.

We’re not assuming that what goes down on the mind-map is unquestionably true, and we’re

going to be testing our assumptions and beliefs, and doing reality checks throughout the whole

process, to tease out what’s really going on behind the scenes.

The best way of learning this methodology is to go through a few mind-maps, so that’s what I’m

going to do with you throughout the rest of this workshop. At the end of this workshop, I’ll give

you the Task Sheet for Workshop 4 (available with the paid version of this course) that will list

all the steps you need to help you go away and start doing your own ‘decision’ mind maps, and

that’s really the goal of this workshop: that you should have the methodology, you should have

the tools you need, to be able to clearly set down what’s going on in your head, when it comes

to that big decision you’re trying to make.

This is a big workshop, it’s a crucial part of the decision-making process, and it’s going to give

you a methodology that once you learn it, you can apply it to any decision, choice or situation

that will crop up in your life, and use it to get real, helpful and effective answers.

We’re going to go through a couple of common real-life examples now, because following the

process throughout someone else’s decision is the easiest and most effective way of seeing how

to apply the principles I’m teaching you to your own decisions.

I’m constantly tweaking the course, and I’ll be adding additional case studies and mind-map

templates that you can follow, so keep checking back for more inspiration. OK, so the first mind-

map we’re going to ‘deep dive’ into in this Module is going to cover the process of trying to pick

a new career.


This is a very common scenario that can come up for a lot of people, so I’ll think you learn a lot

from it.

Mind map 1: Ed the lawyer

First, let me give you some background: Ed is a lawyer, who’s considering going out on his own.

He’s recently got married and had his first kid, and he doesn’t want to be spending 18 hours a

day in the office any more.

He’s considering going alone and working for himself, but he’s not sure if starting up his own

practice is going to give him the money and the free time he actually wants. The first time I met

Ed, I could see he’s a very intelligent, sharp man, but that he’s lacking a lot of self-confidence,

and he doesn’t believe in himself. Let’s see how that’s going to start playing out with his mind-

map.

We did it the old-fashioned way with a huge piece of paper, and the first thing I asked Ed to do

was to set out what areas of law he could do. He wrote down ‘My Experience’ in the middle of

the page, and then went round listing the different areas of law he’d practiced, and that in

theory he could offer his clients.

Figure 1: Ed's areas of expertise

So far, it looks like this is just bog-standard ‘rational brain’ stuff, and that there is no emotion or

vested interests in this part of the process. But as you’ll see in a minute, Ed’s emotional brain is

already at play and getting in the way of Ed’s ability to make a right decision, even at this stage

of the process.

Next, I asked Ed to rank the different areas of law he could theoretically practice against the

following five criteria:

Expertise – How much experience he’d had in that area, and how confident he was of

being able to do a good job

Ease – How easy he found that particular area of law

Time – How time-consuming the work was to do, for each specific area of law

Enjoyment – How much he enjoyed doing that type of work

Value – How lucrative the work, was in that particular area of law

Technical details:

We assigned each criteria its own color, to make it easy to see what’s going on.


The ranking works as follows for this particular segment of the mind-map: The higher the

number, the better it is.

Figure 2: Each area is ranked according to Ed's priorities

In the first part of the mind-map, we’ve set the possible options out on the table. Now, we’re

using a ranking system to start pulling out of Ed more of the specific details that are going to

have a huge impact on his final decision.

For example, there’s no point in him specializing in an area of law that he doesn’t enjoy, that

doesn’t pay well, that he’s not very good at, and that’s going to take up a lot of his time. That

would defeat the whole point of him going out on his own.

So at this stage, we’re trying to get a feel for where the most money could be made by someone

with Ed’s talents, aptitudes and preferences for spending less time in the office.

At the end of this workshop, I’ll break down the principles of ranking for true preference as part

of your preparation for the Task Sheet, but I want you to see how it works in real-life, before you

read about the theory.

At the end of this stage, Ed’s mind map is already starting to throw up some big insights into

what could be holding him back. Let’s work through each of the criteria, to see what information

we can glean from each one.

Expertise – Ed hasn’t ranked anything higher than a 5, which is underlining the lack of self-

confidence he feels about his abilities as a lawyer.

Ease – But he’s finding most of the work pretty easy, which is reflected in the fact that he’s

ranked most things 7 or higher.

Time – He’s also ranked most of the options very highly for this criteria, which reflects his belief

that he could get the work done relatively fast. Again, only someone who’s actually good at their

job could get the work done fast and easily – but Ed hasn’t yet realized this.


Enjoyment – This is another eye-opener, because Ed’s rated most of the options on the table

very low, when it comes to how much he’d actually enjoy doing them. Long-term, people get

very miserable when they’re spending large chunks of time doing things they don’t enjoy, so this

is flagging another potential issue for Ed to address.

Value – Anything with a high ranking, is more money, and vice-versa – which is starting to bring

another problem out of the mist: on Ed’s mind-map, the areas that he’s flagged as being the

easiest and least time consuming are also the least lucrative.

Let’s sum up what we can conclude from what we’ve done so far:

Ed has a lot of abilities, and is obviously a capable lawyer.

He doesn’t believe in himself very much and lacks self-confidence.

He also doesn’t enjoy a lot of the work of being a lawyer, which will clearly impact his

motivation and ability to make money, going forward.

The areas of law that he’s listed as being the least time consuming and easiest also

happen to be the poorest paying, and the least enjoyable.*

*This is the only conclusion that Ed himself is consciously aware of at this stage in the mind-

map. The other three conclusions are blind-spots that Ed’s conscious mind is trying to avoid

dealing with and acknowledging, but thanks to the mind-mapping methodology we’re using,

Ed’s emotional brain is starting to get its message across, anyway.

If we left the mind-map at this stage, Ed wouldn’t have got very far in knowing what to do about

quitting his job – and might even be feeling a bit despondent and down about the apparent lack

of realistic options available to him, for going freelance.

But we’re not done yet! Now it’s time to dig-out a few more of Ed’s unconscious cognitive

biases, which we’re going to do by asking him to rank the five preferences we listed, in order of

importance, with ‘1’ being the most important, all the way down to 5.

Once he’s ranked the preferences, they stack up like this:

Time 1

Value 2

Ease 3

Enjoyment 4

Expertise 5

Now that we have a weighting system in place, we ask Ed to go over the responses he’s given so

far, to identify the top 3 options he’s ranked according to time and value.

Again, let me break this down for you, so you really get what Ed is doing now: he’s going over

the different rankings that he assigned to each area of law, and he’s looking for the three that


he gave the highest ratings to in terms of time; and then he’s looking for the three areas of law

that he gave the highest ratings to in terms of value.

By the end of this segment, Ed should have identified the 3 or 4 areas of law that will enable him

to make the most money, with the least investment of time.

Sure enough, that’s what we come up with.

Figure 3: Ed's identified the most suitable areas

Now, if Ed’s mind-map is truly reflecting his emotional brain (body) and his mind, and his real

priorities, we should have just solved the first part of the problem, and Ed should be feeling

pretty good at the moment.

But that’s not what’s happening.

If we refer back to the ‘Right Decision Checklist’, we see that quite a few ingredients are missing.

Ed is not feeling good about the choice he’s left with. Ed hasn’t had that ‘eureka!’ moment when

he’s got a flash of insight into how this decision truly solves his problem. And instead of a sense

of clarity and completion, he’s looking even more confused and bewildered.

Clearly, the emotional brain is not on board with this decision, and now is where the real power

of the methodology I’m teaching you starts to reveal itself.

Time for a REALITY CHECK

As we’re missing so many parts of the ‘Right Decision Checklist’, it’s time to do our first ‘reality

check’, which will start to show us where the problem lies, and where the cognitive brain is

thinking something that the emotional brain isn’t feeling.


Again, I will set out all the steps for how you can apply this to your own decisions and mind-

maps in the Task Sheet at the end of this Workshop, but depending on the format of the mind-

map, the reality check usually consists of one of the following questions:

How much do you believe this is true? (Rate it out of 100, 100 being the most

believable it could be)

And / Or

How much do you want to do this / do you want this to happen? (Rate it out of 100,

100 being the most desired for outcome possible.)

Before I tell you what Ed replies, let me tell you why this works so effectively to smoke out what

you really want and what you really believe about the decision you’re trying to make, or the

situation you’re trying to achieve some clarity about.

In the previous modules, I taught you that the language your emotional brain speaks is feelings,

not thoughts. When you ask someone directly how much they really want something, or how

much they really belief something, you’re essentially speaking straight to the emotional brain.

Sure, a person could still close down their true response and tell you an untruth – and when

people really don’t want to acknowledge the truth regardless of how clearly it’s staring them in

the face, that can and does happen. If the vested interest is so big, there’s really nothing you can

do to overcome it until the person themselves decides they want to be more honest about

what’s really going on.

BUT, when someone is honestly trying to get to a place of more clarity, and really wants to

understand what’s blocking them, pulling them off course, and causing them confusion, then

appealing straight to the emotional brain like this blows all the fibs we tell ourselves straight out

of the water.

Rationally speaking, we now have the apparently ‘perfect’ resolution to the question. But does it

feel like a good solution to the problem? If the answer is ‘no’, that means that there’s still some

work to do, and some more factors we have to unearth and take into account before we’ve got

there.

How do we do that?

We’ll cover this topic in much more detail in Workshop 5, but it usually comes down to getting

some help from Upstairs. This is the part of the mind-mapping process where the rational brain

has given us its best shot at providing us with a logical solution, but it’s still come up short;

where the emotional brain is now getting a chance to state it’s preferences and concerns; and

where we’re waiting for the answer to start taking shape that’s going to take all these factors

into account, and satisfy both parties.

This is where the magic really happens, if you let it.

Let’s go back to Ed, to see what I’m talking about.


This is Ed’s reality check:

Do you really want to do any of these three areas of law?

Guess what: Ed says no, he really doesn’t want to.

Remember, he ranked all of these areas very low on the enjoyment scale. Even though his

rational brain decided that enjoying his work is not a priority for Ed as long as he can make a lot

of money in a relatively small amount of time, his subconscious emotional brain clearly doesn’t

agree.

For the first time, Ed is now recognizing that at the conscious level, he has to enjoy what he’s

doing for it to really be the right decision, long-term.

At this stage, Ed is starting to listen to his inner voice a little more, and this is where things can

really start to move, because our inner voice really does know what’s going to truly make us

happy.

We ask Ed: What would he enjoy doing? Is there some other option for doing something he

wants, that would make the money he needs, and still let him spend more time with his family?

At this stage of the decision-making process, truly anything could happen.

This could be where Ed gets a flash of inspiration that he actually wants to be a journalist, or an

entrepreneur, or a teacher, and not a lawyer at all.

That’s a hugely challenging prospect for most of us, because remember one of the cognitive

biases that nearly all of us have is that we prefer certainty above anything else. That’s often the

main reason that many people talk themselves out of changing jobs, moving house, switching

careers, or doing any of the other things that seem risky and uncertain.

In Ed’s case, the surprise in the bag is a little more tame:

There’s something else that Ed’s been considering for a while, and that he really enjoys, and that

he thinks would enable him to spend more time with his family and to bring home enough


income, too. But he left it off the original mind-map because it’s technically not an area of law,

and he didn’t believe he was capable of pulling it off.

Remember, way back at the beginning of the process that we flagged that Ed lacked self-

confidence and belief in his own abilities?

Ed simply didn’t have the tools to capture that problem, or acknowledge it himself, before he

did the mind-map. Now, that issue has revealed itself to Ed, and in the process of getting

uncovered, it’s also revealed a potential solution to Ed’s dilemma of what, realistically, he could

specialize in, if he went out on his own.

The last part of the process is for Ed to come up with some action points, so that he can start

taking forward the insights he’s just got from doing the mind-map, and take some tangible

actions that will move him forward, in some concrete way.

Maybe, he needs to think about finding a mentor, or getting more professional support, or

partnering with another lawyer. Maybe, there’s things he could do to boost his confidence, like

maybe more pro-bono work in that area, or taking more training, or volunteering to work on

more of those cases in his existing law firm.

Identify the main problem, then find a solution

The key thing is to identify the issue, problem or lack that’s holding him back, and then to come

up with some possible solutions, and to go and check them out, or action them in some way. If

Ed doesn’t do this last step, then he’s lost a lot of the value of what’s he’s just done, and what

he’s just learnt.


And I don’t want that to happen to you, either, which is why a big part of the Task Sheet you’ll

get at the end of this workshop will focus on pulling out the action points from your mind maps.

It’s a key part of the process, and it’s really where you start to get the big changes happening.

We’re going to leave Ed at this point, even though he still hasn’t fully drilled down to the place

where he’s going to be able to make a good decision about what path to take, career-wise.

But what I wanted to show you with this mind-map is that there were a bunch of subconscious

beliefs Ed had, and that he hadn’t been able to acknowledge or access, that really started to

come out of the shadows where they’d been hiding, when he did the mind-map.

Going forward, any decision Ed makes about his career is now going to look very different. He

knows, now, that he actually has to enjoy what he’s doing to continue doing it, long-term, and

for it to give him enough job satisfaction to motivate him to continue doing it, and to make

money at it.

When people don’t like what they’re doing, sooner or later that starts to affect their

performance, and when you stop doing a job well, people stop coming to you, and that’s also

going to affect your income, long-term.

So Ed’s learnt a couple of crucially important lessons here, that are going to help him get to a

place where he’ll be able to make a truly good decision about his career. In the process, he’ll

probably have to examine his self-confidence issues, and take a look at where they’re coming

from, and what he needs to do to resolve them. Because if he doesn’t have enough self-

confidence, that’s also going to impact how he feels about going out on his own. He could be

the best lawyer in the world, but if he’s going to worry himself sick about whether he’s got what

it takes to go solo, then unless he gets on top of that issue, and learns how to really believe in

himself, or finds another solution like partnering with someone more senior, then private

practice is probably not the right route to go, at least at the moment.

But can you see how doing the mind-map has now blown the problem completely open, so Ed

can actually get to grips with what’s really holding him back in life? Without that clarity, he

could be going round in circles for years, and getting more and more frustrated about staying in

a job he hates, but feeling like he can’t get out of it.

This way, he’s identifying the pillars, the support he probably needs to have in place in order to

make the leap to going solo. He’s identifying that at the emotional level, it’s too scary for him to

go it alone because he doesn’t have the confidence to pull it off. So now, he’s got some real

choices opening for him, about what he can do to either boost his self-confidence, or reduce the

risk factors involved in going out on his own.

He’s got traction now, he’s got something tangible and useful to work with, and he’s well on the

way to being able to make the right decision about his career.

There a huge amount of inspiration and ideas you can glean from this mind-map, so before you

move on, I want to encourage you to replay the animated powerpoint of this mind-map as many

times as you need to, so you can see how the process is working. [AVAILABLE WITH THE PAID

VERSION OF THIS COURSE]


In the next module, we’re going to switch tack, and do a completely different type of decision,

that’s more of a straight comparison between two options. When you’re ready, I’ll see you

there.


Module 3: What to do when no-one else can make the decision for

you

Welcome back to Module 3, Workshop 4. Before we continue, I think it’s a great time to remind

you that as one of your bonuses that comes along with Workshop 4, I’ve given you a few basic

templates for some of the main types of ‘big decisions’ that you can use as a guide, to get you

started.

You don’t have to stick to them, and you can take them in any direction you want, because

remember, mind-maps work so well because they reflect you back to yourself, and what you

really think and believe about things. So I don’t want you to slavishly copy these templates, as

that would be missing the point. But if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed, or a little lost about

how to get started, they’re an excellent way of beginning the process of digging deeper to find

out what’s going really going on.

OK, so in the last module we covered the career and job-related mind-map, which is relevant for

a lot of people, whenever they have questions coming up about what path to take in life, what

to spend their time doing, how to best use their skills and aptitudes, that sort of thing.

Usually, these types of mind maps evolve over time, and they’ll bring up a lot of related choices,

and a lot of related issues to think about and explore, and it’s rare that you can usually capture

the whole picture in one go, or in one mind-map, although that does happen.

The second example that we’re going to look at now is more of a straight, but still very difficult

choice. It’s a template mind-map for whenever you have two options of what to go for, and it’s

very unclear which is the correct option. The previous mind-map was more about taking a whole

bunch of different options and getting them out there, and exploring their different merits.

This next one is more of a do or don’t do, go or stay, act or don’t act type of mind-map, where

you have two basic, opposing choices to make, and you don’t know which one to go for.

I’m using live examples of people I’ve recently coached in this course, so I’m going to share a

‘vaccinate or don’t vaccinate’ mind-map with you, that I did with someone who was agonizing

about what was the right way for her to go, with her new baby.

I know this is a highly controversial subject, and I’m not here to make a statement about what

you yourself should do, if you’re in the same position. The reason I’m picking this mind-map is

because it showcases a very difficult, very emotional choice, where the stakes of getting it

‘wrong’ are potentially very high, and I want to show you how the methodology I’m teaching

you can help you to make the right choice for you, in these types of circumstance.

But again, that’s on the understanding that each mind map reflects the mind and the

preferences of the person doing it, so you can’t just extrapolate the outcome to yourself, and

your own decisions. You have to go and do the work yourself, to get the right decision for you.

Amy’s vaccination dilemma


OK, so here’s a bit of background: Amy had a new baby a little while ago, and there was quite a

big gap between the oldest kids, and this one. One of Amy’s older kids has been diagnosed with

some serious learning difficulties, ADHD, that type of thing. In the process of trying to figure out

what might be contributing to her older kid’s issues, she’s started reading up about alternative

health stuff that she’s never come across before. She’s just recently read a couple of books

making the case that vaccines can overload the body’s immune system, leading to all sorts of

different physical and mental health issues.

Amy was given the books by a friend who’s become fanatically ‘anti’ vaccination, and who’s

pressuring her to follow suit, and not vaccinate her baby under any circumstances. At the same

time, Amy’s pediatrician is firmly advising her to vaccinate, and has told her they he himself has

vaccinated all of his own children.

Amy is caught between these two sides, and doesn’t know what to do, and is worrying herself

sick about making the wrong decision – which is the last thing she needs, as a new mum.

Let me just press pause on the story to point out that this is something that frequently happens

with this type of ‘hot button’ decision. You have articulate, passionate, knowledgeable people

on both sides of the equation, and they can both throw endless amounts of information, facts

and research to back up their opinion.

If the information was clearly weighted to one side, then it’s make the choice much, much

easier, at least in theory. But in this circumstance, Amy is also beginning to doubt the veracity of

the information she’s being given, because it seems like they can’t both be right – but she

doesn’t know which one is wrong!

You can see why it’s a very difficult decision to make, because really, Amy’s gut instinct is the

only thing she can really go on. Adding more information or experts into the mix at this point in

the decision-making process isn’t going to help her out, and will probably just tip her over into

FREEZE, where she feels completely overwhelmed and stuck.

So now, let’s see how the decision-making process plays out – and again, I want to remind you

that this is a basic template, or formula, that you can apply to any big decision where there are

two main choices, the stakes are high, and you’re at the point where more information isn’t

going to help you decide.


The vaccination mind-map break-down – AVAILABLE WITH THE PAID VERSION OF THIS

COURSE

[MIND MAP BREAK DOWN IS MISSING]

As I said, this is a great template mind-map to use for when you’ve got a straight choice

between two options, but no-one else can make that decision for you, for whatever reason.

Because it doesn’t matter what other people believe, or what other people know in these

circumstances. You have to be able to scope out the long-term consequences of your choice,

you have to be know where you really stand on the issue, and what you really believe, and this

methodology can help you to do that.

If Amy hadn’t gone through this process, she’d probably have ended up being swayed either by

the pediatrician, or by her friend, into doing something that was not in complete alignment with

what she herself believed – and she wouldn’t have felt good about that, or had the peace of

mind that was really her main priority. And now, she does.

Sure, we don’t know what the future has in store, but the key to making decisions you can live

with, good decisions, is that you know that you made your best effort to dig down to the truth,

with whatever tools and information you had available at that time. That gives you peace of

mind, going forward, and the reassurance that you’re not to blame in any way, shape or form if

things don’t work out as planned. And that’s priceless.

Again, take some time to go over this example again, watch the Powerpoint presentation (only

available with the paid version of this course), see how it really all fits together, and how those

conclusions kind of appeared by themselves. When you’re ready, you can move on to the final

module in Workshop 4, where I’m going to break all the elements of the decision-making

methodology down for you, step-by-step. Come join me when you’re ready.


Module 4: The Decision-making Methodology That’s Going to

Change Your Life

As I promised you at the beginning of the course, Workshop 4 is a huge piece of work, and it’s

really where the lion’s share of the work is being done to get you to a place where you can really

start to make the right decision, every single time.

In this final Module, I want to take you through the How to Mind-Map a Decision Task Sheet,

that you can download and print off separately as a PDF as part of this module, so that you can

start to action all the points we’ve covered in this Workshop, for when you’re ready to get

started.

Again, this Task Sheet is assuming you have basic knowledge of how to mind map. If you don’t,

then go back now and go through the basic guide to mind-mapping that you got as one of your

bonuses with this module, and work through it so you’re comfortable with the basic techniques.

We’re already at the stage with the Task Sheet where we’re working with pulling out the

underlying stuff that’s going to help you make the right decision, and you won’t be able to do

that if you’re still trying to figure out the basic premise of how mind-maps work. Also, don’t be

scared to practice and to make mistakes, and to get things wrong.

This is very much a work in progress, and especially when you’re dealing with really big, tricky

decisions that have a lot hanging on them, don’t expect to get straight to the perfect decision

the first go round. You may have to revisit the subject a few times, and keep going through the

different doors that start opening up to you during the process, and keep challenging the

underlying assumptions you’re making, until you get your Eureka! moment, and you really come

up with the right decision.

Keep checking back with the Decision Checklist, and that’s how you’ll know when you’ve really

arrived there. If you’re getting stuck, I’m here to help you, and I’ll tell you a little more about the

different options you can pick to go deeper in the last module. Ok, so now let’s just run through

the main points you need to follow, when trying to mind-map a decision.

The ‘How to Mind-Map a Decision’ Task Sheet – AVAILABLE WITH THE PAID VERSION OF THIS

COURSE

[TASK SHEET BREAKDOWN IS MISSING]

We’ve covered a heck of a lot of stuff in this Workshop, which is definitely the most important

one of the whole course, in terms of how to practically apply what you’re learning.

It’s a lot to take in at once, so come back and go over this a few more times, re-read the PDF,

take another listen to the MP3, until you’re sure you’ve got it all, and you can apply these

principles in your sleep.

Once you get this module down, you’ll have the methodology you need to be able to make the

right decision, every single time. So it’s very important that you go away and start practicing


what you’ve learned today, and that you start applying it to your own decisions, and playing

around with the concepts you’ve learned until you’ve really made it your own.

I know it can feel overwhelming, but once the ideas I’ve taught you have

sunk in a bit more, you’ll start to see that even without writing things down,

your decisions are going to start coming into much clearer focus now. If

you’re freezing up, blanking out or panicking, you’ll start to recognize that

now, and you’ll understand the mechanism underneath your response,

and you’ll be able to take steps to deal with it, without getting sucked into

beating yourself up about what’s going on, or feeling bad about it.

In the next and final module, we’re going to take a more in-depth look at the spiritual

dimension of making the right decision, and how that ties into everything else we’ve learned so

far. So it’s the last big piece of the puzzle, plus a general overview of the whole course.

I’m Rivka Levy, and I will see you there.


Workshop 5: The Spiritual Dimension of Decision-Making

Module 1: How to choose good

Welcome back to the last Workshop, Workshop number 5, of the ‘How to Make the Right

Decision, Every Single Time’ online course. I’m Rivka Levy, and today we’re going to be looking

at part of the decision-making process that is nearly always overlooked, but that can actually

make all the difference to your choice panning out in a positive way, over the longer term.

Before we get into the meat of today’s workshop, let’s just pull together what you’ve learned so

far, so you have the right context for today’s knowledge. So far, we’ve been explaining how the

decision-making process involves two completely separate parts of your mind. On the one hand,

we have the emotional brain, or what I like to call the ‘gut reaction’ that is purely instinctual,

and is really only interested in looking after number 1, and keeping you out of danger.

The gut’s input to our decision-making process is normally operating under our conscious radar,

but whenever there’s an emotional component to the decision, you can be sure that the gut is

the one really pulling the strings. The gut is not a long-term thinker; it wants to get you out of

the discomfort, or the problem, or the issue ASAP, and it’s not really thinking about long-term

consequences or bigger questions about ‘right or wrong’.

But that doesn’t make the gut, or emotional brain ‘bad’. It’s got some crucial input to give us

about the choices we make, and we’re not going to be able to make the right decisions until we

learn how to speak our emotional brain’s language, and start relating to it properly, and

acknowledging its concerns and considerations. Essentially, the way we do that is via our

feelings, and in the last couple of modules I’ve taught you a sure-fire methodology to start being

able to really communicate like that, with your emotional brain, and to get its input.

Then we have the second part of the decision-making process which is the rational, or cognitive

brain. That’s the bit that’s actually capable of being more objective, and of sifting through

information to check its validity and relevance, and of piecing the bits of the puzzle together –

but only if the emotional brain has been dealt with properly first.

But if that didn’t happen, then your rational brain is just rubber-stamping the decisions that

were actually made solely by your gut, and is manufacturing all sorts of credible justifications

and rationalizations for why you chose the way you did. These reasons may sound amazing in

theory, but in practice they’re just a fig-leaf for the emotional brain’s knee-jerk reaction.


Again, sometimes these decisions still work out great, but sometimes they don’t. And the real

point here is that when you’re making impulsive decision like this, and you’re not doing the

homework to check if the decision is objectively credible and rational and realistic, then the

chances of your decision turning out to truly be the right one start to plummet, especially if

we’re talking about a decision with a large logistical component, like starting a new business, for

example.

The whole way along, I’ve been teaching you the methodology you can use to really get

underneath all the externals of making a decision to find out which part of your brain is actually

in the driving seat, how to start challenging the assumptions that may be keeping you stuck, or

scared to try new things, and how to get the best out of both parts of your brain, so they

cooperate in helping you to come up with the right decision, every single time.

If you stopped here, and didn’t read through the rest of this last workshop, you would still have

a methodology for making the right decision that is the best out there, and that will help you to

make the best possible decision, every single time.

But there’s another dimension to making decisions that can take your decisions up a whole

different level, and that’s what I wanted to cover now.

The spiritual dimension

Now, it’s true that what I’m about to teach you is probably not for everyone. Not everyone is

that interested in the more spiritual aspects of life, or the deeper considerations behind making

a good decision. And that’s OK!

If you’re not into souls, and the spiritual dimension, and God, that’s OK. But you should still

know one last thing before you press pause or stop reading: the universe runs according to

some hard and fast spiritual rules, and one of those rules is that what you give out, you get back.

In terms of your decision-making process, you can boil the principle down to this: If you’re

making decision that are truly ‘good’ in every sense of the word, then you can expect to get

‘good’ back as a result – even if the decision itself doesn’t lead to the specific outcome you were

hoping for.

This is a cast-iron spiritual rule, and it’s one that it really is good to bear in mind when you’re

weighing up the long-term consequences of your choices, as part of the process you’ve been

learning.

Give good out, get good back.

Sometimes, that can seem really counter-intuitive, especially when our emotional brains are

jumping up and down and demanding that we teach the other guy a lesson or take a stand ‘on

principle’, or prove how much we’re right and the other person’s wrong.

And the truth is, it’s not always clear what the really ‘good’ option is, especially when you’re

dealing with the more complex and complicated situations we all occasionally come up against,

where feelings can be running high on both sides of the question.


But in a nutshell, the more you try to live by that cast-iron spiritual rule, the more you’ll see the

fruit from your decisions and choices over the long-run, in every area of your life.

How the spiritual dimension can help you out of a bind

If you didn’t switch off and you’re still with me now, I’m going to assume that’s because you’re

broadly open to the idea of developing more of an understanding about the spiritual dimension

of making decisions, and you want to learn more about how you can harness it to give you the

best possible chances of coming up with the best choice.

Again, none of what I’m teaching you in this section contradicts the methodology you’ve learned

so far. This is just taking that process to a deeper level, for the people who are ready for that.

If you’ve hopefully been doing the homework and completing the Task Sheets as you’ve been

going through the course, you’ve probably also started to notice yourself that sometimes, you’re

still left with a decision that doesn’t have any rational, easy answer.

That can happen when you seem to hit a deadlock between your emotional brain and your

rational brain, and you can’t make any headway, or get the emotional brain to back down. I’ll

use the example of trying to quit cigarettes to give you a practical handle of what I’m describing

now, as it’s easy to see that rationally, there’s simply no good reason for someone to smoke.

But let’s say you’re caught on a pack a day habit, and your cognitive brain is after you to quit.

You’ve read all the scary statistics about lung cancer and emphysema, maybe, you’re also sick of

the amount of money you’re throwing away each time you have to buy a new, or you’re starting

to feel more and more like a social pariah, stuck on the stoop while everyone else is inside

enjoying the party.

Whatever the initial reason, you’re now in a position where your rational brain is making you

feel more and more uncomfortable about your nicotine habit, and you’re consciously keen to

quit, but where your emotional brain is flat-out refusing to go along with the program. (This can

also happen with dieting, exercising, or any other situation where you’re trying to replace or

change a bad habit or addiction or unhealthy lifestyle choice.)

Let’s also say that you’ve gone through the methodology you’ve been learning, and you at least

have a much better idea of why the emotional brain is refusing to let go of the habit. Maybe,

you discovered that it gives you an excuse to have some time to yourself, when you’re feeling

overwhelmed and stressed-out; or it makes you feel more part of something, socially, when

you’re spending time around people who have the same bad habit. Maybe, it’s temporarily

filling some sort of emotional hole that opens up when you feel lonely, or unsuccessful, or

unlikable in some way.

If you’ve gone through the methodology, you’ll have your own clear answers as to why smoking

seems to be a good solution to the problem, at least the way your emotional brain sees things.

Usually, the way most people try to get their emotional brains onboard is by scaring it into

submission. Sometimes, this works because the emotional brain deals with feelings, and if you


can make it feel that the drawbacks from smoking are outweighing the risks involved, it’ll start

to work for you, instead of against you.

Few things are more powerful motivators than fear.

But here’s the problem: if you press that button too often, your emotional brain will simply

disconnect it. And when it comes to habits like smoking, drugs, even chocolate cake, you can be

sure that the ‘scaremongering’ button has been pressed so often, that it’s very unlikely that it’s

going to have any impact now.

When the governments started printing all those dire health warnings on cigarette packets, this

is the approach they were trying to take, and it may have worked for some people, especially

the more casual smokers who aren’t emotionally-invested in the habit as much.

But for heavy smokers who feel that they need their cigarettes to cope? This tactic was never

going to work.

Overcoming the impasse

So now, you’re in a quandary: you know how much your habit is costing you, financially and

otherwise. You know how much time it’s taking up, how much it could be impacting your health.

How are you going to get your emotional brain onboard, when it won’t listen to logic and it’s

packing a much bigger punch than your cognitive, conscious mind?

This is where the spiritual dimension really comes into its own, because once you start to get

your higher self, and God involved in the process, even impossible decisions like this can start to

open up.

I have other courses where I go into the methodology for how to do this in much greater detail,

and two courses that I recommend you check out for yourself if you’re interested in learning

more are: ‘Meditation for Normal People’ and my flagship course, ‘How to be Your Own Shrink’.

But the basic idea is pretty simple: you take some time out, you tell God what the problem is in

your own words, and then you ask for some help to get things moving.

Again, let’s spell out the basic problem you’re up against: Your rational brain has done the

research, weighed things up logically, and can clearly see that quitting smoking is in your best

interests, pretty much across the board. But your emotional brain is telling itself that it needs to

keep smoking, for whatever emotional reasons it’s throwing up, and until and unless you can get

the emotional brain onside, you aren’t going to be able to permanently quit.

When people manage to quit ‘cold turkey’, it’s because they finally

managed to persuade their emotional brain to get with the program.

So now, how do you break the impasse, and convince the emotional brain

that it’s in its best interests to quit?

Here’s what I suggest: get God involved in the process somehow, ask for help,

and then watch what happens next.


How God can help to get the emotional brain onboard

Maybe, the next day you’ll meet someone who’s dying from lung cancer, but still can’t quit, and

seeing that tragic scenario face-to-face is the push you need to finally get through to the

emotional brain. Maybe, you’ll start coughing up blood on a regular basis, and that’ll be enough

to finally get your emotional brain to take the issue seriously. (Btw, that’s what happened to one

of my relatives, who’d been a heavy smoker since his young teens. After a couple of weeks of

coughing up blood, he quit cold turkey and never touched them again.)

Maybe, it’s the program you watch about all the people dying from second-hand smoke. As long

as it’s just you you’re potentially killing, that doesn’t register. But once other people are

involved, your guilt feelings start to impact your enjoyment so much, quitting starts to look like

a much easier prospect. (This is often the way with pregnant women, who very often quit

immediately when they discover they’re expecting, so as not to harm their baby.)

The ‘how’ isn’t really the point. How God is going to help you get your emotional brain on board

is up to Him, but if you’re asking for help, sooner or later He’ll send you exactly the

circumstances or experiences you need to get the emotional brain onside. Remember, our guts

don’t react to information and rational arguments; they react to feelings, emotions and

experiences. Sometimes, we can manufacture those things to order, or make a decision that

changes how the emotional brain feels about something. But sometimes, we can’t – and that’s

when including the spiritual dimension can really pay off some huge dividends for us.

So the first way the spiritual dimension impacts our decision-making

process is because over the long term we get good back, when we give

good out.

The second way it can impact our decision-making process is by helping

us to break the deadlock between our rational desire to do the right

thing, and our emotional brain’s unwillingness to back down.

Now, let’s look at the third way that the spiritual dimension can affect our decision-making

process: talking to God is the single best way of getting in touch with your higher self, of giving it

a voice, and of discovering what’s really ‘good’.

When you take the time to stop the daily grind, and to sit quietly for a few minutes and to really

try to zoom-in on your mental processes, and your internal world, that’s when you can start to

learn some hugely insightful things about yourself, and about what you really want in life, and

what’s really motivating you, and what’s really driving your decisions.

The short-cut to making the right decision

The methodology I’ve taught you is really a short-cut, in many ways, to achieving this without

having to spend decades sitting up a mountain in the Himalayas somewhere, and it’ll help you to

get to 95% of the insights of what’s really going on with you. That’s enough to transform your

life, give you peace of mind, and help you to make some good, solid decisions.


But that other 5% is only really available via the spiritual dimension, and you can only really

access it by meditating and regularly talking to God. You can sum it up like this: the

methodology you’ve learned will transform your life, and help you to make a good decision. But

if you add in talking to God to the mix, then you’ve got a methodology that will help you to

transform your self, and that will give you a much deeper understanding of what ‘good’ actually

is.

Let’s be clear that you don’t have to quit your job and become a full-time monk to achieve this.

This sort of transformational meditation can be successfully learned by anyone, it can be done

anywhere, at any time, and it can give you the most powerful outcomes for even some very

minimal effort.

As I said at the beginning of the workshop, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and if you don’t pursue

the more spiritual dimension of making a good decision and just stick with the methodology

you’d learned by the end of Module 4, you still have some of the most powerful decision-making

tools out there, and you’ll still be making some excellent choices.

But if you want to go further, there’s more you can do, there’s more to learn, and if you go

down that route, you’ll see how your choices can really start opening things up for you in a way

that’s really just miraculous.

Task Sheet: Workshop 5 – [AVAILABLE WITH THE PAID VERSION OF THIS COURSE]

So the choice is yours – as you might expect from this course! If you’d like to include the

spiritual dimension more in your decision-making process, the Task Sheet for this Workshop will

give you some basic ideas for how you can do that, including some very quick and easy

techniques, up to the more in-depth tools you can use.

You might not feel the need to go deeper, or dig further down, and that’s completely your

decision. But if you’re getting stuck in your decision-making process, or your hitting some sort of

impasse where you know what you want, you know where you want to get to, but you can’t

seem to get over your internal obstacles, to make it happen, then give these techniques a go,

because I have seen them blast through all the problems, and completely turn things around,

really fast.

In the next and very last module, we’re going to do a quick RECAP of everything we’ve covered

to date.

When you’re ready, I will see you there.


Module 2: RECAP of the main points: How to Make the Right

Decision, Every Single Time

You’ve made it to the final module of the course! Here’s where we’re going to bring all the main

ideas together, into one place, to make it really easy for you to refer back to all the different

ideas and techniques we’ve covered, and to start making them your own. So without any further

ado, let’s kick off and blast through what you learned, and how it’s relevant to your decision-

making process.

1. You’re making 35,000 decisions every single day.

From small stuff like how to make your coffee and what to eat for supper, all the way through to

where to live and what to do for living. Making decisions is a huge part of our every-day life,

which is why we need to learn how to do it properly.

2. When we can’t make the right decisions, we can get completely stuck

When you don’t trust yourself to make the right choices, you can’t move forward in life. You

can’t meet the goals and outcomes you set for yourself, and you can’t fulfill your potential. But

there’s also a huge emotional cost involved in poor decision-making, too, as few things cause us

more stress, anxiety and aggravation then being unable to make realistic choices that reflect our

authentic selves, with confidence.

3. Our emotional brain has a huge amount of power over the decisions we make, how

we feel about them, and whether we can stick to them

If your emotional brain isn’t onboard with your decision, you’re not going to feel good about it,

or feel motivated to carry it through properly. The emotional brain usually operates under our

radar, so being able to communicate with it can completely transform our decision-making

process.

4. The language the emotional brain speaks is feelings

And I mean feelings in every sense of the word, ranging from the physical sensations you feel,

right through to your gut feelings about things, and whether you feel happy, satisfied and at

peace with your choices.

5. Whenever there is an emotional element to the decision you’re trying to make, or

your emotional brain feels threatened in some way, your rational brain goes off line.

Which means that it’s really, really hard to make good decisions when you’re feeling stressed-

out, tensed or worried about the outcome. Whenever you’re going into a fight-flight-freeze

response, that means that you’re reacting emotionally, not thinking rationally. You need to take

steps to defuse that reaction before you can continue with the decision-making process. Do

some energy exercises, have a conversation with your emotional brain to find out what’s really

bothering it, then take that information into account, before you make the final decision.

6. There are two types of main decision-making mind-maps: the STRAIGHT CHOICE and

the OPEN-ENDED DECISION.


Straight choice mind-maps is when you have one specific choice to make, and you need to

weight up the pros and cons to see which decision to make: do or don’t do / go or don’t go / act

or don’t act, etc. Open-ended decisions are where you have a range of options or choices to pick

from, and you have no idea which one to go for.

7. For a decision to be ‘good’ in every sense of the word, it has to feel satisfying at every

level of body, mind and soul.

When a decision feels good, that means your body, or emotional brain, is on board with it.

When it sounds good, that means that your rational mind believes that it’s the best option to go

for. And when it is good, objectively speaking, i.e. it’s building the world in some way, then your

soul is also behind it 100%.

8. The ability to make a good decision isn’t just something you’re born with: it’s

something you can learn.

Everyone can make the right decision, every single time, when they’re aware of all the different

elements and factors they need to take into account (i.e., they’ve done this course…) Making

good decisions is NOT a matter of luck, or natural talent. There’s a process going on between

your rational and unconscious minds, and once you know how to tap into that conversation, and

how to guide it and respond to it, you’ll also start to develop an uncanny ability to make a good

decision, every single time.

Conclusion

That’s it, you’ve reached the end of ‘How to Make the Right Decisions, Every Single Time’! You

may be feeling a bit overwhelmed, confused, disorientated by everything we’ve covered,

especially if you went through the whole course in one shot.

So this is where I want to encourage you to let it all sink it a bit, and to revisit the course as

many times as you need to, to really internalize the methodology I’ve set out for you here. This

stuff gets so much easier with practice, so I also want to encourage you to keep trying out the

ideas and techniques that we’ve covered here, to play around with them and make some

mistakes.

As you start to figure out which part of your brain is actually calling the shots, and what’s

motivating it, you’ll find that it’ll start to get so much easier to overcome overwhelm, confusion

and doubt, and brain-freeze, to get to that place where making a decision becomes a pleasure,

not a chore, or some sort of mental torture.

You’ll start to trust yourself more, which will give you more confidence to pursue whatever

decision you end up making, and that will also give you a much better chance of actually taking

the decision through from conception, all the way to actualization and successful outcome.

And whenever you need more help or hand-holding, you can check back with me to see what

coaching programs, online help forums or other things I’ve been busy developing, to give you

the sort of support you’re after, the way you want it.

But in the meantime, you made it through to the end of the course, and that’s definitely a

reason to celebrate! You now know the secrets of how to make a good decision, every single


time, and it’s really going to transform your life in so many profoundly positive ways. As one of

your bonuses for this Workshop, you’ll find a Course Completion Certificate PDF that you can

print off, and fill your name in, to give you something tangible in recognition of all your hard

work and effort.

Thank you

So I want to end this final workshop by saying thanks for joining me on the course, and for

including me on this leg of your journey towards greater happiness and more personal

fulfillment. I love teaching this stuff, I love seeing how people get the confidence, clarity and

motivation they need to live the life that was really created for them, and I’m thrilled that you

gave me the opportunity to do that by sharing what I know about how to make a great decision,

every single time.

If the course has helped you, I’d love to get your feedback, and to hear your story.

That’s it for now. This has been the last workshop of the ‘How to Make the Right Decision Every

Single Time’ online course, and I’m Rivka Levy.

Now, go get ‘em, tiger!

If you would like to buy the full version

of this course, please click HERE, to go

through to the Spiritual Self-Help store.

SPECIAL OFFER!!!

YOU CAN GET ‘HOW TO MAKE THE

RIGHT DECISIONS, EVERY SINGLE TIME’

WITH 33% OFF IF YOU PURCHASE IT IN

THE NEXT 7 DAYS! Get it for just $49.99,

instead of $75!

http://www.spiritualselfhelp.org/store/c4/Courses.html


So what are you waiting for?

Click HERE, to get the full course, that’s

going to help you make some of the

best decisions of your life even better.



About Rivka Levy

Rivka Levy is an author, blogger and emotional and mental health advocate

for thousands of people around the globe, who have used her guidance and

methods to transform their health, happiness and lives.

Her work has been featured in She Magazine, Cosmopolitan Magazine,

inspiremetoday.com, beliefnet.com, and many other blog and media outlets.

Her mission is to:

Inspire, motivate and empower anyone facing a mental or physical health challenge, to

know that you can heal your health, and also transform your life for the better, too.

Give you the exact, God-based, holistic health tools, techniques and support you need

to achieve your health and wellness goals, (that will still let you eat ice-cream and skip

your gym workout, without feeling guilty).

Show you how you can get to a point where you love yourself, love your life, and have

to deal with far fewer physical or emotional health issues.

Rivka’s approach is all about empowering people to be able to tackle their health issues across

all three levels of body, mind and soul. She knows that when God is in the picture, people can

find everything they need to permanently and fundamentally heal from within - with a bit of

spiritual self-help.


Whatever emotional issue you’re dealing with, whatever mental health diagnosis you’ve been

given, whatever chronic physical health problem you’re struggling to overcome, Rivka wants you

to know that you can beat it, and start enjoying your life again.

Bring out your awesome light, people! Follow Rivka at her blog www.spiritualselfhelp.org, on

Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest.

PS: Don’t forget to grab your special

offer! Click HERE to get the full course,

for just $49.99.

http://www.spiritualselfhelp/

https://www.facebook.com/talktogodandfixyourlife/

https://www.pinterest.com/talktogodblog/


how to make the right decisions, every single time free report

Self Improvement