Teens Making Tough Decisions

Everyone has to make tough decisions at certain times in their life. But being a teenager and being expected to make certain decisions under the pressures of time and parents can be really hard! Your parents might want you to do pick a certain career, which is something you'll be doing for the rest of your life. Or maybe you need to pick between two guys who have asked you to the spring dance? Either way, there is a detailed method that you should follow to decide between different alternatives for different choices you need to make in your lifetime.

The first thing you need to do when faced with a hard decision to make is to discover all the alternative choices you can make. This means brainstorming and coming with up with as many ideas about what you could do or decide on. You might think there are only one or two alternatives, but if you can open your mind to new ideas you might find that there are many more different choices that you could pick.

To find all the possible routes you could take, sit down with a pen and paper and start brainstorming. Brainstorming is easy, you just write down the question you need an answer to, in the middle of page and circle it. Now start answering the question by writing down any ideas that come to you, no matter how wacky or impossible they may seem. Then draw a line from your original question to one of your ideas. Once your page is getting kind of full, you can start flushing out how you would go about getting your ideas to work or to happen, depending on which kind of decision you need to make. Of course some of your ideas might not really help you to make a decision, but just being able to think about your problem openly is what's important here.

Now you can narrow down your top 5 choices. Write each choice down on a separate piece of paper at the top of the page. Now draw a line down the middle of each sheet. One side will be for "PROs" and one for "CONs". The first few minutes of writing down pros and cons will be really easy, since the most obvious consequences to each of the decisions will come to you quickly. But once you feel like you're running out of ideas, then you might need to start another brain storming session. If that still doesn't quite help you to fill out the two columns, you should consider asking others for their opinion.

The first people you should ask about what the pros and cons of a decision is, are your parents. They know the best and will be able to give their opinions easily. They might be too close to the problem or issue at hand though, so if you don't feel comfortable asking them, the next best person to ask is a teacher. Don't worry about feeling weird to ask a teacher a personal question after class. Just tell them you need their opinion about making certain decisions. It may turn out that they have been in your situation before, or that they know someone else who might be able to help you better, like a school councellor.

Once you have your sheets filled out properly, you need to find out which choices have more pros and which have less cons. At this point you'll be able to eliminate a lot of the choices. But if it so happens that there are a few choices that are very close to one another, you need to weigh what's more important when this decision takes place. After you've narrowed it down, you might still have this gut feeling that you should pick one option instead of another. Sometimes your gut feelings are better than any of these methods and you need to follow your instincts. Other times, you shouldn't do that. But after you've used this technique enough, you'll be able to tell if you should follow your gut or your comparisons.

Good luck making a decision and may you follow you right path.