When you work in day to day life, you find many occasions where you get too much pressure while making a decision. What should you do and how to take decisions under pressure?
If you continue to work under constant pressure for longer duration it gets changed in to stress and working under constant stress for longer duration ultimately results in depression.
Try to get rid of this situation just at the first stage only. As soon as the pressure comes, give a pause and whatever is going on in your mind; split that process into a five-step process. Four steps will be clear steps for pondering and in the fifth step result of process will have to be executed.
Before we move ahead towards the process, let us understand the difference between thoughts and thinking as most the people get confused in between these two. In fact many people feel these two are same and use them interchangeably.
Thought is a conditioning, which is very different from thinking. Lets see an example here
In one study, a researcher tried to understand the behavior of dogs. He rang a bell and started feeding them. The dogs would salivate when they saw food. As researcher rang a bell before feeding, the dogs associated it with the food, so later they began to salivate just by the sound of the bell. So, there is an elementary thought here, which was, whenever a bell rings.
The first reflex was whenever food is there, salivation occurs. That may have been built in instinctively. The second reaction, which is conditioned, is, whenever the bell rings, salivation must occur.
So these are two stages. The first stage is called reflex, which is built in, a natural characteristic of humans as well as animals. The second stage is conditioning. Something that might not be built in itself, but because of a certain development (learning), it is still a very basic quality of, again, humans as well as (many) animals. According to me thought is nothing more than a form of reflex and conditioning.
So, if you say, whenever this happens, I need to do this, whenever X happens, I need to do Y. Now with that, you don’t have to think. Immediately when X happens, you are already doing Y, right? It is a reflex. Now, that is the nature of thought. And one reflex leads to another.
On the other hand “Thinking” is an active verb, think-ing. It means you are doing something. One thing you do in your decision making process is criticizing your thoughts, seeing whether they cohere. And if they don’t, you begin to change them and experiment with others. It is not predefined and you use your knowledge and experience to analyze a particular situation or thing. You get new intuitions and new insights.
I hope now the difference between thinking and thoughts is clear to you. Now a question must be arising in your mind, why did I spend so much time in differentiating the thoughts and thinking? Because these are foundation and first two initial steps of the 5 step process of pondering and execution; whenever we take decisions under pressure. Let us move on to the 5 step process.
Step One
The first step will be thoughts. There is an anxiety in this which reflects, a constant worry comes and starts bugging you and sometimes there are regrets.
Step Two
The second step is the thinking. In this you start investigating your thoughts. In this step your thoughts have to be criticized, by watching for its coherence. Even if an argument seems logical, it does not always mean it is. You have to become sensitive to coherence and incoherence which is a perceptive process.
Step Three
Then when crossing above two, contemplation starts. There is a philosophy in it. You had thoughts and thinking and lot of analysis based on logic and perspectives. All the ifs and buts fights with each other to frame an opinion.
Step Four
You are a little mature and from this place you start giving opinions to yourself and also start consulting others and take their opinion. You listen their opinion and try to imbibe them in your opinion.
Step Five
So thoughts, thinking, contemplation and opinion…..standing away a little bit, seeing these fours steps and after that, brainstorming will be done. Brainstorm is the hard work that is always done to find a new element.
When brainstorming of these four, you will find a solution saying, “First of all, get yourself free from pressure. Whatever has to happen, that will happen. Keep a fun, broad-mindedness and make a decision with full awareness. Do not stop your hard work and move ahead in life.” This will be the result of brainstorming and from here you will be free from pressure.
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