Leaders are decisive.  And this is not an easy thing for many people.

And here’s the great thing, you can learn to be more decisive.  You’re not stuck with your current ability to make a decision and take action.  It comes down to something you’ve probably heard from me time and time again, confidence.  Confidence is the key to being decisive.

When you have confidence you tend to focus on the future and not agonize over “mistakes” from the past.  This does something very powerful for you, if you give yourself permission to make mistakes, learn from them and move on, you don’t have to worry that every mis-step is going to lead to hours, days, months or even years of beating yourself up about what you should have done.  Can you imagine how difficult it would be to make a decision if faced with this kind of situation?  This is exactly what many people do to themselves, it’s no wonder they are paralyzed and unable to move in one direction or another.

Here’s an easy way to begin to build up your self-confidence.  Make a list of your strengths and I mean all of your strengths.  This is not a time for brevity.  Get it all down in the list.  When you’re done with that, start listing your successes.  Make this a long list, we’re not looking for just the huge successes, but any strength or experience that you are proud of.  You don’t have to document them in detail, a short phrase should be enough to represent each strength and success.

Now that you have this list, I want you to focus your attention on these things, not the should of, would of, could of’s that you may have focused on before completing this exercise.  Look at your list at least once a day and by all means, add to it as you develop more strengths and have more success.