Why making decisions can be a flawed approach to make choices.

Most of the time we don't distinguish between choices and decisions, when they are in-fact two very different things. When we think we are making a choice or decision, we are first making a decision, and then making a choice.

A decision is the process we go through before making a choice, it's the process of elimination. We start with a set of options, and narrow the set down by comparing things like our likes and dislikes, past experiences or the opinions of others. We finally make our decision once that set has been reduced to a single option.

A choice is the action of picking a single option from a set of multiple options. A choice requires no reason, no elimination and can therefore make available to us more options than if the decision process had selected the option for us.

Of course, choices without decisions in some cases could be very dangerous. The whole processes of making decisions and choices together is one way that we take things we've learnt and apply them to our lives. For example making a choice between touching a stove top can be helped by a decision, eliminating the option of me touching it because I would burn myself. But we collapse the decision and choice making process so that we rarely give ourselves the choice of making choices without a decision. For example, the people we date are often influenced by the people we've been with in the past. Mr or Mrs Right could be standing in front of us, but because of an experience with a previous lover our decision making process will never making him/her available to us.

After saying all this, I should highlight from the title the word 'can', not 'always'. Decisions are very powerful, and I'm sure if you ceased to use them you'd probably start to make some very bad choices, like touching the stove top. So be wary. Make decisions when you want to, and be aware of the options your eliminating. Try to consider what choice you'd make if you weren't going to go through the process of elimination. You never know, you might discover Mr or Mrs Right were standing in front of you all along.