Personal mastery teaches us to choose. Choosing is a courageous act: picking the results and actions which you will make into your destiny. Striving for goals (i.e., the objective of your decisions) that do not reflect your values and consequently do not make you life joyful is how we make ourselves unhappy. But if you do not know what you want, then how will you know how to achieve it? Have a very clear picture of what you want out of life and what it will take to get it. Be realistic about your abilities. Because when there is a way, there is a will, the opposite is not true as many people unfortunately believe and and taken it as the base for decisions concerning their personal life. Even thinking about strategies beyond your abilities ruins your life.

Philosophy, religion, and morality have pondered the search for what constitutes a good life. Yet only in the last decades has the study of well being become a scientific endeavor. The results indicate that the goals and values of personal life are ver subjective and mostly cultural.

The ultimate goal of human decisions is always the satisfaction of the acting man's desire. There is no standard of greater or lesser satisfaction other than individual judgments of "values" and determination of "ranks" among these values. The values their ranks are different for various people and for the same people at various times.

A potential problem is in deciding the importantness of the things you think about most of the times. The solution to this problem is to come-up with some criteria in evaluating the degree of the values you hold dear for achieving living well. We have to give meanings to our individual life, otherwise our lives are blink and senseless.

The first task in making private and personal decisions is to find out what are the "values", for what? The answer is for the enhancement of your life. Moreover, one must decide about the "ranks" among these values and their relations to whom. The following is an ordered three-category model:

Group A:

This most important group includes all the things that you can do for yourself and no one else can do it for you. Examples include "a good sleep at night", learning to think for yourself, and your health. As an Spanish proverb says "A man too busy to take care of his health is like a mechanic too busy to take care of his tools."

Group B:

The things, which are yours and could not have been anybody else's. For example, your child belongs to this group.

Group C:

All other things. Such as your house, your job, etc.

Clearly, the question concerning what belongs to which group is highly subjective. For example, considering your job could become a member of group B if you like what you do and you believe no one else can do it as good as you do. Works of art for the artists belong to this group.

Self-esteem is a big factor in making good decisions. Some people easily pressured to do things by anyone are easily told what to do because they have very low self-esteem. When one has low self-esteem one can be talked into doing almost anything because one depend on others too much for advice. This is all because one may not have strength and courage to listen to his/her own thoughts. There are many ways to escape from your own thinking engagement. For example, have you asked yourself why do you read Newspapers? Could it be an escape device? It takes education and courage to gain more self-esteem is to be positive or confident in decision making. Listen to yourself and think for yourself. This won't get you into trouble because of someone else.

Major decisions require courage. We must have courage to bet on our decisions, to take the calculated risk, and to act.

Finally, in personal decision-making there is no one better to talk to than yourself if you really want to get things worked out satisfactory. No other person has as much information about your problems, and no one knows your skills and capabilities better.