The Mindful Investor: How a Calm Mind Can Bring You Inner Peace and Financial Security

Appendix A. Making Decisions with Mindfulness

Making decisions with Mindfulness is a practical way to bring Mindfulness training into your daily life. You make countless decisions as you move through life, some made in less than a second and others made over years. With the following technique, you'll learn to apply Mindfulness to this process.

The primary purpose of this technique is to use decision-making as a Mindfulness builder, while the secondary purpose is to make better decisions.

The process of making decisions with Mindfulness described here, which was developed and written by Soryu Scott (see www.budsa.org/decision), has four steps: Define, Explore, Allow, and Launch. These can be easily recalled with the acronym DEAL.

DEFINE

To define means to determine a simple representation of the decision in the three subjective spaces—Feel, Image, and Talk. The purpose of this first step is to merely clarify what the decision is in terms of how each of your choices is represented as Feel, Image, or Talk. This allows you to know what you're going to focus on and, of equal importance, what you're not going to focus on. Often the simple process of defining the choices with regard to each of the three subjective spaces is a profound experience.

EXPLORE

To explore means to enthusiastically investigate all sides of the decision in each of the three subjective spaces for a period of time, beginning with the definition as you established it in step one. The purpose of this is to create, or figure ...