How to know the truth about any issue or decision.

All of us every day, multiple time a day are trying to figure out what is the right thing to do, what is the best decision for this or that.  Regardless of whether it’s your job or career, in every job or career there are decisions to be made.  Some jobs are just full of decisions every single day.  Others are more where you’re working under other people and you pretty much do what they tell you to do.  But there are still decisions regarding your career path, whether you’re going to keep working there or go somewhere else, whether that is really your passion or just a job.

In parenting, I was talking to my wife about this.  She was talking about how many decisions there are every single day.  She’s always saying, “What is the best thing to do for the next hour?  This or this?”  As far as our health and our relationships it is just endless when you start thinking about how many decisions I make every week, every day, sometimes every hour.  And we want to make the best decisions we can, but sometimes it’s really tough because it’s not a matter of do I take cough syrup, which tastes terrible, or ice cream?  Sometimes it’s not quite that stark.

The decisions are maybe not that far apart.  They both seem good or they both seem not so great.  So how do you decide in any situation what is not necessarily right or wrong, but what is the best decision and how to tell the truth about any particular issue.

Fortunately we have a thing inside of us that I believe is in our heart.  Everything we’re about is about the heart.  This mechanism is also in the heart.  This mechanism is kind of a truth detector.  It’s kind of a truth indicator.  We call it the conscience.  Before you say, “Oh, I know all about that” let me challenge you just a little bit.  Just about everybody I’ve talked to thinks the conscience is a moral right or wrong about every situation.  I want to challenge you today that I think it’s more than that, or I believe that we have things attached to the conscience, I’m not sure which it is, that are a part of that conscience functioning that is more than just moral right and wrong.  It is also what is best in any particular situation.

Here’s why I believe that.  There’s a wonderful book called “The Pulse Test” that Roger Callahan first told me about.  He’s the founder of energy psychology.  He was real big on it.  It’s by Arthur Coca, MD.  I think it’s still available on Amazon.  This is a wonderful little book.  Paperback, very inexpensive, about 175 pages that tell you how you can use the mechanism of taking your pulse to determine, really, what is best in any situation.  We know that the pulse rate is tied to all kinds of health issues.

What Dr. Coca is saying is that you can use this as a very reliable indicator of the state of your body regarding stress.  It even goes down to – Dr. Callahan, one of the things he used it for, okay, think about this issue and take your pulse rate.  Think about that issue and take your pulse rate.

It’s very simple to do.  I’ll outline it here very briefly.  In the morning when you get up take your pulse rate.  In the afternoon take your pulse rate.  At night take your pulse rate.  Track that over several days.  Then, once you have a baseline to know “What is normal for me at this time of the day?” then take your pulse rate while you are resting and then think about a particular decision or issue that you’re trying to make a choice on and see if your pulse rate goes up or goes down.  Then after you’re done thinking about that decision take your pulse rate again to see if you’re back at resting.  Basically the principle is if your pulse rate goes up significantly when you’re thinking about a particular choice, that choice is inducing stress in you.  It shouldn’t be.  If it’s a good choice for you it should not induce stress.  You should be more at peace when you think about that.

Next – Part 2 – Peace is the light on the dashboard.