What’s practical or what’s possible?

How do you make choices? Not about which outfit to wear or where you'll go for lunch, but the big ones? The decisions that alter your life? Do you weigh the pros and cons?

Flip a coin?

Go with your gut?

Weighing the pros and cons is the left-brained thing to do. Instead of writing down the pros and cons, I keep a running list inside my head. That must be my right brain taking over.

A friend taught me the flip-a-coin test. Heads-- you choose one thing. Tails-- you choose another. Pay attention to your reaction the instant the coin hits the table. Even if you don't base your decision on the outcome of the coin toss, it's a good indicator of how you feel about it.

I've made decisions that don't make sense on paper. That doesn't mean I didn't carefully consider them. That doesn't mean I acted on a whim. It just means that sometimes, our dreams aren't practical. And sometimes we have to do brave things to prove we believe in those dreams. That we believe in ourselves.

Before making a choice, I check my facts and check my motives. I pray. I analyze it to death. But in the end, my heart tells the truth. Perhaps when I say "heart," I'm referring to the wiser part of myself. The part that embodies the thinking and feeling. The whole. And if I give it time, it tells me when to slow down.

And it tells me when to leap.

So that takes me back to the beginning of this post. How do you choose?