You Just Have to Make a Decision

How to Stop Hoping and Start Knowing

Most people have specific goals, dreams, and desires they would like to achieve, have, or experience. What stops them is the decision to actually go after it. And that one step, making the decision, is more powerful than most people realize.

1) Making a Decision Is an Act of Creation

Robert Ohotto writes that there is perhaps no act more creative than making a choice. It literally distributes your life force through its consequences. Wallace Wattles said the same thing a century earlier. That’s not a coincidence. That’s timeless wisdom.

When you make a firm decision, you stop standing at the edge of possibility and step into it. You go from hoping to knowing. And that shift in energy is everything.

2) Desire and Knowing Are Not the Same Thing

This is the part people get stuck on most often when using Helene Hadsell’s SPEC Method, the Expect It part. Helene defined the difference clearly: desire is excited anticipation, and knowing is calm assurance.

Think about it this way. If someone asks your name, you don’t feel nervous or excited; you just answer because you know. That’s what knowing feels like. No anxiety. No crossed fingers. Just quiet certainty that it’s already done.

Desire is the buzzing feeling when your lottery numbers are almost called. Knowing is Helene waking up on a Friday morning with a simple, settled feeling that she would win a car that day. She did. It was a truck, which she sold for cash and moved on. No drama. Just trust.

3) When It Doesn’t Come Through the Door You Expected

Sometimes you do everything right, and it still doesn’t work out the way you planned. That’s not failure. That’s the process.

For example, a woman found what she was sure was her perfect apartment, went through the whole application process with complete faith, and was rejected. Months later, she started hearing about the problems in that building, such as difficult neighbors and hidden issues, while she was happily settled in a better place.

The universe had a better view of the map than she did.

Colette Baron-Reid always suggests adding this phrase to your manifestations: this, or something better, for the highest good of all. It loosens the grip without giving up the goal. And it leaves room for something you couldn’t have imagined.

4) You Still Have to Take Action

This is where The Secret did people a disservice. Ask, Believe, Receive, but it left out the co-creation part.

Wallace Wattles never said to sit on your couch and wait. He said to shift from a competitive to a creative mindset and take action every day toward your goal. Helene was filling out entry blanks and going to the post office. That was her inspired action. Mine is writing every day, whether it be a blog or a book. What is yours?

If you want a new job, update your resume, reach out to your network, and apply. If you want to get fit, get out and walk, exercise to a YouTube video, or go to the gym. The universe meets you in motion.

5) There Are No Wrong Choices

This one surprises people, but it’s true. Every choice, even the ones you regret, shapes you into who you need to become. Hindsight is 20/20, and most of us can look back on a “wrong” choice and see exactly why it happened.

Suzanne Giesemann puts it this way: instead of saying, “Why me?“, say, “Isn’t that interesting? Why is this happening?” That’s a huge shift because the why me is a victim mindset. That reframe shifts you into a feeling of curiosity and into empowerment.

Make the decision you’ve been sitting on. Take one step. Watch how many steps come toward you.