Life Skills & Leadership: Unit 2, Session 3: Making Decisions | Page 41 of 127“Think about a decision you made recently. Which did you use most? Head, heart, hands, or hope?”- Listen to some examples that participants share. Say:
“It’s obvious that each of you have used a variety of your head, heart, hands, and hope to make
decisions. In some cases you used several, if not all, of these aspects of decision making. You might
prefer one aspect more than another but, as we’ll see, it’s usually better to use more than one to make
our best decisions.”B. PAUSE for Better Decisions
Rationale: Participants learn a five-step process for making decisions.
- Introduce a five-step process for making decisions. Say:
“Making good decisions during adolescence can be tough. What seems like a good thing at first may
not turn out as you expected. And sometimes, teenagers don’t even realize that they could have made a
decision and avoided problems in the first place. Part of the difficulty is that, during adolescence, our
brains work differently than when we are adults. Remember, during our session about adolescent
development, we talked about the mental, emotional, physical, and social changes we deal with at this
age.(Refer to the handout from Unit 1, Session 2 if appropriate.)“With so many changes going on at once, making decisions can become very complicated. Fortunately,
there is hope. Young people can learn to make better decisions even while their brains are undergoing
this incredible growth. Today you will learn some simple steps that will improve your decisions and lead
to better outcomes.- Distribute Handout 2: PAUSE for Better Decisions and explain each of the five steps.
“To make good decisions, it’s usually better to think about them first rather than rushing and deciding
something quickly. You can avoid making a bad decision by slowing down. Here’s a way to do that,
which I’ll call ‘PAUSE.’ Each letter of the word ‘PAUSE’ stands for a step in the decision-making process:“P is for Pause – what is the decision? (Sometimes we don’t realize that there is a decision to be made.
Slow down. It might be difficult to realize that we can take charge and be in control.)“A is for Ask yourself – what are the options? (List as many choices as possible. Try to notice those
choices you can make and those where you have no control.)“U is for Understand the consequences (Try to guess what will happen as a result of each choice. This is
a mental activity that is difficult for adolescents given their growing brains, but you can get better with
practice.)