Certain principles of self-development have not changed and will not change with time. Let us call them Self-development Fundas.

We should keep reminding ourselves of these Self-development Fundas.

One of these fundas is: FOLLOW YOUR OWN DECISIONS. Once you have taken a decision, do not go back on it for flimsy reasons. If you follow this principle, you will find that it enhances your faith in yourself, strengthens your determination, gives you the image of being a reliable person among your colleagues and friends and generally makes you more successful in life. So, look back at your own behaviour and consider whether and how often you go back on your decisions.

Take a decision carefully and then follow it unless there is a strong reason to go back on it. Do not, for instance, keep deciding every night to get up early the next morning and then, when the time for getting up comes, convince yourself that since you slept late the previous day, you must sleep till late to get enough rest. A decision is an order we give to ourselves. We may not know it but such violation of our own orders definitely weakens our faith in ourselves.

The other extreme is to be so rigid that one sticks to one’s decisions even when they are known to result in definite harm, or to feel guilty when one has, for some genuine reasons, to revise one’s decisions. This can even be a sign of an underlying psychological abnormality. There is nothing wrong with your going back on a decision, but there is a lot that is wrong with going back on a decision either because you do not have the determination to carry it out or because, at the stage when you must undertake some physical or mental stress to implement it, you convince yourself with specious arguments that the decision was afterall not so crucial. When resolves made in the heat of the moment are broken because we show weakness at the time of carrying them out, we end up weakening ourselves as individuals. Every such occurrence is like the hit of a hammer on a stone which may not break it but which definitely takes it one step further towards breaking.