Everyday life can be very hard to cope with when difficult problems and struggles can arise at any given moment.  Without the proper training or ability to think clearly, a person can literally go insane thinking about these problems and how to deal with them. When I was very little, my parents divorced and without even knowing it, I engaged in attempting to solve a problem for the betterment of myself and my family.  At such a young age, I was able to utilize one of the most commonly used processes for decision-making which included analyzing the issue, formulating alternatives and evaluating the alternatives moving towards the ultimate goal of coming to a final conclusion.  Almost two decades later, it is important to analyze this highly important event that completely changed my life and how the problem-solving process was used at the time and can continue to be used each and every day of my life.

I was eight years old and my parents sat my brother and I down to explain to us that they were no longer in love and were going to be living apart for a while.  They gave us the option for the two of us to live together, or we could choose which parent we wanted to live with permanently.  Naturally, due to a strong natural desire to protect my mother, I chose to live with her.  Three years later, the hormones of a teenager had me arguing at wit’s end and I had a decision to make between staying with my mother and moving in with my father.  I ultimately chose to move in with my father, and this caused a rift between the four of us.  We never really recuperated from the struggles of all of us living apart, especially between my brother and I who no longer saw each other on a daily basis.  We missed out on growing up together, in large part because of my decision.  Today, my parents no longer speak to one another, which is also usually the case with my brother and me.  We come together for holidays, but the main semblance of a customary family is long gone and it has taken its toll on each of us.

With this rather large problem to handle, it is important to understand the decision-making process and how it was applied by my eight-year-old youth.  There are roughly six stages to the decision-making process which include defining the problem, analyzing the problem, generating possible solutions, analyzing the solutions, selecting the best solutions and planning the next course of action.  The easiest of these steps, at least for me, was defining the problem and problem analysis.  I knew that my mother and I were struggling to get along and that I had a serious problem on my hand.  Our arguments and hard feelings needed to be removed for our family to be able to live together anymore.  If I had been a little older and had a stronger grasp on the problem-solving process, I would have spent a little more time analyzing the problem to understand what was causing it and how to clearly define the issues involved.