Finding balance in our hurried world can be exhausting.

Just ask Suzy Welch, mother, wife, business journalist, commentator and author of the New York Times bestselling book 10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea.

Throughout the pages of her best selling read, she details a clear, straight-forward, and transparent decision making process you can use when you’re stuck or paralyzed by a choice. Such as to work or stay at home with the kids, switch jobs, or move to another country – by considering the consequences of your options in 10 minutes, 10 months, or 10 years.

The process can be used in love, work, parenting, friendship or anything else that matters.

“When you use 10/10/10, you end up having a lot more consistency in your life and a lot more transparency because you and the people around you know why you’re making decisions. Even if they don’t agree, they’ll feel like they had a seat at the table,” she says.

Here are Suzy’s 7 tips for making decisions differently this year.

• Live by your choices. Choices, while still personal, come with consequences and you have to live with and own them, good or bad. You won’t be able to make everyone happy.

Identify your values. Look at your life and how you spend your time. “If you’re miserably unhappy, you can be absolutely sure you’ve not been living your values, because it causes a lot of disharmony,” Suzy says.
Own your values and say them out loud. Problems occur when people have certain values and then try to live a life that isn’t consistent with them, or they don’t share their values with others.
Take it day by day. “Understand that every day is a day you’re going to live out the choices you’ve made and the consequences,” Suzy says. “You cannot have it all at the same time.”
Talk to your kids about your values. In general, Suzy says work-life choices become easier as your kids get older, around or after age 12 and they are better able to understand.
Get out of your comfort zone. A wise older reporter once toldher, “Be careful of a job that becomes easy; it’s like a velvet coffin.” Suzy emphasizes growing outside of your comfort zone. “Like all living things, God wants us to grow,” she adds.
Pause before you make a decision. When someone asks you something, say, “That’s a very interesting question. Can I get back to you on that?”

Suzy Welch, author of the New York Times bestseller 10-10-10 is the former editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review, and a work- life columnist for O The Oprah Magazine. She is the coauthor, with her husband Jack Welch, of the New York Times bestseller “Winning” and of “The Welch Way,” published in BusinessWeek magazine and internationally by the New York Times Syndicate. She lives in Boston.