The choices you make every minute of every day influence the life you live and the person you are. Make them wisely.
“Hmmmm, will I have that bowl of almond mocha ice cream, or not?” Almond mocha ice cream is my all-time favorite, so the choice is harrowing.
I can choose to eat the bowl of ice cream, knowing I’ll have to spend an extra 30 minutes or more on the treadmill tomorrow, or I can choose to forego the ice cream and feel sorry for myself for at least the next hour or so.
Heck! I choose to eat the ice cream anyway, knowing that I may as well have rubbed the entire bowl straight on my belly, but also accepting the fact that the price I will pay for 2 minutes of glorious ice cream today is 30 minutes or more of hard push on the treadmill tomorrow.
Nevertheless, I made the choice and I take full responsibility for making a choice that may not have necessarily been the right one.
That’s what making choices is all about – taking full responsibility for our actions.
As Ann Weber, a psychologist from North Carolina says, “Choice is uncomfortable, because it makes us feel responsible. The advantage of indecision is being blameless, but the disadvantage is a life out of control.”
The more choices you make, and the more you realize the world won’t fall apart either way, the more control you gain over your life.
Why Can’t I Make Choices?
A research team from Berkeley University in California identified 4 personality types who avoid decision making. Do you fall into one of these categories?
Perfectionists: are people who avoid making choices altogether rather than risk making a mistake.
Non-compromisers: are people who want it all and feel compromised if they have to give up anything.
Freedom lovers: are those who, confronted with several options, don’t want to commit to just one. They want their options to remain open.
Dependants: are people who trust other’s opinions more than they trust their own.
The common denominator amongst all these personality types is a lack of self-esteem.
Although lack of self-esteem can often be traced back to childhood behavioral conditioning; as an adult, you have the power to CHOOSE whether you want to live a life huddled at the back of the pack, not brave enough to stand up and be counted. Or you can CHOOSE to live with exuberance, joy and the supreme knowledge that you can make a difference in the world.
Making Choices That Matter
Whether we like it or not, we all make choices all the time; consciously and subconsciously, hard decisions and easy decisions, choices that not only affect us but those around us, life altering decisions and choices that, in hindsight, took us down the wrong path. But hey… that’s life!
As human beings, it’s often easier to choose the path of least resistance. After all, we are creatures of habit, so if it’s habitual for you to cocoon yourself inside your comfort zone, then it’s highly likely you’ll always choose the “soft option”.
But living a life of quiet desperation is a choice, and people who choose to live life in this way have to take on the responsibility for making that choice.
On the other hand, there are those of us who accept that making choices isn’t always easy and isn’t always comfortable, but want to live a life ripe with new opportunities, new visions, new adventures and new challenges.
Challenges allow us to grow and learn from the experiences we encounter.
Consider this: life doesn’t just happen. The life we choose to lead is dictated by the choices we’ve made in the past, those we make today and those we’ll make in the future.
To live an extraordinary life, we need to understand and focus on what we want to achieve, and then make choices that will ultimately lead us to the goals we want to attain.
