Choice

Wow, that is one tiny word. Sounds so simple!  I mean, the mere suggestion that us humans and our complex, conscious and unconscious minds can actually affect and shape our futures, might seem a step too far right?  After all, if we put our minds to it, anything is possible.  Well that’s the point.  It depends what is in the mind in the first place.  So, let me start at the beginning.

OK, so life was less than ideal when I was younger.  Not just ‘pass me a tissue so I can have a good cry’ kind of way I mean, ‘want to hurl at the world at its meanness’ kind of way.  Honestly, if I’d have known the phone number for the NSPCC help line (was there one in those days?) I’d have been on it constantly!  That reminds me that my boys know the number off by heart but I promise for no other reason than it was driven home to them at school rather than any ill treatment from me…….. I’m not unusual in this respect, I mean hey, plenty of people have had less than ideal starts and I’m certainly not going to moan and whine about mine.  But why am I not tied to that?  Why am I (seemingly) unaffected by it.  Well, to say I haven’t been affected would be an outrageous lie.  I have, in all sorts of ways, big and small.  The thing is, I didn’t realise it until waaaayyyy into my future.  I’d so wished I’d developed skills to realise these things earlier and maybe life would have been a little easier.

We are all different and yet as humans we all have the same basic needs.  We like secure, comfortable environments and when life isn’t like that, we do what we can to survive.  When we can’t trust the people, who are supposed to love us unconditionally, it puts us on guard and fearful.  When people leave our lives too early or suddenly, it makes us wonder about the fairness of our world.  When we struggle through personal relationships and lose our sense of self, we lack trust.  When we work ourselves to the bone to provide security for ourselves and our loved ones and end up depleted, how do we recover?  When yet more negative experiences are placed upon us, we can feel weighed down, often thinking we can’t survive these things, that they are all too much.  Some may, like me, have a breakdown (yep – got it out there early folks) and that long road to recovery can seem, on times, never ending.

So, what enabled me to work through things and see life through a more positive lens?  Well, I was always quite, no insert, VERY, optimistic.  I still am.  I’m irritatingly positive (apart from the few occasions when I’m not).  I wake up every day and think, ‘today is a different day’ and if it turned out to be the same as yesterday or worse, I’d get up the next day and so on, until it was.  It turns out, that this was my saving grace, but it was also my choice to think that way.  I chose to see each day as an opportunity and I had a vision, a sense of purpose.  I wasn’t sure what exactly, but I knew what I didn’t want.  It hasn’t always been like that to be fair as I have alluded to, but for the most part, that is pretty much the way I operate.  Is it easy?  Well, define easy!  But think for a moment…. What meal will you have tonight?  What food might you have as a snack?  It’s your choice.  What if life was like that?  That we could just simply choose?

Believe it or not, I like to think we do have that choice.   We can choose to change the way we live our lives, or we can choose to stay just as we are.  If the latter is a great place to be, great!  If it’s not, that’s a whole different conversation.  Sometimes the choice is easy and sometimes it takes a period of self-reflection, discovery and curiosity.  As a coach I’m often amazed at the simplest things that can really change people’s perceptions on what their future might look or feel like.  I’ll often say “if there is one thing you would like to achieve as you walk out of the door today, what would that be?  And if you could see yourself in the future having achieved that one thing, how would you feel?  Who would be with you?  What would you notice?”  The realisation that they can feel it, see it, hear it and sometimes even taste and smell it, is often all they need for their brain to change direction, for it to see what might be possible.

Netflix has become my new bestie during lockdown and I noticed a fantastic line from Jamie in the series ‘Outlander’ . “One day I turned around, looked back and saw that each step taken was a choice. To go left, to go right, to go forward or even to not go at all. Every day man has a choice; between right and wrong; between love and hate and sometimes between life and death. And the sum of those choices, becomes your life”.

So, if you could choose, what one thing would you choose today that could shape the rest of your life for the better?