Living by choice means you stay in your power, you create flow in your life, and you take full responsibility for your actions or inactions.
You may be thinking yeah, but sometimes you have no choice…
You may feel like you have to do something. Do you recognize when you feel that there is absolutely no choice, you feel obligated, or you just can’t say no to doing something?
When you come from this place, you tend to give your power away to whomever is asking you to do something. You also may be in a place where you are blaming someone else for how you feel or the way things are going. When you do this, you give all your power to that person or circumstance.
Choice and the Power Struggle
Living by choice, allows you to take your power back, and keep it.
There is always a choice. That doesn’t mean that the choice will have a great outcome, but you always have a choice.
Maybe you are stuck in a job. You want to leave it, and start your own business, but you can’t because you have to work at your job right now. You may feel that you don’t have a choice. You have a family to support.
Well, you do have a choice. The choice would be to leave your job. This may have consequences that you don’t want, so you choose to stay. You make the decision to stay, and you keep your power. When you do this, it opens up other possibilities because you took responsibility. You may decide to start your own business and build it while working your other job. You may decide to look for another job while you’re working the other.
Choice and Responsibility
When you come from choice, you take full responsibility.
When the responsibility and choice lie within you, then you can do something about your situation. When you put the responsibility on something or someone outside yourself, then you must wait for something outside of you to change.
It can be scary to take full responsibility and look at your situation and circumstances as a choice. But when you do, there is so much more that opens up for you.
We all have circumstances or events happen that we have no control over. You may hate being in the position you are in, but you always have a choice around your response.
There are many ways that we give away our power. Pay attention to how or when you do it most. There is one big way that I tend to give my power away. It is when I think someone has more information then I do or knows a lot more then I do. I second guess myself, and follow their lead, even when my entire being is saying, “WHAT???”, instead of stopping and asking, “Is this a choice that is right for me?”.
If it’s not, am I willing to take full responsibility or will I blame it on someone else who lead me down a wrong path? This is not living by choice.
When you make choices that are right for you and accept responsibility for them, then you stand in your power. Even when something fails miserably or doesn’t work out the way you thought it would, there is always power in it. You receive information that you didn’t have before, that will allow you to make a better choice next time.
I’m not saying this is easy. We all have our patterns that we fall into, and blame is sometimes a lot easier than looking at ourselves and taking full responsibility. But when you do, there is such a freedom to staying in your power.
Here are a few tips to check in with to help you live by choice:
- Be honest with yourself: No one needs to know but you. Look at what your pattern or patterns are. Do you play victim, martyr (this is where I tend to land), the blame game, or never make a decision etc.? When you’re honest with yourself, you can catch yourself in it. This is 90 percent of the battle.
- Catch Yourself: When you think you don’t have a choice, you have to do something, or someone has really triggered you, ask yourself, “What choice can I make here?”
- Take a bird’s eye view: Taking a step back and looking at a situation from a bird’s eye view and observing it can show you where you didn’t make a choice and gave your power away.
- Make a new choice: Sometimes, it’s to stay exactly where you are for a little bit, but now it’s not a have to, it’s your choice. You keep your power. This makes it much easier to make a new choice when the time is right.
- Know some choices fail: Someone once said that with every failure comes a setup for success. I used to hate this saying, but with a little more experience and age, there is a lot of truth to it. Every failure gives us information that helps us succeed next time.
When you are able to live from choice and stay in your power, it allows you to have more freedom, flow, and be in response as you create the life, business, and success you want.
It’s not easy, and you may find you can’t always do it, but I think that’s pretty normal. It’s a journey well worth taking.
Would love to hear about your stories of living by choice.
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