By Leo Babauta
Far more than we might realize, we often forget that we are choosing everything about how we’re living life. From how we spend our time, our money, our energy, our emotions, our attention … to how we eat, move, work, and love … we choose it all.
And yet, it often feels like we’re not choosing — consider these common things we say:
- “I can’t help it — they just push my buttons.”
- “I can’t seem to get myself to exercise regularly.”
- “I don’t know how to stop scrolling on my phone.”
- “I’m so mad at myself for eating all that junk food again.”
- “I’m so undisciplined — I can’t stick to anything.”
- “I don’t have the time to do ___.”
- “Ugh, I keep buying too many unnecessary things!”
These are just a few examples — we don’t feel we’re at choice. That’s because we forget that everything we do and feel is a choice we keep making.
What would it be like to reclaim our power, and be fully at choice?
It can be magical.
Why We Forget We’re at Choice
It becomes a habit, created over years of practice, to forget that we’re at choice in every moment of our lives.
But we do it because being fully at choice, being fully responsible, is scary. It’s hard. It feels vulnerable.
It feels safer to not be at choice — to see it as other people’s fault, or see it as life just happening to me.
And so we turn to this disempowered view out of habit.
Interestingly … this habit doesn’t actually get rid of the fear and difficulty. Being at the mercy of everything and everyone else is not fun at all, and very scary. We just don’t realize we’re making the choice to be at the mercy of things outside of ourselves.
What Can Happen When We Start Choosing
But let’s say we decide we’re going to choose. “I decide this is what I’m going to do today, how I’m going to show up for conversations, how I’ll react when someone insults me, how I’ll set and honor my boundaries.”
What happens can be very magical:
- We feel more empowered, excited, inspired, motivated.
- We realize we can also choose not to do something, which can give us more space.
- We realize we can stop choosing to make ourselves feel bad about things.
- Our lives can become a deeper expression of ourselves.
When we choose, we are creating the world around us, from our hearts. We choose how we want to experience the world, how we want to interpret the words and actions of others, how we view each moment, what we pay attention to.
This is magic.
The Need for Radical Honest & Responsibility
The way to come into choice in our lives is to be fully honest with ourselves. This isn’t easy — it requires a willingness to look in the mirror with courage, letting our judgment come up but not dwelling on that judgment.
Start by owning the places where you feel not at choice — where does it feel like it’s other people’s fault? Where are you judging or resenting others? Where does it feel like things are happening to you, and you feel powerless?
These aren’t places where you’re doing something wrong — like you shouldn’t be like this. They’re just places to notice.
Now ask yourself: what is the identity that I’m holding onto, by promoting the idea that I’m powerless? It might be the idea that you’re a martyr, a victim, a blameless good person, an exhausted person who is just trying their best but no one appreciates them, a powerful person who lives in a world of losers who don’t get it, etc. etc.
This self-view can be really hard to see, so it helps to have someone else help you see it. If you’d like to do coaching work with me, get in touch.
The next step is to take responsibility — you’re the one who has created this identity. You might not have realized you did, and you’re not bad for doing it — it was a protection mechanism at some point. By now, it’s just habit — you can’t even see it, because it just feels like reality.
If you created it, taking responsibility is deciding if you want to stay that way. If so, great. You’re at choice. If you don’t want to stay that way, then you’re also at choice — you can choose to let go of that identity and choose how you want to show up, how you react to others, how you view others and yourself, what you want to create in your life and in the world.
This is powerful, but not at all easy. It requires work — beautiful, magical, deep work.
Bringing Awareness & Remembering
Once you’ve been honest with yourself, and decided to take responsibility … the hardest part can often be remembering to be aware of it all. We have old habits that we default to, and forget to practice with this deeper layer.
The practice is to become more and more aware. Notice when you’re pointing the finger, or feel powerless. We don’t want to notice we feel powerless, because we don’t like to admit it to ourselves. Just notice where you can.
You can remind yourself to notice as well — put sticky notes in different places, or objects where you’ll see them. Create a wallpaper for your computer or the lock screen of your phone that will remind you. When you see these reminders, stop and notice where you feel like you’re not at choice, and what identity you’re holding on to by choosing to feel that way.
Then ask yourself, “If I let go of that identity, how can I be at choice?”
It’s a powerful, scary and magical question to ask yourself.