As I mentioned last time it is so empowering when you feel like you have choices. It opens a whole new way of looking at life and it sends us on a more gratifying trajectory.
So what does life look like when you realize you have choices? Well for me it became more joyful and purposeful. As I mentioned I realized I had a choice on how to show up in the world. What I was going to do with my time. Who I was going to be around. How I was going to view things. How I was going to treat myself. The last one was another big one for me. Throughout the years I had not been very kind to myself. Even now, at times, I catch myself putting others first and negatively talking to myself. The difference though is I now know I have a choice so when that starts to happen I put a stop to it quickly and make a different choice.
Back a few years ago if someone had told me that I could have chosen to change my career I would have thought they were crazy. I figured I would continue with my accounting practice until it was time to retire. Interestingly enough, retirement to me now seems like such a funny arbitrary notion. There is no set time. It is your choice! It is when the time is right for you! We get to choose. But here I am changing things up and making different choices.
I think the difference is, in the past I made choices but they were unconscious choices. Now my choices are conscious and deliberate. My choices feed who I am and how I want to show up in the world. You may have noticed I’ve used that phrase numerous times “how I show up in the world”. I’ve done this intentionally to hi-lite we get to choose. Taking a stand for who we are and living within our integrity, authenticity, and values is showing up in the world. When we show up in the world we make the choice not to meander through life. Life is for us to live. We get the pleasure of being alive but when we feel we don’t have choices we exist in our lives. We survive in our lives instead of living our lives. The other thing that goes hand in hand with this is when we choose how we show up in the world we start showing the world who we are because we are choosing to be seen. When I did this it also released my voice which I now choose to use fully in my life. Showing up in the world, being seen, and using our voices can be scary but it is so worth it. It was such an opening for me and I continue to make the choice every single day.
What I have come to understand is that by realizing I have choices, my life is so much more worth living. Part of that is because I made one big first choice and that was I chose me. From there I made choices to figure out who I was and what I wanted out of life. I chose to dream again and I’ve experienced how they have come true. I choose how to live my life and what was acceptable to me and unacceptable to me and not to waiver on the unacceptable. We get to make those choices and they enrich our lives in so many ways.
As you can see by shifting and making choices from a more conscious standpoint my world opened up. This opening allowed me to see more possibilities around me. Stay tuned for the fifth and final post in the series on choices.