Coach Monique first began using meditation, relaxation training, and thought awareness exercises for her own personal use 15 years ago. Because it had such a positive effect on her day-to-day life, she became trained to teach others.
Everywhere everyday every one of us is making choices. Choices are a constant so it’s easy to forget we are making them. All of us, but some of us more than others, struggle with choice because it inevitably means loss as well. For every door we open, we are closing another, and we fear the loss of what could be. None of us has a crystal ball so we have no guarantee our choices will work out… herein lies the struggle. We all make bad choices, we can’t help it. It’s a part of the human condition, but learning to make better choices and move on are the keys to increasing our successful outcomes.
First, its important to understand making choices is a process. Because choice making is a constant, it is easy to forget just how often we are doing it. This is an important factor in why so many of our choices don’t work out. We make them mindlessly or habitually instead of with careful consideration, intention and expectation factored into the process. Each of us have a unique process for making choices based on our own filters such as what we believe is possible, what we believe we deserve, our past experiences and expectations for the future as well as our comfort levels with things such as change and conflict.
Choices are also driven by our beliefs about economics or money; the perceived required work involved as well as perceived enjoyment and anticipatory excitement for the outcome. Also, not to be forgotten, the occasional need to be right over being happy… who hasn’t fallen into that one?
Here are some guidelines to consider stacking the deck in your favor for making positive choices in your life.
Once we have improved our processes for making choices, we still need to recognize sometimes it will not work out the way we had intended, but all is not lost. Failure teaches us some important lessons so that we can recognize how we can improve our chances next time. Also recognize the gifts we are given because it didn’t work out the way we had hoped. Sometimes it can take some time before we are able to objectively do it, but allowing yourself to reflect on the things that didn’t work gives us the opportunity to see the progress we have made and to recognize strength within ourselves we may have been unaware of before.
The power of choice is a gift given to humanity, recognize it as a privilege, enjoy it, learn from it and see what wonders it can reveal!