Use Your Power to Choose Your Life

The power of choice is hugely underestimated by most people - in fact, many of us believe that our power to choose is pretty much limited to picking from the Macdonald's menu - yet it goes far deeper than that, and when you harness your power to choose, it can transform every area of your life.

Let's look at the nature of choice - let's put that in the context of choosing a dessert at a restaurant. So your waiter arrives and asks if you'd like chocolate or vanilla ice cream - you make a choice, and that's usually what you get. Some people might give that choice a bit more thought, while others would just go straight for the chocolate, but all of us are familiar with and expect to have the power to choose in that situation.

Unfortunately, life is generally not like that. We get presented with things with only one choice - like the waiter showing up and offering you only vanilla ice cream - you can choose to have no ice cream, but if you want ice cream, vanilla is what you're getting. This is more how life tends to show up for us - you want to have a car, but you have the car that you have. You want a house - but you have the house that you have. You don't get presented with a menu of cars and houses and asked to choose which one you would like.

Now - this is where traditional thinking is all wrong. We assume that we have a choice in some things and not in others, whereas we all, always have a choice in everything. If that's a liitle hard to swallow - stick with me, it will make sense, I promise!

Let's take that car example - what you would really like to drive is a brand new Porsche, but instead you have a 12 year old Ford. There's two ways to look at that. Most of us are trained to think along the lines of "this is all the car I can afford, if I had more money, then I'd be able to buy that Porsche, but I can't because...." - does that sound familiar? This is certainly the way that I used to think. But there is a problem here - because this way of thinking says that the car you drive is determined by what your boss pays you, or whether the bank will give you a loan, or whether or not you were able to go to college, or some other reason. All of these "reasons" are giving your power away - they are making the car that you drive someone else's choice, not yours.

Now - turn that around. Let's say that you CHOSE that 12 year old Ford. It doesn't matter why - maybe you liked the color, maybe it just doesn't matter WHY you might have chosen that car - it really doesn't matter. What matters is that you get clear with yourself that you made that choice - not anyone else, just you. This might sound a little crazy to some of you - "why the heck would I do that?" might be running through your mind! But that's not the point. The point is that YOU make the choice and not someone else.

Now extend that to the rest of your life - to your family, your partner, your house, your clothes, your kids, your job - everything. Understand that you chose all of those things - you were not forced into anything, you chose everything exactly the way it is. This is where the power to choose gets really awesome.

If someone else chose parts of your life - that makes you a victim, and although I've known many people who were successful at being a victim, I have yet to meet a successful, fulfilled victim. But if you chose your life, good parts and bad parts, now you are in control. That means that you can start making some different choices - choices for a better life. Suddenly, life becomes about you want to happen, not what is happening to you.

These ideas are a bit hard to swallow - it took me a while to wrap my head around it - but you have the power to choose in that too! Some of you will have already closed this article, others are thinking of all the reasons why they would never have chosen certain aspects of their lives.

All I can say is that this concept has been incredibly powerful and instrumental in my building a six-figure home based business - by making different choices every day, I have and continue to achieve more and more in my life. If you can put your usual thinking aside and try this way of looking at life on for size - you will be amazed and how much power you will have. So much power - you will never give it to anyone else again!

Don't ever give away your power to choose - it's more valuable than you know!