The average working adult makes approximately 12 decisions before 9am and it is estimated that an adult makes about 70 or more decisions a day. Starting with whether to get out of bed when the alarm goes off, to what to wear, what to have for breakfast (or even if you will have breakfast).
Whenever you have decided consciously or unconsciously, to do something, then you have exercised your ability to make choice. No matter what your circumstances or situation, there are always choices that you can make. Everything in your life is a choice, even doing nothing.
Once you let go of the possibility of choice, the walls of your life close in around you and become solid, immoveable objectors to the magic and mystery of your creative mind. Your life will become reduced to an endless repetition of habits, and behaviours, instead of a fresh unfolding of endless opportunities and possibilities.
It is easy to eliminate possible choices from our decision making process because we quickly assess that we are not capable of taking that route (self-doubt), we tried it before but failed (self-criticism), it would be too difficult (fear), or others will not approve or allow us to act in this way (mind-read). Whatever excuses we give for not taking a particular course of action, it is generally surrounded in resistance. He path of least resistance is not always the wisest choice.
In his book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes that
To yield to resistance deforms our spirit.
It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.
It is amazing how many people wait until a choice has to be made before thinking about it. Making choices under pressure does not allow you to filter your preferences, so that you can make self-determined wise decisions about what will give you the outcome you desire.
To fully explore choices one must be calm and take the time to discover the potential in each choice. This cannot be done in the heat of the moment. Steve Jobs pointed out that when the mind calms down
…there’s room to hear more subtle things- that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before.”
Nothing will happen unless you make the choice to act. The power of choice belongs to each one of us. Making conscious decisions empowers us to do and be what we want – what is really important to us.
There is nothing you cannot do or be, if you have the courage to believe it
Daniel O’Leary