All we have is our choices

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

Victor Frankl, author of ‘Man’s search for meaning’ and Auschwitz survivor talking about choice.  

My mother often says ‘your life is a series of choices’ - and she’s right!  We don’t have a choice of who or where we are born, but from that moment on we have the ability to make some kind of choice, however tiny, in our life.

Sometimes it is easy to get caught up in a situation or set of circumstances and feel like we have no choice.  But we always do.  Choices can be very difficult and sometimes we find ourselves deciding to give up our power and autonomy to make that choice into the hands of others - because if we do that, then if it all goes wrong, it’s not our fault.  We kind of abdicate responsibility.  Sounds familiar? Then, sometimes we can find that we end up talking as if we are a victim of not making that choice.  We can stay stuck in the situation because we are not, for whatever reason, taking the action to choose. 

For example, when I had a bullying colleague who actively sabotaged my work. At first, I felt like I was the problem so I tried my best to work with it (and around it too) until it affected my health.  I didn’t feel like I had a choice, I was stuck, but in fact I did have a choice.  I could have confronted the individual involved about what was going on, formerly escalated it and made a complaint or resigned from the job.  All of these felt impossible, I wasn’t brave enough to make one of those choices.  Alternatively I could have started playing a counter game, entering the power play - but this choice meant going against my strong value of authenticity. I’m glad I didn’t compromise on my value of being authentic but next time around I would want to be more courageous and make the difficult choice rather than giving up my power until a choice was made for me.

Once we realise that we always have the power to make a choice, it means we can take responsibility for where we find ourselves.  That doesn’t mean choices are easy - as leaders, sometimes the choices we need to make can be very difficult but if we have self-awareness, we can choose in alignment with our values and own them rather than blaming someone else. 

We can also recognise that NOT choosing is also a choice.  Staying stuck or giving away the power to choose to someone else is, actually, a choice too. We all have limiting beliefs which are beliefs about ourselves and the world that hold us back or are no longer serving us. These beliefs form part of our internal dialogue and when we find ourselves in that stuck place it is often because of these. By exploring these and making the initial choice to work towards a new, more helpful belief, we can then begin to tackle the stuckness.

Now that we know we always have a choice:

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” Nelson Mandela

When we understand our limiting beliefs, create our own support system including creating a vision of who we want to be and how we want to show up then we can start to learn how to make choices from our values and our hearts.