Dear loving people,
It was at her retirement that Rose realised she had
spent 26 years of her professional life on the same post as Administrative Secretary
of her company. Bihndoh – her colleague on the other hand recruited on the same
day with Rose had grown to become Director of Operations. With much regret Rose
told her friends, “You see, I made the
wrong choices. I chose not to step out of my comfort zone, I was so afraid to apply
for promotions or for other vacant posts; I never ventured to seek more
training. I opted to remain on the same spot, doing what I thought I was best
at. Bihndoh was more daring, she would try the seemingly impossible and it paid
off. She’s the director of operations and here I remain, a mere secretary. Chaiiii!
This world ooooh!”
This is what happens, “When you have to make a choice
and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice” William James says. I
don’t know what you think?” but that is an undeniable fact. Not making a choice
is a choice. Letting things happen by default is a choice. If we choose to give
up our right to make a choice - we have made a choice. We always have choices,
even if we do not like the ones available. Not liking a choice does not mean we
do not have a choice. We are constantly presented with choices. Every day we
make hundreds of them, some small, some large, and some life changing. Each
choice that we make shapes our lives and determines what other choices will be
available to us.
Often I ask my junior
colleagues what they want to do, where they plan to be in a couple of years or
just how they like to spend an off-day. Guess what? Some get so embarrassed and
even offended. One of them who became a close friend told me one day that at
first she thought I had this boring residual people-pleasing tendency. But when
she began to look at it more closely, she realized it was actually about
relinquishing the tiny decisions, since inevitably there are lots of large ones
that she had to make. That became an eye-opener for her.
It took me considerable
time to come to terms with the concept of not choosing. At one moment, I
thought I was going nuts. After all, if I did not choose, then anything that
happened was not my fault. It took years for me to understand that when
we don't make a choice and we simply let things happen, or we let others make our
choices for us, we have given up our personal power. At times it can
feel freeing to give others the opportunity to choose for us. After all, if
they chose it is their responsibility, right? Wrong. Giving up the right to
choose does not mean we give up responsibility. We are still responsible, even
if we choose to be irresponsible.
The truth is that, every
day we make countless choices that affects our lives in major ways. Do we stay with a job or take a risk and follow our dreams? Do we tell
someone how we feel, or do we wait for a better time? Then there are the
decisions we make by making no choice at all for example when we remain in a job
that we really want to abandon, or we stay in a position even though our
heart’s pulling us to another one.
At times, the only choice we have is to choose our attitude and how we will
respond. These
choices are powerful because they allow us the power to stay in control of the
internal even if we cannot control the external. Choice is a conscience
response. That response is compelling because it allows us to make choices over
how we will act in any given moment. When we choose our responses, we decrease
the number of times we will regret doing something that we felt we were forced
to do.
Life is a constant
stream of choices. That can be overwhelming and sometimes downright exhausting if we put pressure on every decision,
in fear of doing the wrong thing, or making a choice and then somehow missing
out because of it. These big life choices may seem completely unconnected from
the tiny decisions we make about how we spend our time, but it all comes down
to the same question: Do we want to take responsibility for now?
Not making a choice can be a dangerous choice. When we decide not to choose, we decide to give
our personal power away. We give our power away either to a person or
situation. Making a choice, even if it is only how we will respond to a
situation, allows us to maintain our personal power.
Making choices, and being mindful of our choices, is important because it
not only helps us maintain our personal power, but also to take responsibility
for the outcome. By taking responsibility, we remove ourselves from the role of
victim. Being a victim is a weak position to be in and removes choices we may
otherwise have. To claim our personal power, we must make choices and accept
the responsibility for those choices.
We’re the only ones who
can identify what we want and then do something about it, whether it’s what we
do with our evenings, what we do with our jobs, or even what we do with our
lives. We can see this as something stressful, and wait it out; hoping someone
or something else will tell us what’s the best course of action. Or we can tune
into what we want in any given moment, knowing that no matter how things turn
out, we will be happy for finding the strength to follow our instincts and
choose.
Zig
Ziglar says that "Every choice you make has an end result.”
