Choice

If you don’t have choice you can’t really do anything about how your life unfolds. It’s beyond your control. To feel you have no choice in any aspect of your life is to feel powerless, which is a terrible thing.

Most of us would, I think, agree that we do have choice in our day-to-day lives, but having a good understanding of choice is important for us if we’re to understand how much agency we have.

Choice or lack of choice is well-defined in some areas of our lives. We have good deal of choice in what we eat for breakfast and maybe very little choice about what time we show up for work or bring the kids to school. I’m not too concerned about these areas. It is where choice is less obvious that interests me more, specifically: times when we think we are exercising choice but we are, for example, always making the same choice, and conversely times when we feel our choice is limited, but there may be more options available to us than we at first perceive.

As an example of the first instance. One day I was working on something on my computer, almost certainly something I didn’t like doing but needed to get done. I found myself flicking over to my web browser and opening a news site. In my head the dialog was running thus: “this is sort of hard and sort of boring, I’ll just give myself a break for 5 minutes and read the headlines”. At that moment I realised I felt like I was exercising a choice - I am choosing to take a break - but the actual unfolding experience had no choice in it at all. It was much more like I was compelled to exercise a habit of distraction and procrastination.

I’m going to labour this point because I feel there is an important distinction to be recognised here. I felt like or thought I was making a choice (between ‘work’ and ‘break’), like it was a ‘rational decision’. But when I examined what happened, there didn’t seem to be any ‘choice’ at all. My habit of giving in to distraction and procrastination compelled me to act in one particular way. Had I really been consciously choosing, I would’ve chosen to finish the work task. Rationally I knew it needed to be done, rationally I knew browsing the web would do nothing for me except prolong and delay the task, rationally I knew that I hadn’t been working for so long that I would actually benefit from a break. I knew all that, but I made a choice that went against what I wanted.

I thought there was choice where in fact there was none. Unless I consciously acted to choose and that was hard because of my engrained habit of procrastinating.

In change and transition work you will hear choice talked about a lot. Simply because it is so central to change: without choice, there can be no change. Really think about that. Unless you exercise your ability to choose, you will end up doing what you are used to doing. By definition change is doing something different, being something different. And that cannot happen without choosing the new path.

Sometimes change is forced upon us: changing work circumstances, an illness, a change of relationship, etc. Here we seem to have less choice. But we do have one very special and powerful choice left to us: we have choice in how we respond to the external change. And again, unless we remember that this is available to us, we will always feel powerless in the face of external changes, a victim of circumstances, helpless. But we really do have choice in how we respond to the world.

So think about choice as it is manifest in your life. You can practice choice in small ways to get used to using it, to ‘build up the muscle’. Be especially conscious of the little habits and patterns that no longer serve you - can you modify them by making better choices?