We Have A Choice

There are many times in life when it may feel like we have no choice. It's something I hear all the time, people telling me that they didn't have a choice. The truth is, though, that we always have a choice. There are certainly times when the choice is extremely obvious, like when a cop is trying to pull you over, the obvious choice is that you should pull over. That doesn't mean you don't have a choice though, even in a situation like that, you could keep driving, it just wouldn't be a very good move most of the time. That's a bit of a silly situation, but in this post I'll discuss a few instances where we might think we don't have a choice, but really we do, and if we choose the less obvious choice we'll end up much happier.

The first situation is right when you wake up. Most of the time you're waking up to an alarm that wakes you up so you can go to work or school, or whatever other commitments you have that morning. Within the first 30 seconds of waking up we've already decided what kind of a day we're going to have. If you have a bad day, you have generally committed to it within seconds of waking up.  How many times have you used the excuse "I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed."? How about rather than letting that simple excuse ruin your whole day, instead you decide that you're going to have a good day, regardless of anything that may seem bad at first look? My advice would be to go to sleep every night telling yourself that you're going to wake up rested and have a great day the following day. Then when you wake up tell yourself how awesome the day is going to be. Bonus tip: If you can, set your alarm tone to be something uplifting and happy, it'll help this whole process.

Another situation where we "have no choice" generally, is when you're driving and somebody cuts you off. Why do we get so bent out of shape by this? Road rage is one of the most amazingly common things I've ever encountered. It seems like everybody gets insanely angry over the tiniest most insignificant things as soon as we get behind the wheel.  If giving someone a ride was your first impression with them, they would likely think you fly off the handle over every little thing.  So how about instead you just accept that maybe they didn't see you, or they are in a really big hurry to get somewhere? When we get cut off, you have the choice to just take a breath and be okay with it.  The same goes for when somebody is driving really slow in front of you and you can't pass them, perhaps you should take it as a sign from the universe that you should slow down and just appreciate the drive, letting go of your insistance that you need to be there now. A lot of times I've found that when someone in front of me is forcing me to drive really slow, I end up seeing a cop less than a mile up the road, and whether or not I get pulled over is directly related to how I handled that situation.

So there are a couple instances where you might not have realized that you do in fact have a choice.  In the comments below, let me know if there are some other situations where you've given yourself the choice to feel happy instead of defeated.