Your tired and exhausted and your boss asks you to stay late. You know she needs your help but you were also hoping to have a relaxing evening at home. What do you choose?
Your child waited until the last minute to do their homework and now they need your help. Your facing a work deadline. What do you choose?
Your partner has an event coming up that you are "expected" to attend, but you hate going and keep fantasizing about the project you've been working on. What do you do?
Your Chooser determines the relative freedom (or lack of freedom) that you experience in making choices for yourself.
Many of us will do what is expected of us every time.
We will do what we believe we "should" do rather then what feels best to us.
We are taught to trust what makes sense over what feels truly right. In fact, our brains are experts at convincing us that what makes sense is the "right thing to do."
Logic over feelings.
We are bombarded all day long with thoughts about what we "should" be doing that effectively drown out the whispered longings of our heart.
When a thought or idea enters our conscious, it gets run through a filter. The mind scans its filing cabinet of experiences and looks for a category for this thought or idea - right/wrong, good/bad, acceptable/unacceptable, selfish/selfless, etc. - once it finds the category, we close the filing cabinet and have our decision.
Or do we?
This system is called decision by default. The filing cabinet houses all of your past memories, experiences, and is is controlled by your LIMTING BELIEFS.
Your limiting beliefs are the filter through which this system is classifying right/wrong, good/bad, acceptable/unacceptable, selfish/selfless, etc.
So your 5 year old inner child who learned that pleasing others is good and doing what she wants to do is selfish is now in the driver seat of your life.
Or the 5 year old inner child who learned that his behavior is "too much" is now controlling your decisions.
The good news is that we have two different filters and we can make a conscious choice to engage our other chooser. The other chooser is our Inner Wisdom.
Our Inner Wisdom places feelings above logic. What choice FEELS truly best to me? And then uses the rational mind to figure out how to choose what feels best.
When our chooser is broken, we just default to our limiting beliefs as a template for making decisions in our life.
So how do you know if your chooser is broken?
Anger and any of its family members keep showing up - disappointment, blame, resentment, judgement, annoyance, irritation, rage, hatred.
Anger is always an indication of perceived powerlessness. It is a sign that you are making decisions by default rather than allowing your Inner Wisdom to take to the driver seat in your life. It does not mean that you actually are powerless, simply that a part of you believes you are.
This is the function of our limiting beliefs - to render us powerless in order to protect us.
So how do you shift from decision by default to choice by design?
It begins with a pause.
You have to be aware that there is some discomfort when making decisions by default. You have to tune in to those sometimes subtle feelings of anger that are alerting you that your chooser is broken.
They are quiet at first, because we have gotten really good at suppressing them.
Once you notice them, allow yourself to pause before you choose. Put your hand over your heart and become aware of the two different parts of you. The part that is pulling you toward what seems right, what you have always done, or what others will approve of and then become aware of the part of you that has feelings about that. The part of you nudging you in a different direction. One that feels a bit impossible, frightening, and certainly expansive.
I can do that?
Yea, you can do that.
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