I asked my doctor this question once – If you were me, what would you do? – and she gave me a straight answer. Well, I asked, right? I was so glad to have my options taken off the table. I just did what she said. Her answer made things easy. But most importantly, her answer actually brought me peace, and I trusted her immensely. I knew if I were opposed to her advice, I would have known it immediately and said so.
This example shows that we can be pretty clear about what we don’t want, but not so clear about weighing options and saying what it is we do want. I’ll bet you can give me a longer list about what you don’t want than what you want because when we begin to explore what we want, our expectations soar and we want perfection – and hence, we find it very hard to decide on anything!
The reality is everything comes down one choice at a time. We can create whatever we want, and we can change our mind anytime! The ONLY thing holding us back from crossing the bridge between what we want and where we want to be is the choice to move. Mostly, we know this intellectually, but we don’t know this. So, why so stressful?
Today, we have more choices than ever! In the doctor’s office that day, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to review all the options I had, and my doctor’s response brought me peace, not fear. It was much easier for me to decide within this constraint based on our trust, but more importantly I knew what peace felt like in my body.
Most of us need to discover, inside ourselves, how we want to spend to our lives; what brings us peace and what brings us stress. My work is to help you in the digging, to teach you how to trust yourself and find what it is you’re yearning for. Coaches can lay out options, just like doctors, but the clients or patients must decide.
Within the deciding comes the idea of regret. Will I make the right the choice? Will everything I expect come to fruition? The only thing you can know for sure is that if you sit it out, if you don’t decide, you’ll never regret it, and you’ll never move forward.
It’s all an experiment. All we can do is continue to re-adjust on our way across the bridge, stay vulnerable, address conflicts in our own way, and keep walking. Maybe a few things get dropped over the edge and lighten your load.
Spending the time to discover what you want is important because
if you decide to do nothing,
if you decide to maintain your status quo,
or you decide to make a move toward what you want,
you’ll get back just what it is you’ve decided.
So sit with yourself, and decide what it is you reeeally want.
