Krawczak

Even before you leave the house in the morning, you make dozens, if not hundreds, of choices. Should you hit the snooze feature on the alarm or just get out of bed? What should you wear for the day? Should you eat breakfast? If yes, then what should you eat? You picked a bagel, should you toast it, microwave it, or eat it cold? What should you put on the bagel – cream cheese, butter, peanut butter, something else, or nothing? There are so many choices.

Those seem to be the easier ones. What about the more difficult choices you face? Like calling a therapist to ask for help. Whether to allow your child to walk home from school alone at age seven. To take the job offer that would move you and your family across the country. Buying a new vehicle and have a vehicle payment or continue to pay for repairs on the aging vehicle you already own. You can add your own challenging choices from experience to the list.

That are a lot of opportunities to make choices that add value to your life or choices that detract from your life. Are you making the best choices as often as possible? What determines if a choice is a good one or not? Do you know if the tens of thousands of choices you make in a day are taking you closer to, or further from, a successful, happy, positive place?

Even making the choice not to make a choice is a choice you make. When you think about it that way, it becomes more evident how you are making so many choices each day. Are you on autopilot when it comes to making choices? Many people are. When you make choices without considering long and short-term consequences, without your goals in mind and without weighing or comparing the different options, then you are not likely aligning your choices with your goals.

What you don’t always think about is how the choices you make today have an impact on what happens to you in the future. Especially when you start to consider how your choices are compounding and building on previous choices you’ve made.

If you were to take a step back and look at how you arrived where you are right now, you could likely map your choices that led you to today. Was it planned or did you make choices in the moment without thinking about the long game? Were there times when you didn’t feel like you had a choice and simply let things happen to you? Although that may seem like what happened, there are always choices to be made. It may not be the exact choice you want to be making, but you still have some sort of choice in every situation, even if it’s the choice of how to respond to a situation that isn’t ideal to start with.

Your goals are your destinations. You likely have different goals for different areas of your life. Your choices are your road map on how to get there. When you are very clear about your goals and intentional about your choices, it makes it a lot more likely that you will achieve your goals.

When your choices don’t align with your goals, you might stay busy, but are you moving forward toward whatever it is you want for yourself?

I see it frequently, and you likely to as well. People say they want less drama, less stress, more happiness, more free time, etc., but they make choices that are taking them further from those things.

What if you started becoming crystal clear on your goals and then purposefully aligned your choices with those goals? What kind of changes would that lead to for your life? Positive ones, I suspect. I know when I focus on the alignment of choices with goals for myself, I am happier.

Pay attention to the many choices you make in a day and try to spend a little more time on making each choice so you can align your life and achieve the things you want to for yourself.