Choices are good, choices can bring us opportunity and choices can bring us freedom.  Choices can also give us the building blocks to create a prison inside of ourselves which enable us to freeze up and not be able to move in any direction for fear of making the “wrong” choice. Having choices gives us the opportunity to get to know ourselves. What do we like or dislike? What do we prefer?  Believe it or not, for many people, just knowing what their favorite color(s) is a difficult choice.  I’d love to see the statistics for sandwich places such as Subway Sandwiches.  What is their best seller?  How many choices does their average customer make (bread, cheese, meat, veggies, spices, salad dressings) and has their customer “matured” in their decision making capacities over the years of being offered choices? I think probably so, since now some of the major hamburger places are offering more and more choices. 

Then there are the life choices such as do you want to be married (or have a partner) or not, do you want to have children or not. Some of the churches and synagogues offer pre-marriage counseling, which for me when I got married in my early 30’s seemed rather archaic since I’d been on my own for awhile, but I realize now that my husband and I still had some tough decisions to make about how we wanted to live and share our lives that we needed guidance on. 

There are also the moral choices such as if you were on a ship that was sinking and you had two kids, which would you save first or would you jump in with both of them?  Hopefully, most of us won’t ever have to make a choice like that in our lifetimes. Sometimes our choices can feel very big though, even if we’re not on a sinking ship. 

So with all the choices we have available to us throughout our lives, how in the world do we ever figure out what we want to “be” when we grow up?  For me, I hired a Coach, and explored several paths until I landed on being a Coach myself.  Then as a Coach, we’re bombarded with all kinds of topics that we can Coach on, how do we make the choice where we can be the most useful to our clients and attract clients in a relatively new market place (Coaching)?  I am learning (again) that it is all about following your gut and/or heart and listening to what it would choose for you to do. 

Today I’m going to be on a guest panel for a radio show (KOOP 91.7 at noon) led by Nelin Hudani and our topic is going to be around how “Life mirrors us”.  I love-love-love being on the radio.  At some point, I am going to make the choice to either have my own talk show on the radio or not.  To get to the place where I can make the best decision for me, I will do the footwork first. I will find out how much time and/or money would be involved in having my own radio show, I’d take a consensus of all my friends and clients to see what kind of topics they would want to hear on a radio show hosted by me, I’d line up guests and speakers/entertainers. Then I’d listen to my heart/gut to see if this is really where I want/need to spend my time. 

Right now though, I’m going to make the choice to go have a venti-decaf-Americano with one Splenda!What kind of choices are you making today?