The Power is in Your Hands

July 24th 2019

At the end of the day, what you choose to do with your life is up to you.

I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the power of choice and its role in life as a whole. You make choices all the time and you don’t even really think about most of them. You choose to wake up with your alarm or hit snooze in the morning, you choose what you wear for the day, you choose when to leave your house to drive to a job that you chose to take (even if you felt like it wasn’t a choice at the time), and you make small decisions all day until you finally choose to go to bed.

However, choice is much larger than just small decisions. It is waking up and deciding to be happy or deciding to feed your bad mood. It is choosing to stay in a situation that makes you unhappy because you are too unwilling to acknowledge that there is another choice that can be made. And, of course, some things come down to consequence and we can’t always have power over certain outcomes, but we do have control over how we react to circumstance.

For me, I am a firm believer in waiting things out before making a decision in my life and I do so with a positive and hopeful attitude. Not all things work out according to plan, but I like to give everything its fair chance before making rash decisions. However, it has taken me a while to get to this point.

I have always been the kind of person who sort of stuck things out for too long and told myself that I didn’t have a choice but to be passive to the flow of life. However, I realized that there is so much more to gain from going against the grain and discovering paths that I couldn’t see before.

That is when I realized the power was in my hands to make life what I want it to be. I can work a job for a year and leave to pursue something entirely different and, on the other hand, I can grow to love a job I didn’t originally enjoy and make the choice to stay for many years and see how much growth it can bring me. I realized that I am not bound by anything or anyone telling me I need to do things a certain way in order to do life properly.

I realized that there really is no such thing as doing life properly and that, by harnessing my personal power, I am doing more to advance my life than I am by trying to live by the rules of someone outside myself. Life isn’t nearly as straight forward as people make it out to be and, as a result, we have way more power to make entirely new paths for ourselves than we realize.

So, how does one harness this personal power of choice? First of all, openly admitting that you are in control is HUGE. I said it out loud for the first time recently and I felt so liberated. “I can choose whether or not to hold onto this job or this person or this situation whenever I want” is what I told myself and all of a sudden, things seemed to matter less. I felt less stuck because I allowed myself to steer my own life instead of putting the wheel in someone else’s hands. I felt free.

The next step to unlocking personal power is thinking of possibilities. A large reason that many people just go with the flow or expectations of life is because they aren’t fully aware of what is out there. When you stop to think of the possibilities of life, you begin to see things for what they really are. I begin to realize that I can be a boss lady working a 9-5, or a yoga teacher, or a blogger, or whatever the hell else I can think of (that I am qualified to do or find a way to get myself qualified to do).

There is no rule that says I need to live a certain way in order to be successful, so I am beginning to be open to the possibilities and allowing myself to consider moving between as possibilities to be as valid an options as choosing one path would be.

The third step to harnessing the power of choice is preparing yourself for uncomfortable change. Power doesn’t come from making the most comfortable choice, sometimes it comes from making choices that are difficult but will enhance your life in the long run. I recently made a choice to take a job that made me really uncomfortable. It is something that I am good at but a big change overall with a lot of work and things to learn, however, I made the choice to go for it and I had to prepare myself to be uncomfortable in order to advance my life.

Lastly, the most important thing to know about choice is that even wrong ones are part of your journey to where you are meant to be. It is okay to make mistakes, because there are really no such thing as mistakes, just potholes on your path through life. Take even failure in stride and that is where you will find your true power.

Jess~