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How Making Strategic Choices Can Improve Your Life
The quality of our lives depends on how well we make strategic choices.
A choice well made changes everything. In the words of Theodore Roosevelt, "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."
Living in an information society, it may seem that we can now make better and more informed choices to determine our success, but confusion, not clarity, appears to be the norm.
When we choose, we preclude other choices. We can enter one door or the other, but not both at the same time. Moreover, since each door leads to a separate adventure, we will never be able to return the road not taken. Sometimes it appears that we can make no choice and stay in a safe place, but this too is a choice, a choice to stay stuck where we are right now.
Since choice precludes other choices, it is always a risk.
We lose the possibility of other choices not made. Also, the choice we make may not bring us the consequences that we really desired.
Choices determine our destiny and the quality of our lives. They may be small or large strategic choices, but each one moves our lives forward, molding us to be less or more of ourselves. Thus, a choice, the opportunity to weigh options, determines our direction.
And just as we may lose with a choice, we may also win. This, too, can be unsettling. When we win, it transforms you. New strategic choices, responsibilities, and consequences now arise. It will be extremely difficult to hold on to the old ways of doing things. The tabloids are full of celebrities who are completely overwhelmed by their success and become self-destructive.
Why do we fear success? It is because we fear power, our personal power. Recognizing our own power means we have to give up thinking that things out there are running our lives. We have to take responsibility for everything, including the bad things. The culturally conditioned belief that something out there is running what is happening within us has to be given up.
When we make strategic choices, then, interesting things happen.
When we choose, we risk losing. On the other hand, if we don't make a choice, then we will have certainly lost.
When we choose, we also risk winning. These consequences then activate our inner thermostat that wants everything to be the same. We threaten our comfort zone because we are now in a new, uncharted place. It is this that makes people feel overwhelmed by success and actively try to reverse it.
While winning may not offer we everything that we need, what else is there? When an actor becomes famous, he may not be able to go shopping without being mobbed by curious onlookers. When someone becomes rich, they may have to spend a lot of their time just managing their business and finances. Winning, then, means certain pleasures, certain familiar and comfortable things, may be lost. Our social strategic choices will not be the same as before success happened.
On the other hand, losing is infinitely worse. Losing is about negativity, scarcity, lack of all kinds, and frustrating limitations.
Finally, there is a place where we neither win nor lose, but nothing makes much sense or is worth pursuing. This is a place of apathy.
Our ultimate choice, then, is whether to win and change things or lose and feel the sting of scarcity or stay in that gray zone where nothing much happens. All our other strategic choices, whether small or large, lead up to one of those three outcomes.
About the Author Saleem Rana at MindPower Insights will show you how to get focused, increase productivity, plan your future, and take action to realize your dreams! Visit Mindpower Insights today and download free goal-setting software.
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