What choices are you making?

I believe that there is a huge difference between choice and habit. Making a choice, also known as a decision, requires presence, awareness, and discernment. Habit is a default setting. Habit is you on repeat. Habit, is your foot on the gas while you are asleep at the wheel.

We become what we repeatedly do.

Sean Covey

Since most of our daily behaviors are habituated we stay on our track, comfortable with the familiar. Humans dislike discomfort and when I say dislike I mean HATE, humans hate discomfort. It doesn’t matter one lick if the habit is helping or hurting you, I guarantee you that even your baddest, darkest, ickiest habit is comfy like a perfectly worn pair of jeans.

So many people desire change. They want it so badly they can taste it. They yearn for it. Yet they run their day exactly as they did the day before. Each habit bolstering the track they are on. They get to the point where even the desire to change becomes habituated. How many friends do you have that are talking about creating the same changes in their lives that they were embarking on a decade ago?

Life is a series of choices. Each choice leads to the next, a chain reaction that starts in the past and impacts our future. Minor choices, major choices, and all the choices in between create ripples of impact, ripples of possible change.

Repetition is not failure. Ask the waves, ask the leaves, ask the wind.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening.

The simple truth is that when we change it is going to be UNCOMFORTABLE. Changing is like pulling on a pair of jeans that are too small, while standing in front of a mirror, and getting the button to close. To change you have to choose it. You have to take the action required. Change requires active choice. A choice you keep choosing until the change has come to pass. If you want to shift yourself you have to put in the effort. You have to choose it, again and again and again.