Choosing The Best – Part 4

One of the most important considerations when making a choice is to look at how long that choice will continue to influence your life. With some choices, it is clear that the impact will be lifelong. For example, choosing a spouse will have an impact that can easily last for the rest of your life. Choosing a college or a career can have the same long-term impact. Usually, we take such choices seriously and put a lot of thought and consideration into them.

What many people fail to appreciate is that a lot of the choices which are seemingly smaller can also have far-reaching consequences. For example, if you choose to have a high calorie, high fat breakfast, that would seem to be a relatively minor, short-term choice. But if you make that choice every day, it soon becomes a habit. And if you get in the habit of eating high fat, high calorie meals, it can have a negative long-term effect on your health.

A habit is nothing more than a choice which has been “hard-wired” into your life. It is a choice that you consciously make at first, yet soon it becomes a choice that you continue to make without even thinking about it. When a choice becomes a habit, the power of that choice, whether it is positive or negative, is enormously magnified. Eating one doughnut in your lifetime is not going to have much effect on your health. But eating 5,000 doughnuts could have a tremendous negative effect. That is the power of habit. Going for a brisk 45-minute walk just once is a pleasant experience and not much more. When it becomes a daily habit, though, it can add up to walking more than 700 miles a year and can have a significant positive impact on your level of physical fitness.

Small choices, repeated over and over again, become programmed as habits, at which point they take on a life of their own. So in that regard the small choices, whether positive or negative, can be extremely important, and can affect your life far into the future.

When making a choice, look as far ahead as you possibly can. How will this choice affect your life a month from now, a year from now, or five years from now? What would happen if this choice were to become a habit? The more broadly you consider your choices, the more positive and empowering those choices will be.

Another thing to keep in mind when making a choice is that there are usually more choices available to you than are immediately evident. The best choice may not be obvious at first. It can often require some creativity and imagination. To arrive at the best choice for any given situation, it helps immensely when you decide to look at the situation as an opportunity. Even though it may be filled with disappointment and despair, somewhere there is opportunity. When you make the effort to find it, you’re well on your way to crafting the most positive, productive, creative choice for how to proceed.

Even when others tell you that you have no choice, you have a choice. Even when the circumstances seem hopelessly desperate and intractable, you have a choice. From wherever you are, you can always choose to move yourself and your world positively forward. You can always take what is available to you and mold it into an opportunity.

If you depend on chance, you will likely be disappointed. Instead of leaving your life to chance, live your life by choice and make use of every opportunity to choose the very best.
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