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Self Management and the Power of Choice
According to Shad Helmstetter, author of Choices – Manage Your Choices And You Will Manage Your Life, your ability to manage yourself always begins with managing your choices. That means taking full and complete conscious control over every choice you make. Because the little choices you make everyday – from what time you wake up, to what you eat – all add up to patterns that not only shape your life, they actually become your life.
Even though this is how our lives are formed, I doubt you were taught in school how the process of thinking and choosing actually works. None of us were. That’s why most of us don’t have a clue about how to change, even when we really want to do so. Perhaps you’ve tried to apply self-help strategies or self-improvement courses, only to find yourself disappointed by your inability to apply the strategies and see the results you hoped for. Well, you aren’t alone.
According to Helmstetter, you cannot become a good self manager without learning to make conscious choices. In fact, understanding the process of making choices is the bedrock of self management and change. It is “choice management,” that when applied to thinking and action, will restructure your habits and bring about true change.
Science has confirmed that every “style” of thinking (positive, critical, optimistic, fatalistic) becomes an electrically and chemically imprinted pattern of thinking in the brain. The good news is that we have the power to exert control over these patterns and to influence what happens to us by recognizing our ability to make purposeful choices and then put “making choices” into practice.
It sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. Helmstetter’s chapter on “Effective Techniques for Managing Your Choices,” explains the Four Steps of Choice to help increase awareness and encourage you to take responsibility for your actions. They are quite simple:
1. Say to yourself (or out loud if you want to), “Is this a choice?”
2. If the answer is yes, then immediately say to yourself, “This choice is mine.”
3. Next, as soon as you have given the choice as much or as little thought as it requires, consciously say or think to yourself the words, “My choice is….” and complete the sentence.
4. Always be aware at a conscious level of why you have made the choice. Say to yourself, “The reason I made this choice is….” This is to keep you fully on top of which of your mental programs you are responding to, and who or what is in control of your decisions.
If you write these four steps down on a card and refer to them through out the day, your awareness of making conscious choices will grow exponentially. With each choice, you will have an opportunity to do what you want to do, rather than revert to old habits. and that’s where change begins.
