One of the stories that has ruled my life, quietly in the background, without me even noticing, is this:
“I have no choice”
If someone asks me to do something, I have no choice. If someone asks me not to do something, I have no choice. If I feel that there is something that someone might want me to do, I have no choice. And so on…
This came up during a powerful coaching session I received the other day.
We talked about how much of my life feels out of control, or at least out of my control.
We talked about how, often, things can seem hopeless. This hopelessness often shows up for me when trying to do things that I want to do. Creations I want to bring forth into the world.
It runs in a loop, something like this:
1. I’m excited about this creation
2. Whoa this creation seems hard
3. No matter what I do, this will likely fail anyway
4. What’s the point in even starting
5. What else can I do instead
6. OMG I could try this new shiny thing
7. Go to ‘1’
Not exactly the most empowering loop.
So how does this relate to having no choice?
Well, my survival mechanism tells me that I have no choice whether something succeeds or not. My survival mechanism is pretty clear that anything I try to do will fail, and there is nothing I can do about it.
And so it becomes a battle of will between me in my essence, and my survival mechanism. Or you could say between the big me and the little me.
The trouble is, in a battle of will, the survival mechanism will almost always win. It knows exactly where your weak points are, your achilles’ heels, and how to strike with devastating force.
So for me, in this instance, I often end up not taking the action I am excited about, because my survival mechanism convinces me that there’s no point anyway. And I don’t have any choice in the matter, right?
The insight that I had during my call was that if I want to change my relationship with choice, I need to change my relationship with ‘no’.
I need to exercise my ability to choose, and train my brain to realise that I do in fact have a choice. And I need to do it by saying ‘no’ to more things.
My automatic response for most of my life has been to say ‘yes’, in an effort to make people like me and not offend or upset, and what I realised during this call was how draining that is. How much energy it takes to constantly put other people before myself. And how every time I say ‘yes’ when I mean ‘no’, I feed my survival mechanism.
Successful, happy people say ‘no’ much more than they say ‘yes’. And I need to start doing the same.
Just as it can be hard to hear a ‘no’, it can, for a lot of us, be just as hard to say ‘no’. It certainly is for me.
This insight into the cunning working of my survival mechanism is huge for me. It has shown me exactly how saying ‘no’ to things that aren’t a ‘hell yes’ for me is a powerful tool in creating the life I want.
I’d love to know what you got for yourself from this?