Do We Really Have a Choice?
by Allison Watts, DDS
“There may be a thousand little choices in a day.
All of them count.”
If you’ve gotten my Practice Success Guide, in one of my follow-up emails, I asked the question, “Are you making choices in alignment with what you say you want?”
If you’re a dentist and you haven’t gotten The Practice Success Guide, go get your free copy at…
Or just ask yourself, “Are you making choices in alignment with what you say you want?”
To make choices in alignment with what we want requires three things:
1. Awareness in the present moment, including awareness of our own motives
2. Clarity-knowing where we are and what we want
3. Courage to make the correct choice despite fears and anxieties deeply embedded in our psyches
Even though I’m learning all of these self-empowerment skills and tools, sometimes I don’t feel empowered. Can I really choose what affects me and how it affects me? Sometimes I feel like I just need to slow the moment way down, so I can choose something different than what my autopilot would have me choose.
Our subconscious mind imposes choices on us based on what it believes will keep us safe and what will be best for us. These beliefs come from our childhood and things that we learned, probably when we were young. They may have served us then, but not so much now…
So why don’t we make choices in alignment with what we say we want? Because we want something else more —immediate gratification, safety, control, comfort, power… we just may not be aware of it! Our unconscious belief causes us to make a choice believing it will give us the feelings or outcome it wants. Libet’s theory says that subconscious activity not only precedes but determines conscious choice. Yikes! Really?
Can we reprogram our subconscious? Can we just make more conscious choices that are alignment with what we really want? I truly believe we can. I don’t believe we just got programmed as kids and that’s it—we’re stuck! I believe (I’ve learned this from Bob Proctor and other thought leaders) with the following steps, we can choose beliefs that serve us.
- Know what you really want
- Believe you can have it-you don’t have to know how…
- Decide and take the first step
- Hold the picture in you mind, impressing it into your subconscious
- Keep focusing on the goal/vision, believing it is coming (do not look at your current situation and decide it’s not on it’s way-that will stop the process)
- Keep taking action in the direction of what you want
**It’s easiest if you start with a goal that you really want and you really believe you can have.
Any idea that goes into our subconscious repetitively becomes fixed. When you repeat the idea or goal state it as if you already have it.
We can change our beliefs to ones that serve us. If you’re not getting the results you want, it’s important to do this because our beliefs create our choices and our choices create our life.
Go create the life you want … one goal at a time,
Allison