Control Your Life: Break-Away from Default Choices

Whether at work or at home, each day we are confronted with choices that will change the course of our lives.  Often, the choices we make are by default. You buy a new system because “I am used to it.” Or, you choose to be a lawyer because “My family is full of lawyers.”  These default choices are ones that have been made according to an existing, predetermined code.

Take a moment to think about your default choices and see if you can find a pattern in your decision-making processes. Acknowledging these patterns is important because they can lead you to recreate the same situations in your life without intending to do so. It’s up to you whether you want to repeat a pattern or move on from it, but becoming aware of it gives you the choice.

What can you do to change your default choices? One solution is to learn a set of navigation skills. The purpose of navigation is to locate your position accurately, to set a target destination, and to progress toward that destination.

Following are important principles for Self-Navigation:

• If you don’t know where you are starting from, you will navigate from the wrong premise. And you won’t know how far or in which direction you need to go.
• Navigation is a lifelong process. When you give up choice and change, you give up on your life’s journey.
• In the navigation process, you will come across major and minor choice points. At each major choice point, you create the next section of your life’s path – for better or for worse.

To learn more principles and a simple but deep model for Self-Navigation that will give you the power to choose rather than relying on unconscious patterns, download a copy of Self-Navigation: A Compass for Guiding Your Life and Career.