LJ007: Every Moment is a Choice [Foundations]

This week on the podcast, we're exploring the choices that we have in every moment. It's common in our culture to look at our lives in terms of "have-tos," but staying in that space takes away our agency and our joy. By getting curious about our have-tos, we can figure out what is really important to us and play with ways to make the things we do more enjoyable.

And in difficult moments, when it really feels like terrible things are happening to us, we still have the choice of how to respond, what story we tell about our situation, and what energy we bring to it. Realizing how much choice we have can be so empowering!

We hope today's episode sparks some fun insights for you and we invite you to dive deeper with our Episode Questions. Join us on Instagram or YouTube to continue the conversation and share your reflections.

Let’s dig deep, challenge paradigms, choose connection, and live joyfully!

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EPISODE QUESTIONS

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1. Do you find yourself saying “I have to” a lot? Can you find any patterns around when you see it happening more frequently?
2. How does it feel to think about having choices in each moment?
3. What helps you find your center when moving through a challenge?
4. What choices do you see around the stories you are currently telling about your life?

TRANSCRIPT

ANNA: Hi, and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast! We're happy you're here and interested in exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world.

In today's episode, we're going to talk about choice. I love talking about and grounding ourselves in choice, because life is filled with choices from the mundane to the epic. And for the most part, it's an invisible process. We're making decisions on the fly throughout the day. Other decisions are made with a lot of deliberation and forethought and take a lot of time, but the ability to choose is something that empowers us. The knowledge that, no matter what, we have a choice.

PAM: Right, and that is so surprisingly easy to forget in the moment. I can find myself moving through parts of my day almost by rote, and sometimes that means I'm in the flow of things, feeling good and accomplishing things I want and choose to do. And other times things start to rub.

When I start hearing myself say, "Oh, I have to do this," that feeling that I don't have a choice is a good clue that I'm probably feeling a bit overstretched or under-resourced, and it's a great clue to step back, take a breath, and just take a moment to look around a bit.

It's so easy to fall into the "I have to" trap, because it is used so much in our culture. The phrase "I have to," or, "You have to," has become so commonplace that we've mostly stopped questioning it altogether. It just seeps into our everyday language. We say we have to go to the store, we have to brush our teeth, we have to go to bed, and so many more things. And soon, we start to believe that we have to do all the things, that we don't have a choice, that we are, in fact, prisoners to a long list of have to's.

And not only that, when we come to feel that we don't have choices and buy into this whole "have to" ethos, it's usually not long before we start to feel pulled to impose them on others. "This has to be done and you have to help," which then can lead to judging others around the things we think they hav