Prime Life = Prime Results

Choices

When something happens or is happening, your brain will ask you:

 

1. What does this mean (first and foremost to me)?

2. How should I act in this situation?

3. What will the future look like if I act this way?

4. Will the decision / choice bring me pleasure or pain?

 

This process occurs so quickly; you usually don’t have time to activate your conscious mind to help in the decision-making. Our choices are born out of our identity. How we experience and see ourselves determines our choice.

 

The human being has a need to act consistently, so we solve the issues coming our way from our identity, not with our reason, as we often think. Even when our identity has a negative impact on the choice, we still use it to make the decision. This is because of our need for consistency. Our identity also defines the point of view through which we observe the world.

 

There are many denominators behind our identity. Nearly all of them are however, learned things. And if they are learned, you can also “un-learn” them. To be scientifically correct, we can´t really “un-learn”, the forgetting occurs when we place something else on top of the old memory. Our past memories (and habits) will always remain deep in our subconscious, but the more new memories we gather, the more our old memory will fade away.

 

Our identity consequently seems to be something other than the sum of those mentioned denominators. Could our true identity be a bunch of beliefs, born out of the experience accumulated in our subconscious? I think emotional beliefs impact the forming of our identity more than the experiences we inevitably carry in our backpack.

 

The stimulus chain is always affected by feelings. Therefore one must seek and discover the appropriate feeling to find the precious freedom of choice available in every situation. We can’t change the fact the strongest feeling always wins in a competition like this. In this way it’s possible to change our backbone reactions. As a matter of fact, a human being never has to react. Instead, it is possible to choose a measured response to the feeling emerging. Reacting is unpremeditated, whereas a response is usually the product of consideration.

 

This insight – the fact you yourself can determine the distance between stimulus and reaction – is able to change your life in an instant and permanently. This happened to me. I noticed this insight brings with it a great deal of a healthy sense of responsibility because suddenly I was driven more from the inside out, than out of the power of external stimulus. This sense of responsibility entails a sense of accountability in a curiously helpful way. You always feel more accountable to yourself, when you act according to your identity.

 

In any given moment you can start experiencing positive or negative feelings. This is completely in your hands, it’s your choice. If you hear news of a war somewhere in the world (stimulus), you easily feel anguish (reaction). On the other hand you can hear the same news (stimulus) and let yourself be filled with thankfulness due to the fact the country you live in, is currently in a state of peace (proactive response to stimulus). The responsibility of the choice is yours. What you concentrate on, is your reality.

 

Therefore, if you want to change your reality, change the focus of your concentration.