Choose to Live with Mastery & Wellbeing

The crux of living with mastery & wellbeing is the ability to recognize and take advantage of a simple fact: that every moment of the day presents an opportunity to choose how you will live. These moment-by-moment choices will largely determine the quality of your life—usually far more so than external events can determine it.

Dr. Viktor Frankl was a leading proponent of making conscious choices.

The ways you respond to the choices you are presented with each day—the actions you take and the thought processes and attitudes you employ—constitute a daily practice. In this sense, life is a practice. Discovering this reality for yourself and acting in accordance with it are immensely freeing. You learn that you have much room to move even within limitations and constraints.

Taking advantage of your freedom to choose entails becoming fully responsible (response-able) for making conscious choices in every moment: making an earnest and repeated effort to consider your limitless choices and choosing to act in ways that are aligned with your personal life values.

 Mounting evidence from brain scan research clearly demonstrates that every time you make a fully conscious choice, you reinforce the neural circuit for that choice, which makes it easier to make that choice again. Therefore, when you begin to recognize and act upon the choices that align with your values and promote health and happiness, you have the opportunity to make use of your own physiological circuitry to create wellness, consciously enlisting an aspect of your brain’s functioning that usually operates outside of your awareness.

How to Live by Choice

Living by choice is not a mystery; the steps to doing so are simple. But it doesn’t come easily, especially at first. If it did, everyone would drop their old habits and start living with intention so they could reap all the benefits and live healthier, happier lives. The challenges of living by choice are to make the commitment to exercise your response-ability, to practice certain steps each day, and to practice consistently over time.

The steps will be explicated in Friday’s post.