Old comfortable fears or new courageous purpose?

[Note: this post was originally published on Substack August 25, 2023] 

You get to choose, every single day

Is there a time you can recall when you were taught about choosing? If you’re like me, it was probably about something related to food as a young child. You could have “this yummy thing” or “that yummy thing”, but you couldn’t have both yummy things. Those were our first lessons in choices. They definitely got harder from there!

What happens when we choose comfort in pain rather than courage in freedom? We actually do this all the time. Our brains work most efficiently in set patterns. It’s why breaking old habits and creating new ones is so hard. I recently broke a very old belief pattern in my head. It involved old stories I told myself. Ones that had been set when I was a child. Ones that protected me then, but only hurt me now as an adult. They were comfortable, they were known, and they led me through many years of my life.  

The old stories were beliefs that wound up feeding anxiety, pain, and fear as I grew older, and they no longer fit my life. Palpable feelings that influenced many decisions that I had made as an adult. Even though those stories were no longer real they held me captive in the belief that I needed them. I needed to continue to live in that space, even when it caused me anxiety and pain because moving into something new felt harder and more painful. 

I wasn’t self-aware enough at the time to realize that I could change these things. I didn’t know I had a choice. That’s just “how things were” and “how I was.” Even when I was told that I, in fact, did have a choice, I didn’t know what my “choice” would be. How could there be a choice? This was “how I was” because that’s how I’d been raised! I didn’t understand what this “choice” thing was all about!  

It made thinking about making a different choice another hard and painful decision that I didn’t know the answer to … yet. 

When I started to realize that coaching and being human and being in service to other humans was where my heart lived, I still didn’t grasp that I had the opportunity to choose to leave those old stories behind, because I kept coming back to how hard and painful it would be to change. 

Even when I’d worked with my therapist and my coaches and had a rational idea of what I could do, it wasn’t fully connecting with my emotional side. I didn’t feel like I could authentically make that choice yet. I hadn’t embraced and believed with my whole heart that I could have a purpose, a “raison d’être” in this life.  

In a recent therapy session, I realized that my coaching is my raison d’être. It’s what makes me feel alive, rejuvenates my spirits, and helps me honor my need to be a human in service to my fellow humans. It’s my way of helping create a little bit of humanity in what can often be a hostile and insensitive world. 

And now I understand.  

I get to choose.  

Old fears and pain or new freedoms and courage.  

Every. Single. Day.  

I get to choose whether to live in my old stories of fear, anxiety, and pain, or whether to live in courage, with the freedom to pursue my raison d’être.  

It may have taken a long time for me to feel able to make that choice the first time, but now I get the option to make that choice all the time. And with every opportunity to make that choice, it becomes closer to being a habit and just “how I am.”   

Knowing you have a choice is the first hurdle. What’s amazing is we all get to make that choice.   

Every. Single. Day.