What are you choosing in this moment?

I’ve been feeling a bit blah for a few days. Nothing’s been going particularly badly; it just feels like nothing’s been going particularly great, either.

In response to people’s greetings of “How are you today?”, I’ve been coming back with a rousingly wet-noodle response of “I’m doing alright.”

Yup, that’s definitely someone you’d want to hang around with, absolutely positively.

Not.

And I realized that I’m not only smearing others with this amazingly uninspiring – not to mention energy sucking – response; I’m inflicting it on myself, as well. Can you say “lose/lose”?

Although it felt like I allowed myself to stay stuck in this mode for weeks, it was really only a few days before I gave myself a virtual whap upside the head. I decided it was time to apply to my own situation two of my favorite choices from my client tool kit:

• Make forwarding choices. (If you haven’t encountered the term “forwarding”, it means just what you’d think: something that moves you forward.)

• Act as if.

The reality is that each of us has choices to make in every moment. You can choose to be focused or distracted; see what’s going right or what’s going wrong; claim that you’re feeling alright or that you’re feeling great.

Your choices create success. Or not.

And once you’ve decided which choice will move you upward and forward, rather than keep you stuck or – worse yet – drag you down and backwards, you get to act on that choice.

Some people use the term “fake it ‘til you make it.” I personally don’t like this phrase. It smacks of powerlessness and consciously acting like an impostor (but maybe that’s just me).

I find it much more powerful to “act as if”. This is actually a way for you to model for yourself the way you want to be. It:

• puts the choice on how to behave squarely in your hands;

• exercises your creativity as you think up how a [fill in the blank – confident, successful, strong…] person would act;

• is a very effective method of baby-stepping your way into a more productive, empowering type of behavior.

After realizing I was sucking my own energy dry with my lackluster “I’m doing alright” response, I chose to reply with my more usual answer of “I’m doing great!”

And by choosing this more positive, powerful response, I found myself feeling better, more energetic, more like a person who has a damn good reason to feel great. And that’s a whole lot better than “alright.”

So what are you choosing for yourself in every moment?

Please share your favorite ways of making good choices in the Comments section below.

(And thanks to Sasquatch I for choosing to post his image in the Creative Commons section of Flickr.)

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