“Power of choice is a fundamental power of the human experience! "

Posted on September 06, 2022 by Ameneh 'Arja' Khaleghi, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

“Power of choice is a fundamental power of the human experience!
The power of the choices you make have infinite consequences; from the littlest choices to the biggest and here is the paradox: you have no idea what a little choice is or a big choice!!
We were used to believing that a big choice is an obvious one, buying a house, getting married, getting divorce….in fact those are your small choices! The choices that actually matter when it comes to your health, when it comes to healing, when it comes to positioning yourself, empowering yourself, are the choices that you think have the least power that you make in the privacy of your own company that perhaps you think are the most insignificant, I have found repeatedly are the most powerful choices of your life! Most powerful impact on your biology, on your sense of who you are, on your well-being, on your whole life map.”
Caroline Myss, Tedtalk, please watch the full video on youtube.

This is one of my most favorite talks from Caroline Myss, she beautifully explains the power of choice and I just happened to read Viktor Frankel’s famous book “Men’s search for meaning” these days and came across a very relevant quote, it goes like this:

“We, who lived in concentration camps, can remember the men who walked through the huts of others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

“Even though we are all subject to circumstances in our lives, we are free to choose. To choose the way we think about those circumstances. To choose also how we will respond to them. I dare say that few of us will undergo the horrors that Viktor experienced in the death camps. Yet in the midst of that situation, he realized his true freedom. The power to choose his attitude. In fact, he said that though the Nazi’s could take everything from him, they could not take away this: his power to choose his response to them.” Source: The Power of Choice: Freedom Over Circumstances"
I suppose living in Nazi camps was the extreme adversity one could go through, it was a very exceptional experience and I don’t think any of us have any idea what it really looked like, and Frankel talking about this because he was the person who chose his attitude and we realize this from several situations that he described in his book and in fact he was not the only one, he continues the above quote with this:
“And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.
Seen from this point of view, the mental reactions of the inmates of a concentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certain physical and sociological conditions. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”

I believe same is applicable to us and we have a choice on how we want to show up in the world, I don’t think it is the easiest thing to do but I believe it is possible and we have the choice to respond rather than react, we have the choice to think we are the creator of our life or the victim of the circumstances. The point is that we all happen to forget for a moment that our state of being is our choice but if we keep reminding ourselves and keep looking at things from this perspective, it will become our natural perspective and we will think and behave from a higher level of awareness and this is growth, this is self-expansion, being fully responsible for my state of being, fully responsible for how I want to show up in the world, in my own world.