You and I make thousands of choices every day. These choices range from the mundane things in life like hitting the snooze button or getting up with the first alarm to more serious things like how we treat people, how we manage our money and what we make of our lives.  From the time we wake up in the morning till the time we go to sleep at night, we are faced with choices. What we choose throughout our waking hours will have consequences. These consequences can be good, bad, funny, hurtful and life changing. Learning how to consciously make choices for the best possible outcomes is mostly about recognizing and acknowledging the type of person you want to be and understanding how your choices will impact you and others.

For example, choosing to be honest in your interactions with people will have the positive outcome of people trusting you and you feeling good about yourself, while choosing to be dishonest will have the negative outcome of people not trusting you and you possibly feeling bad about yourself. This example may seem pretty basic, but if you dig deeper it can become quite complex. Why? Honesty isn’t always easy, especially if you know it will cause pain, punishment, anger, or loss. It is in these difficult situations and circumstances that you must know the type of person you want to be and understand how your honesty or dishonesty aligns with that. The choice you make could be life changing for you or someone else. Since we all have different moral compasses, I cannot tell you what choice to make in this instance of honesty and dishonesty. I can only tell you that I would choose honesty.  

In writing this post, I am making conscious choices of the words I use and the tone in which they are written. The purpose behind my words is to highlight how choices affect everybody. No one is off the hook. No one gets a free pass. Even choosing to not make a choice is a choice in and of itself. Therefore, I encourage you to be more aware of the choices you make, why you make them, and the impacts they will have on you and others.