Exercising Your Right to Choose

When it comes to making decisions, a chronic sense of disempowerment often results in feelings of helplessness or hopelessness that can affect the choices you make and determine your quality of life.

When you live your life as a disempowered person, you often feel like the majority of your life experiences are out of your control. You allow other people or events to determine what you think, say and do; how you spend your time, and even the general direction your life takes.

Transitioning from disempowerment to empowerment is a simple matter of realizing that few things are truly out of your control when you exercise your right to choose.

Below you’ll find three tips for building a stronger sense of empowerment through conscious choice:

1) Realize that you always have choices.

It’s easy to feel like you’re powerless in certain circumstances, but powerlessness is most often a perception, not a fact. Even if you’re incapable of physically altering a situation, you at least have the power to choose your outlook, attitude and reaction to the things that happen to you.

More often when you believe you have no choices, you’re really saying that you don’t like the choices you do have. But that’s very different than not having choices at all! When you affirm that you have no options, you contribute to a sense of powerlessness that can cause you to act in destructive ways rather than seeking a more balanced solution.

2) You are not responsible for anyone else’s happiness.

Have people in your life ever made you feel like you have to go along with their decisions in order to keep peace? This is common in controlling relationships, but even healthy relationships can experience decision-related conflicts.

True empowerment is having the strength to make the decisions that are right for you, even if others don’t always agree with them. When other people will be affected by your decisions it’s a good idea to work cooperatively with them, but you may also be tempted to allow others to influence decisions that involve only yourself. Most often this is done in an attempt to avoid conflict or disagreement, but it doesn’t serve you in the long run. When it comes right down to it, you are not responsible for keeping anyone happy other than yourself, and you can empower yourself to make the choices that are right for you – regardless of what others may say or think about them.

3) You are in charge of your own happiness.

Just as you are not responsible for others’ happiness, neither are they responsible for yours! Disempowerment can often make you believe that you are reliant on the words or actions of others for your sense of happiness and contentment, but this type of attitude only keeps you stuck in feelings of helplessness.

Instead, use your power of choice to do the things that will make you happy. These decisions might relate to your work, residence, relationships and more – and they may not be easy decisions to follow through on.

However, just knowing that you have to make the choices that are right for you or live forever dissatisfied is usually enough to provide the courage to affect positive change.