Choose To Define

Life gives me the opportunity to define and redefine what/who I am, know, believe and feel with the free choice to continue or change.

One does not need to be in the fields of counseling or education for very long before they discover the large number of people who believe that they do not have the opportunity to define who they are or become what they wish to be.

Life is a gift that we are given.  We are free to choose what we do with our gift of life.  Included in this gift is the power we each have to define ourselves through our self-image.  Although there are plenty of people who are willing and eager to define us using their own criteria, it remains our own personal decision as to whom we listen when we make choices that we use to define ourselves.

Using our own definitions, we decide who we are as an individual.  At any time during our Life Journey, we also have the power to re-decide and make changes.  We have the choice to listen to other people or seek other sources of knowledge.  We choose what we learn and how to use this knowledge in making us the individuals we are or wish to be.

By the time we have passed through childhood and adolescence, we have been heavily indoctrinated by society into what we should believe about our world and ourselves.  Even though it is difficult to resist the input we each receive from the important people and institutions in our world, we always retain the power of choice.

Whether we continue believing these societal beliefs or decide to redefine how these beliefs affect our self-image and behavior, the power to do so is always there for us to use.  Our challenge is whether we wish to do the intensive work necessary to explore, confront and make our own decisions as the basic beliefs of our lives.

Within this gift of life, we are given the power to feel.  As with other parts of our lives, society spares no effort to have an individual develop feelings that are “normal” and fit into our culture.  Like with the areas of knowledge and beliefs, we are free to decide what to do with the feelings that life has given to us.  Even with this freedom to choose beliefs and feelings about ourselves, the pressures to be normal and meet the expectations of others is intense.

In reality, most of us cannot help the way we feel at any particular moment, but we are able to define what these feelings mean to us and how we wish to act or not act on them.

We are able to structure situations which tend to encourage or discourage the presence of certain feelings.  We can decide to focus on which feelings make our lives better or worse for us to live.

Even if we accept the belief that we cannot always decide how we feel right now, each of us remains able to control the way we choose to think and act with these feelings.   As with other aspects of living, we remain responsible for the choices we make in how we choose to think and act in our daily lives.

Unfortunately, there are many people who refuse to accept life’s opportunity to decide who they are, what they know, how they feel or what they believe.   These individuals often prefer to stamp a big “V” on their forehead and play the psychological game of being a victim in their life style.  Playing a victim tends to release them from the responsibilities of defining, redefining and choosing healthy thoughts and actions.

As stated before, we are given the gift of life.  How we live that gift will be a result of how define ourselves though our self-image as well as the choices we make daily on our thoughts and behaviors.

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