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Consciousness, Choice & Accountability

Consciousness, Choice & Accountability

Who Do You Choose to Be?

Consciousness

My wish, my mission, is to help as many people as I can become the conscious creators of their lives so they can enjoy more meaning, happiness and fulfillment. I believe in our inherent potential for goodness and that life has no preset mission for us but that we get to choose who we are and who we will become in each moment.

Only when one raises their level of consciousness or self awareness can they begin asking questions and looking within to discover who they really are and what they deeply desire in their lives.

When you know and can admit (even if just to yourself) what you want from life, you stand at choice about walking a new path or retreating and settling for life as it is. When you’re living consciously, you come to learn your values and how to honor them, your strengths and how to use them, and your weaknesses and how to bridge any important gaps between where you are now and where you want to go.

When you feel passion within you and you know what you stand for, by taking actions that are congruent with who you are and in alignment with where you want to go, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll immediately be granted everything you want or that every step will be successful but you will be able to learn from each step, grow from each challenge and build your confidence and trust in yourself.

If you are reading this, chances are high that you’ve already begun your personal growth journey or someone has shared this with you believing you would benefit from it.

Choice

Whether you realize it or not, at every moment of every day, you stand at choice. Most people live unconsciously on auto-pilot – as bystanders in their lives. They believe life is happening to them and they have no choice. They give control of their choices over to the people and circumstances in their lives. Some people accept that and live decent lives. I’m not judging it – it is what it is. However, that kind of life will rarely lead to fulfillment.

When you realize that you’re always – ALWAYS – at choice about what you Think, Feel, Believe, Say, Do, Don’t Do, something changes – you regain control over your life. There is an immense sense of personal freedom and liberation that you will come to cherish in your life.

  “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”
~ Dr. Viktor Frankl

You will need courage, faith and an open learner’s mind to face your fears head on, to tell your truth and to begin to consciously choose who you are and who you want to become.

Every day is made up of 86,400 seconds. Each second is an opportunity to choose who you are Right Now. It’s a choice to stop reliving your past, to live in the present and to consciously create your future, moment by moment. It’s also a choice to give up your right to choose and let life take you where it may.

“Everything can be taken 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.”
~ Dr. Viktor Frankl

Accountability

The one notion you cannot escape is that no matter what you choose, you are accountable. Accountability is a foundational element of true personal growth and it will change the course of one’s life as soon as they own up to it.

“Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”
~ Dr. Viktor Frankl

Whether we’re conscious or not, whether we realize we’re always at choice or not, we must be accountable for everything we create in our lives. Accountability means we accept personal responsibility for everything we say, do, think or feel including:

  • Our choices
  • Our direction in life
  • Our attitudes, states, moods, behavior patterns
  • The consequences of our actions or inactions
  • Our own self-esteem and well-being
  • Our fears and our triggers
  • Our coping mechanisms, defense mechanisms and their consequences
  • Our anger, cynicism, pessimism, pains
  • Our happiness, contentment, satisfaction and fulfillment

When we are not accountable, there are consequences in our lives and they can look like the following:

  • We feel stuck, frustrated, confused, lost, angry, hostile, depressed and/or desperate
  • We constantly seek approval and need to please others to feed our self-esteem by getting recognition, attention, approval and acceptance from others
  • We become emotionally stunted and stop growing
  • We may feel guilt, shame, remorse, resentment
  • We grow evermore unable to trust ourselves and others
  • We become highly defensive and resist vulnerability
  • We feel insecure and scared
  • We have a low tolerance and threshold for challenging situations and/or people
  • We reinforce a negative downward cycle and feed our fears and thus learn how to play life small and safe

It can be a jarring, scary experience to take a good long look at yourself in the mirror and learn that you have created (consciously or not) the life you have now. Such a reflection can be unnerving and disappointing. You may resist it – you may go to such lengths as to lash out and blame others for everything in your life and you will succeed at finding excuses and justifications but you won’t feel any better and you’ll just repel others from you.

Moving Towards Meaning

Take a few, deep cleansing breaths, and summon the courage to keep looking and learning. Have compassion for yourself and look deeper within – look into your heart and get a sense of your own greatness, your own beauty and uniqueness just as you are, human. You don’t need to be perfect – there is no perfect anyway, you just need to be who you are. Keep looking and ask yourself – what do I want? What do I choose? Who do I want to become?

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”
~ Dr. Viktor Frankl

I believe we can all change, we can all grow, we can all find meaning and purpose in our lives and become the conscious creators of rich, meaningful and fulfilling lives.

Make a decision to change, starting now. Here are some tips to point you in the right direction:

  • Get some help – reading, coaching, therapy, workshops, seminars, videos, groups (the book quoted several times in this article is a good start: Man’s Search for Meaning)
  • Take stock of your values, strengths, virtues, beliefs, passions, desires
  • Take stock of your weaknesses, coping & defense mechanisms, negative patterns
  • Build a supportive network around you
  • Find accountability partners
  • Be kind to yourself and others
  • Be who you really want to be as many times a day as you can and celebrate each choice and every bit of learning along the way.

This is your journey and I wish you all the best. Even when, especially when, the road is dark, gloomy and lonely, trust in yourself and lead with your heart and take the next step.

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”
~ Dr. Viktor Frankl

 

 

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1 Comment

  1. Vannesa Lingel

    Very nice post!

    Reply

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