Thursday
May132010
8 ways to avoid effective choice
Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 08:11AM
There are eight common ways in which people avoid or undermine effective choice and by which they lose the potential power of choice:
1. Choice by limitation - choosing only what seems possible or reasonable. If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all you have left is a compromise. The human spirit will not invest itself in a compromise.
2. Choice by indirectness - choosing the process instead of the result. Often people become so involved in processes that the results they truly want to create are obscured or entirely forgotten. Without a clear vision of the result, they have little chance of creating what they desire.
3. Choice by elimination - eliminating all other possibilities so that only one choice remains. People often leave one life situation and move to another by choice by elimination. Most of us have had the experience of making matters worse and worse until we feel we must leave because the situation is intolerable.
4. Choice by default - the "choice" not to make a choice, so that whatever results happen seem to occur without choice. Because of an inability or unwillingness to choose, the person in this mode assigns the power to the situation and abdicates his or her own power.
5. Conditional choice - imposing preconditions on choices. Conditional choice follows the typical formulas: "I will choose this when ..." and "I will choose this if ..." Such people place the power to organise their lives in certain arbitrary external conditions.
6. Choice by reaction - choices designed to overcome a conflict. The power here lies in whatever produces discomfort, and the choice is made solely to eliminate that discomfort.
7. Choice by concensus - choosing by finding out what everyone else is willing to recommend and following the results of that pool.
8. Choice by adverse possession - choice based on a hazy metaphysical notion about the nature of the universe. The theory is that whatever you possess in current reality you have somehow chosen, if not in this lifetime, then in an another. Actually the life experiences you now have are, in part, a natural outcome of the structures you have previously established in your life.
The above has been taken from the book "The Path of Least Resistance" by Robert Fritz.
1. Choice by limitation - choosing only what seems possible or reasonable. If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all you have left is a compromise. The human spirit will not invest itself in a compromise.
2. Choice by indirectness - choosing the process instead of the result. Often people become so involved in processes that the results they truly want to create are obscured or entirely forgotten. Without a clear vision of the result, they have little chance of creating what they desire.
3. Choice by elimination - eliminating all other possibilities so that only one choice remains. People often leave one life situation and move to another by choice by elimination. Most of us have had the experience of making matters worse and worse until we feel we must leave because the situation is intolerable.
4. Choice by default - the "choice" not to make a choice, so that whatever results happen seem to occur without choice. Because of an inability or unwillingness to choose, the person in this mode assigns the power to the situation and abdicates his or her own power.
5. Conditional choice - imposing preconditions on choices. Conditional choice follows the typical formulas: "I will choose this when ..." and "I will choose this if ..." Such people place the power to organise their lives in certain arbitrary external conditions.
6. Choice by reaction - choices designed to overcome a conflict. The power here lies in whatever produces discomfort, and the choice is made solely to eliminate that discomfort.
7. Choice by concensus - choosing by finding out what everyone else is willing to recommend and following the results of that pool.
8. Choice by adverse possession - choice based on a hazy metaphysical notion about the nature of the universe. The theory is that whatever you possess in current reality you have somehow chosen, if not in this lifetime, then in an another. Actually the life experiences you now have are, in part, a natural outcome of the structures you have previously established in your life.
The above has been taken from the book "The Path of Least Resistance" by Robert Fritz.
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