The Art and Science of Choices Big and Small

There are a lot of resources and support for making big life decisions.

Where you go to college, what industry you work in, who you marry, and when to have children have a social benefit and thus are societal expectations. As such, there is a culture of making those decisions intentionally, with support and accountability from your community and even the government.

While we have a lot of focus on those big decisions, our lives mostly reflect a multitude of small choices made cumulatively every day or even every hour. Our daily habits, attention, and efforts impact who we hang out with, what is in our bank account, how healthy we are, whether we are happy or not, and so much more.*

Yet we aren’t taught how to be intentional with our daily choices. Instead, we make them by default, by mirroring our peers, what we see in the media, and by taking the path of least resistance and choosing the easiest, least scary thing to do.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, especially if you are good with how things in your life are turning out, and if there’s nothing else beyond that default that you’d like to work on or accomplish. If you keep up the same habits and choices, you will get the same results.

But what if you want different results?

Then you need to make different choices, change habits, and put your attention and effort into new things.

Whether the new result you want is big or small, doing something different is likely going to be harder than you imagined. That’s because our primal instincts see change as increasing uncertainty, and from a prehistoric perspective, uncertainty can be life-threatening. Despite our modern advances, the prehistoric parts of our brain have a tremendous influence over our default decision-making.

That’s where planning and scheduling come in.

Our instinctual influences are strongest in last minute decision making, but can be overruled if another option is easily accessible and implementable. By planning what we want to do in advance, we get to use our prefrontal cortex to decide what to put our energy and attention into. And scheduling those plans means that when the time comes, we know exactly what to do.

Making it as simple and easy to make different choices, implement new habits, and refocus our attention will increase our odds at getting the results we want. And while not taught in schools or subsidized by governments, there are resources for how to make changes in our lives. James Clear’s Atomic Habits is a particularly good resource to develop new habits.

Behavior change isn’t just a science, it is also an art. The nuance in what choices we make and why is can be uncovered and influenced by examining our thoughts. And that is my speciality! Click here to set up a call where we can talk about the results you want in life.

*Our lives also reflect institutional and internalized systems of oppression that impact us, but for the purpose of this post, I am focusing on the choices we do have control over.