I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and she’s pretty successful in her industry, and she was telling me about a project that she’s working on.

While describing the project, there was passion in her voice – she was angry. At the same time, she was processing her feelings from the client’s experiences. And there was this compassionate empathy, this visceral anger that was coming up from inside of her. And you know she was talking about how people don’t have access to certain information and the choices they make as a result.

And as I was listening to her.

I was thinking about my own life and the lives of other people.

And just my observations of things that I had seen, and I would come back in and listen to words as she was saying, and it was all boiling down to choices.

And a lot of people say if you know better, you do better. Well, that’s not necessarily true because we can have a tremendous amount of information, but we don’t do anything with it. We can. We can spout it out; we can recite it. We can verbalize it back to other people. We can give them advice from that information that we’ve provided, and it can help them because they go and put it into action. But if we’re not utilizing that information, it’s just information.

And what I was realizing was that we don’t realize that we have choices many times, and that can be in any area of your life that could be purchasing a home—having a better relationship.

Living in a different environment, living in a foreign country, starting a business. Going to school, not going to school. Choosing who you want to love.

Depending upon the environment that you’re in and how your mind processes information, and their previous experiences that you’ve been a part of, you don’t sometimes realize that you have a choice. You know you see women that were battered and abused, and people say, well, you know why stay in that relationship. Sometimes people don’t realize they have a choice.

And then when you realize you have a choice, or you get that epiphany or that IHOP moment.

Then something else comes in and is like, well, what do I choose? And there’s so much that’s available in this world today. Suppose you’re not accustomed to making choices for yourself. If that’s not something that you’ve done before, you’ve always done with other people wanted you to do. You’ve never taken the time to sit out and think about what it is that you want. Think about who you are. Think about where you want your life to go. Then you have no idea, no concept that you can make a choice. And what are your available options?

A lot of times, we choose from the lesser of two evils.

But guess what, you don’t have to choose from a list of two evils if you have choice A and choice B. Guess what? You can create a choice C, Or you can select neither of them.

But many times, we don’t realize that we have those options available to us and then the other thing you could live in a community. Let’s use housing as an example. You can live in a society where there are homes, and other people live in homes, and it never crossed your mind that a home is available to you.

And then if when you purchase a home, what community do you want to live in? Do I have to live around the people that I grew up around? Can I move to another state? Is it OK for me to live in a specific community? Do I have to live in this country, you know? And so, there are so many other things that go along with making choices. But the primary thing that she and I were talking about was.

Many people don’t realize that they have the ability or the option to choose.

I know for myself I didn’t have.

The understanding that I had a choice. I grew up in a family where I didn’t choose what I ate. I didn’t determine what I wore. I didn’t decide what time I woke up. I didn’t choose what time I went to sleep. I didn’t choose who was around me. You know, I didn’t decide what I was going to study in school, and consequently, I lived a considerable part of my life doing something, doing lots of things that I did not like.

And so you get numb. You live that way when you get an opportunity to understand, and that information is available to you.

Then you have an opportunity to make a choice.

And then the other thing is a lot of times there isn’t the information provided to you so that you can become aware that a choice is available.

So if you live in an isolated environment, everybody is like you; everybody is doing the same things.

There’s a lot of control. There’s a lot of peer pressure.

You’re not going to get information about different things, and it’s easy for people that have the experience of doing different things. They’ll impose their experiences, their understanding on other people.

And I really try hard.

To not do that because I have been on the other side, I have lived an exciting life. I’ve lived a very blessed life, but there were many times and opportunities that I did not take advantage of because I wasn’t aware of the options available to me.

Case in point, I have two higher education degrees, have a Masters’s degree and an MBA. I’m a lifelong learner, and part of my personality is that I consume information. I utilize it to make decisions, and I enjoy learning I’m inside of my mind. I’m a thinker, and I think deeply about things; and I talked to my friend, the same friend, and I was trying to explain to her. You know, using this example that I’ve been in school. Probably most of my life.

And I’d never was introduced to a note-taking course. I watched YouTube one day, and the Cornell note-taking method YouTube video came up, and I was like, what is this?

Now I’ve been to undergrad. I’ve been to Community College. I’ve been to a four-year university. I’ve been to technical colleges. As I said, I have an MBA, and also a master’s in two different disciplines and not in any one of those schools that anybody mentioned. To me, anything about a note-taking course.

And so I say that to say this that.

You would think that I would have access to that type of information because of the environment I was in, but I did not.

Decades later, sitting at my desk, scrolling through YouTube, looking for something unrelated.

I find out that there’s not only a method but there’s a book. There’s lots of books, high school, note-taking, I mean it’s crazy, but anyway so you know you don’t have to miss the opportunities. There are choices available to you that you’re not even aware of that you have no exposure to.

You can be the catalyst for somebody else creating other options, and you can utilize someone else’s creativity and choose.

I like for you to consider sitting down and thinking.

What do I really want in my life?

How’s my life feeling to me?

If I continued in this path where I’m going right now and doing the same thing every day for the next 12 months, what would my life look like, and am I OK with what that picture will be? Am I OK with who I’ll be?

So start small with your choices if it’s something that you’ve never done before, making choices for yourself.

But I want to encourage you to start making choices for yourself. I want to encourage you to sit down and think about where you want to go and what you want to do.

And then, after you do that, talk to God.

As a matter of fact, you can talk to God while you’re doing it.

And say a prayer.

Ask him to give you access to information. Ask him to give you access to opportunities. Ask him to give you access to favor.

Ask him to give you access to understanding and ask him to give you access to courage. Put all those things together.

And make some good choices so that your life looks the way you want it to look.

Ninety days six months, 12 months. Three years five years down the line.

If you didn’t know, you have choices.

And where your life is today is not weird; it has to go tomorrow.

You can make a change even if it’s very hard.

Just take one step at a time, see it and keep moving. Remember, you have choices. Choose wisely.