Simple Strategies for Making Empowered Life Choices
Life choices shape the direction of your days, and sometimes all it takes is one moment of clarity to realize you have more power than you think.
Recently, my therapist reflected something powerful back to me that stopped me in my tracks.
“You seem to be choosing your life instead of letting your life choose you.”
That simple statement brought me back to one word – choices.
The average person makes thousands of decisions each day. When life feels busy or overwhelming, it’s easy to move on autopilot and make decisions without much thought. But when we become more intentional, our choices begin to reflect our values, goals, and what we truly want.
I often hear women tell me that they are unhappy, unmotivated, or feel stuck in their life. They are no longer inspired by their goals or fulfilled by their jobs. One of the key things that can truly make a difference is by making new or different choices.
I always say that our choices are portals and they have the power to change everything for us.
Creating Space Through Stillness
If you are feeling the pull to make new choices, one of the most powerful shifts I’ve made is allowing myself to be still.
Stillness can feel uncomfortable at first, because we often fill every spare moment in our lives for the sake of being productive, efficient, or successful. We have built our identities around how much we can do and that usually makes the idea of stillness feel like a bad thing. I dare to say that it makes stillness and slowing down feel unsafe.
What I have learned and what I encourage people who are feeling overwhelmed and unsure of how to make real changes in their lives is to create space to get still and silent. It’s in stillness that you begin to notice what you’re feeling, what you need, and which life choices feel aligned.
What I have learned and what I encourage people who are feeling overwhelmed and unsure of how to make real changes in their lives is to create space to get still and silent. It’s in stillness that you begin to notice what you’re feeling, what you need, and which life choices feel aligned.
This might look like:
Taking a few extra minutes in the shower to take deep inhales and exhales
Waking up 15 – 30 minutes earlier to have peace and quiet before everyone else in the house is awake
Sitting quietly with your coffee for a few minutes instead of gulping it down as you run out the door
Journaling at the end of the day to clear your mind
In those quiet moments, clarity often finds its way in and you are more resourced to make better choices.
How Self-Care Supports Better Life Choices
Another shift to help you make better choices is to prioritize self care. While this may seem counterintuitive, if you take my definition of self care, it may make more sense.
My definition of self-care is the intentional practice of tending to your needs.
This means that it is proactive (instead of reactive) and consistent (instead of sporadic).
When you are consistently neglecting your needs, no matter how big or small, you reinforce that you are not a priority. This tends to affect how you show up, how you advocate for yourself, and how confidently you make life choices that support your health, happiness, and fulfillment.
This shows up when you procrastinate on making the necessary doctor appointments or stay in a job or relationship longer than you should or even choosing to put everyone else’s needs before your own.
Tending to your needs is a foundational piece of living a Nourished Life and it is something that I try to help people to understand. Self care isn’t just about bubble baths and spa days (which are great), but if you get clear on truly getting clear on what you truly need and start to tend to those needs, you will get into the practice of making better choices.
Plus, when you feel nourished physically, emotionally, and mentally, you’re much more likely to make decisions from a place of alignment instead of depletion.
One thing I did in the beginning of my Nourished Life journey was to set an alarm on my phone. At 11:11AM a prompt would appear saying “What do you need right now?”. This daily practice helped to take a moment to pause and get still to connect with myself and my needs.
Stillness and self-care are true game changers to making better choices, but there is one more thing that I’d recommend.
Learning to Give Yourself Grace
The reality is that not every decision will lead exactly where you hoped, and that’s okay. And sometimes, we will make choices that prioritize our needs and others may not agree or support us. But this doesn’t automatically mean that it was the wrong choice.
Not only are our choices portals, they are also great opportunities to collect data and to learn something important.
When my marriage ended, I reflected a lot on the choices. Choices that I made and how they led me to one of the most devastating seasons of my life. Once I allowed myself the space to be still to process everything from the sadness, pain, embarrassment, shame, and guilt, I was able to sit with the lessons learned and I got clarity on what I wanted to in my new chapter.
It gave me a new perspective and a new runway to make new, better, and more informed choices. It’s been empowering to have the information from that experience to help me feel more confident in the life I choose to live now.
This is why self-compassion is so important. You don’t need to beat yourself up over every decision, but just give yourself the love and remind yourself that you made decisions based on the knowledge and capacity that you had in that moment. (And this is again why I think stillness is so important).
Self-compassion helps you stay open to the lesson instead of getting stuck in regret.
Small Life Choices Create Big Shifts
Stillness, self-care, and self-compassion have become powerful anchors in my Nourished Life journey. I lean into them daily to feel more grounded and reconnect with what I can control. This reminds me that I can make a small choice to shift everything.
In fact, it’s often those small daily decisions that quietly create the biggest changes over time.
As you move through your week, take a moment to notice the life choices you’re making.
Ask yourself:
- Are my choices aligned with my values?
- Am I making decisions from intention or from habit?
- What would it look like to choose myself today?
You have the power to choose your life, one decision at a time.
How to Make More Time for Yourself
If you need help creating space for yourself to make more informed and conscious life choices, download this free guide 7 Strategies for Making Time for Yourself Without the Guilt.
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