The Last of the Human Freedoms: The Freedom to Choose

During the first week of June, I spent time four days in Palm Springs with my coach in-person. The first three days were as part of a Women Leadership Mastermind and then I had a full day one-on-one intensive. This is the first time in four years of working with my coach that I have had the opportunity to spend time with her in-person. We have not had this opportunity due to the pandemic and various other reasons.

The four days in Palm Springs were life-changing to say the least. And I know that when I do my year-end review at the end of the year, those four days will stand out as the completion of the first six months of this year. In many ways, they were a completion AND the beginning of something new for the second half of this year.

Following those four intensive days, I attended the final weekend of the CFJ Coaching Success School – a school I had been part of since October 2022. The school is run by the incredible Carolyn Freyer-Jones who wrote What If This Is The Fun Part? During the final weekend, participants in the school get to spend time with The Godfather of Coaching – Mr. Steve Chandler himself.

I had been looking forward to spending time with Steve Chandler in-person. I’ve had the opportunity to be with him on Zoom, but never in-person. So, this was truly special and I’m so grateful for everything that had to unfold over the past 12 months that made the time with Steve Chandler possible. There is something magical about spending time with someone who has mastered the art of coaching, who has spent his life serving others, and who is still so humble and grounded. I learnt so much and I will share more about what I learnt in the coming weeks.

For now, I want to slow down on something. As I shared in a few of my other newsletters in May, I’ve been feeling burnt out and tired, and it has mostly been because of my participation in the CFJ Coaching Success School and the fact that I had underestimated just how much it would require of me on top of an already full and rich life. Do I regret attending? Not at all. And it was valuable for me to slow down and really SEE my own journey as a coach and just how much I have invested in my own personal growth and learning over the past four years.

In many ways, the past four years have been transcendent and life-changing in ways I could never have imagined, and it has been a lot of hard work to get to this point. I’m truly grateful for this journey and for how it has unfolded for me. And as I’m writing this, I’m aware of the new paths opening up for me to explore. Paths I have been resistant to exploring until now.

On the three-day intensive as part of the Women Leadership Mastermind, my coach took a small group of women entrepreneurs through a process that had us really slow down and tap into other parts of ourselves. We had the opportunity to consider what our minds want us to know AND to slow down and listen to our bodies, our hearts, and our Higher Self / Inner Wisdom / Soul about what we really want and need.

Something that became clear for me during this time, is how much I’ve overextended my mind and not listened enough to my body and my heart. The four years of work I’ve done with my coach have not only been about building my business, but have also included deep spiritual work that has transformed the way I see myself, the way I relate to others and to the world.

During the six months at CFJ, I had the opportunity to slow down and listen more to my heart, and really lean into the healing that is available to me. I recently completed a program in nervous system regulation that supported me in understanding my emotions more, and how they manifest in my body, why they are there, and how to navigate what often feels like challenging emotions – including emotions like anxiety, grief, anger, and shame – and believe it or not, but also, joy and connection. There is value in each of these emotions.

As I have often shared with my clients, feelings are always valid AND feelings aren’t facts. Just because we feel a certain way, doesn’t mean it’s true, AND there is value in considering what the feeling wants us to look at inside. There is value in considering why the feeling is there in the first place. It is merely a signpost. It’s a light on the dashboard of the car that is pointing us to something we haven’t seen yet or that we are resistant to seeing.

Some of this still feels like a work-in-progress to me. I’ve learnt a lot, and I continue to learn as I’m always open to learning and growing. And two things have become more and more clear over the last year. Firstly, to live a full, rich life, requires taking ownership of our responses and our experiences. It requires that we co-create WITH life, instead of fighting against life. And secondly, it requires that we take full responsibility for our own healing and the integration of our different parts. We are multi-dimensional beings and when we don’t recognise or appreciate the different parts of ourselves, we move through life in a fragmented way. There is wisdom that our minds cannot access that is available through our hearts, our bodies, and our souls and when we reintegrate all those parts, they give us access to wisdom we didn’t even realise we had.

My commitment to myself is to continue to work on my own healing and reintegration, and to tap into the wisdom that other parts of me hold. I have spent a lot of time on growing, learning, and expanding my mind. The last few years have required a deep dive into my heart and my soul. And yet, I’ve neglected the wisdom of my body until now. I have not really listened to what she wants to share. So, for the next six months, that is where my focus will be – reconnecting with my body and listening to the wisdom that is there.

What does ownership look like?

So, if living a full rich life requires taking full ownership of our responses and experiences, what does ownership look like?

Steve Chandler shares that there are two kinds of people in the world and that we have one of two choices we can make in our lives. We can be a Creator, or we can be a Reactor.

Creators take full ownership of their lives. They believe that things in life happen FOR them and that there is something to learn in every experience. Owners know that they cannot control reality, they only control HOW they respond to reality. They can choose their response in every situation. Is it easy to choose your response? Not always, no. And it’s still important to recognise that everything is a choice. Even doing nothing or not responding is a choice too. If we are not seeing how we have a choice to make in every situation, then we are called to do the inner work to slow down and see our reactions, change the way we think, and choose differently if we don’t like the results we are getting.

Therefore, we get to create the experience we want by how we relate to what is happening. The issue is not the issue, it’s how we relate to the issue that determines the experience we end up having. One person might look out the window and notice it’s raining. They might then get upset about the rain and think that their whole day is ruined, because they had planned to go out and now it’s raining.

I do want to pause here for a second to also note that the upset is not really caused by the RAIN. Their upset is cased by their THINKING ABOUT the rain, because another person might notice the rain and feel deep gratitude for the rain. They might think about the plants that need the water, or they might think that the rain is so refreshing after the heat of the last few days.

One of the things I’ve learnt to do here in Canada, is to go out even when it rains. I run or walk anyway. We explore anyway. In South Africa, we would have stayed home if it was raining. In Canada we learnt that you cannot wait for the rain to stop. You might wait for a very long time…

We took our kids to a farm to participate in an Easter “Eggstravaganza” IN the rain. And they had so much fun. The rain was not a deterrent to the choice to enjoy the experience right in front of us. It’s not the rain. It’s our thinking about it. And it’s the same with everything else. It’s not the person, the event, the experience that is causing the upset, its your THINKING ABOUT it. Creators understand this at a deep level, and they know that they get to choose how they want to think about the event, the person, the experience. It’s always a choice.

Victor Frankl spoke about this in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, when he shared that “between stimulus and response, there is a space, and within that space lies our freedom. The freedom to choose.”  Frankl called this the last of the human freedoms. It’s the one thing that no-one can ever take away from you. The freedom to choose how you respond to life.

And I can appreciate that I’m making it sound really easy. And I want to share that it’s not always easy. Sometimes making the choice to reframe, to change how I’m thinking about something is one of the hardest things I need to do, AND it’s also the most liberating thing I can do for myself.

The alternative is to go through life reacting to everything as it happens. The alternative is to live as a helpless victim of the circumstances of life, and to delegate your own sacred authority to choose to someone else or to forces outside of you.

Reactors react to everything that happens in life. They believe that life is happening to them, and they don’t believe that they have any choice in the matter. So, Reactors go through life looking for who to blame for their misery. They see themselves as victims of their circumstances. They believe that life is just a series of unpleasant events that happen to you. The saying, “Life’s a bitch, and then you die”, most assuredly came from a Reactor. Reactors don’t see that THEY are making the choices that have resulted in the life they are living. They don’t want to see it, because if they had to acknowledge it to themselves, they would also have to acknowledge that they could make different choices.

And this will sound absurd, but often suffering is the path of least resistance. It’s far easier to choose to continue to suffer, than to make the changes required to move into a place of creation and ownership. For most of us, we are so used to suffering. It’s what’s familiar, so we simply stay stuck in our self-created suffering. It’s much harder to do the inner work required to heal past wounds, really pay attention to our emotions and what they are bringing up for us, to work on the unwanted patterns in ourselves and in our lives, to have the difficult conversations, to mend the broken relationships, to stop blaming and to start creating solutions, to admit when what we have tried up to now hasn’t worked and to try something wildly uncomfortable that might just pull us out of our suffering.

These things require us to choose to be Creators. It requires that we take responsibility for our own responses to life. We still cannot control what happens and how life unfolds, and we can have a completely different experience of life. We can see that we haven’t lost our freedom. It resides within us always. We always have the freedom to choose our response to life.