Freedom to Choose

Sometimes we need a little reminder of the basics of life. Listening to Covey as I write for Sammy ... some highlights:

Don’t you feel better when the weather outside is great? What if you could carry your own weather with you? You could always feel great no matter what!

Don’t you feel better when people treat you well? Isn’t that a kind of social weather? When you carry your weather with you, you can choose to be consistent regardless of how people treat you. That’s being proactive. Being reactive is the opposite. You always see yourself as the victim —- of the weather, of your moods, of someone who has it in for you.

Your life is the result of your own decisions, not conditions, not what’s happening around you.

Between what happens to us and our response is a space. In that space lies our power and our freedom to choose our response, and in those choices lay our growth and our happiness.

Even in the midst of challenging circumstances we have this exhilarating power to choose how we will respond. This is the last human freedom, the power to choose your own response to any condition, to anything that happens to you.

It’s not what people do to us that hurts us, it’s our chosen response to what they do that hurts us.

As Gandhi said, “They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.”

We must simply never build our emotional life around the weaknesses of other people. Otherwise, we give them permission to continue to mess up our lives. We give our future away.

The miserable person at work doesn't make you miserable, you choose to be miserable.

We have the power and the freedom to choose, to create our own weather each day.

Mood: inspired, sleepy
Drinking: cheap, coarse, black coffee
Listening To: habits of productive people
Hair: tied up