Making Better Choices
by Maria Khalifé
“When it snows, you have two choices: shovel or make snow angels ~ Anonymous
It’s been said that there is no such thing as a good person or a bad person. Well, I’d like to say that I think there are only good people, and that some of those good people make bad choices and lead them off the path of what is good. There is a dynamic way of thinking that will help you in making better choices.
You will always know when you are off the path. Because “good” is your norm, if you choose something that leads you in a direction that is different than what is good, you have an internal monitor – kind of like a GPS device – that tells you that you are off the track. That device inside you is called your conscience and the message your conscience sends when you are off the track is a feeling of discomfort.
We’ve all made mistakes and bad choices. It’s a natural part of our learning process. Our less-than-good feelings (that uncomfortableness I mentioned above) like uneasiness, unhappiness, unsureness – are all red flags that try to get our attention and beg us to be making better choices so we can feel comfortable again. It’s nice that each of us has an internal monitor so we don’t have to depend on our parents, older adults, our teachers or the police or military to monitor us. We can do it ourselves.
It’s not necessary to feel guilty, to punish ourselves, to think we are stupid or foolish. No, all we have to do is see that we are uncomfortable, and resolve to ‘right it’ as soon as we humanly can in order to forgive ourselves our mistake and get back to comfort quickly. Just because we might have heard “you’re bad” when we were children; just because those words created tapes that play repeatedly in our heads, we can put a stop to it by simply saying to ourselves: “Stop. That’s not true. I’m good.”
The labels “good” and “bad” were thrown at us during our childhood as a form of control. If you were “good,” you received parental approval. It was withheld if you behaved “badly.” I’d like to think that many of our parents did not know (because their parents did not know) that the world is predominantly good; that each of the individuals in the world were predominantly good; that if “good” was fostered and praised, we would naturally unfold more good choices.
