The Power of Choice & Creating Your Own Luck

Welcome to the joyful journey podcast. If you're looking for more clarity in your life, clarity of purpose, or how to activate that purpose, and you are someone who wants to operate from your highest self to be a force for good, you know this world craves, then this is the show for you. I'm Anita Adams, your host and guide to finding clarity and creating a life you love. Let's tap into our inner wisdom, access our highest self, and unleash joy. As we do this, we raise our vibration and heighten the collective consciousness. And that, my friend, is the joyful journey. Let's dive in. Hey, joyful journey are Anita Adams here, your host and today I want to talk about the power of choice and how you create your luck. I have had people over the years tell me how lucky I am. You have such a loving and supportive husband, they say, You're so lucky. You're so lucky that you've got such easy kids to deal with. You are so lucky that you can work from home, you are so lucky that you and your family got to live in France for a year. You are so lucky. Alright, first, I recognize that I'm a white middle class woman who has privileges many others around the world simply do not in that regard. Yes, yes, I'm, I'm really lucky. I also feel incredibly blessed for all the beauty in my life. For that I am deeply grateful. However, I wouldn't say luck has gotten me to where I am today. We are the product of the choices we make or don't make as not making a choice is still a choice. Yes, my husband is loving and supportive. That's not lucky. I had as much to say in choosing him as he did me and why would I choose anyone who wasn't loving and supportive? Has our marriage always been easy? Absolutely not. There were times I didn't know if we would make it through those dark, challenging years, not days years. We were committed to each other though. And we both chose to work on us. Despite the fear, the tears and the frustration. There were many times I wanted to walk away from that pain. And I know my husband felt the same. We chose to stay in the room and work through our issues though. Today, we have one of the most beautiful relationships imaginable, and luck, and nothing to do with it. When I think about our kids, my heart lights up. They are amazing human beings and the greatest gifts we've been given. Yes, I believe their nature has contributed to the beauty of our relationship. Nurture also plays a huge role, though, and parenting isn't easy. These relationships have also brought fears many, many, many tears, and even more frustration, there were countless times I had the urge to toss in the parenting towel. As any parent will tell you bringing up thoughtful, respectful and competent children is a tremendous amount of work. For me, this work in large measure included working on me, my boy was challenging as a young, a young guy. And I understood it wasn't just his behavior that had to change. It was mine. So I made the choice to work on me to learn how to be more patient, how to communicate with him in a way that also worked for him, which I've discovered is very different than how you communicate with girls. And I learned how to hold my tongue to think really think before speaking, good host those, those preteen years and early teens were the most challenging for me. And I'm grateful for the for all the lessons that came with that time. Another personal choice was to work from home. That has been awesome on so many levels. And yet that choice also came with a lot of personal sacrifices and many challenges. I made the choice because I wanted to be a stay home mom while developing a career. So I started my own business when my youngest was just nine months old. That required many late nights trying to work around my kids schedules. There were a number of years where I was barely making any money. It was hard to pay bills. And it was even harder to be the mom and the entrepreneur I desperately want it to be. That choice, of course, also came with a lot of fears, a ton of tears and heaps of frustration. Then my husband and I made the choice to move to France for a year, which is one of the highlights of my light. Despite the fears, tears and frustration that sprung from that choice. It was nothing short of amazing, but it wasn't built on luck. It took four years of planning, saving, sacrificing, and organizing to make happen. As it happens, that choice to live a year abroad was a big turning point in my life, as it drove home the importance of our choices and the importance of being intentional with everything you do. The trip was actually predicated on some poor choices my husband and I made a few years previously, that and that time just about destroyed our marriage. Fortunately, we recognize what was happening and we're able to make new choices, better choices that brought us closer that year abroad. And the four years leading up to it helped us understand that we needed to make conscious choices about who we were choosing to be and how we were choosing to live. Self awareness and being intentional with your choices, in a nutshell, is the secret of creating a life that is enviable, and that will have people whispering about how lucky you are. The only way to become self aware and consistently make intentional choices that are also the best choices for you, your family and those who serve is by doing the inner work and asking yourself three important questions. Who am I? What do I want? And why does it matter? These three questions you must come back to again and again. And again. If you haven't checked out some of the earlier episodes of this podcast, I want to learn more about how to find this kind of clarity on who you are what you want, and why it matters. Then listen to episode 234, and five they're they're all short and sweet. Episode Two is actually my personal story about how finding clarity saved my marriage. And the following episodes will give you a pretty good breakdown of my three guiding principles to inner wisdom, which could easily be renamed three guiding principles to your best life. When you find clarity about who you are what you want, and why it matters, you are able to make conscious choices that best serve you and those you love. And you become an active player in the game of life instead of a passive player where choices are made for you. When you are a passive player, that's when you are really rolling the dice and leaving things up to chance. I tell you, it's way more fun being in the driver's seat creating your own luck. There is one more thing I want to share with you about the power of choice and how you can make a profound positive impact in your life and the lives of those around you by doing this one simple thing. Get into the practice by starting every day saying today I choose to be love. And then throughout the day and particularly in any challenging situation that happens during the day. Ask yourself what would love choose? Anytime you feel rattled, ruffled or upset in any way, take a breath and simply ask what would love choose? Take another breath, wait for the answer and then respond accordingly. This takes all of three seconds to do and is such a brilliant and simple thing that anyone can do anywhere anytime. It can be used to make any choice. And the day is full of choices from the smallest choice of picking what to wear to the bigger choices like how to respond to an angry child for instance, loves to choose to wear something that makes you feel good and love would likely choose to be patient and listen to your child before speaking. There are a myriad of choices we are given each and every day. Get into the habit of asking yourself at every opportunity. What would love choose. You may be surprised at how lucky things turn out for you. That's all I have for you today. I hope you hear people telling you how lucky you are because that is a sure sign that you've made some really great choices. Have an awesome day joyful journeyer and we'll catch you next