We HAVE to make decisions. We GET to make choices. We all have to make decisions, and there isn’t always an ideal option or even an option that we want. Sometimes it comes down to picking the lesser of two evils. What we do always have is choice: how we show up once we’ve made a decision. I may not be able to control my circumstances, but I can always choose my attitude.
Fresh out of prison, it took me months to find a job at a bagel shop making $7.00 an hour. I was ashamed, resentful, and angry. I whined about it to my therapist, and after listening to me vent, he said, “I don’t think you understand the difference between a decision and a choice.”
He held up two pens. “Pick one,” he said. So I picked one. He asked me why I picked that one. I explained that I liked the color. He said, “That’s a decision. Try again.” Several more times I chose a pen and explained why. Finally, after choosing a pens over and over, he asked me again, and in frustration I said, “Just because! Because I'm picking it!”
“Exactly,” he said.
I was still confused. He went on to explain that I was working at the bagel shop because I had decided that was what I needed to do to get where I wanted to go in my life – just like choosing one of two pens because I liked one color better, or one shape. What I hadn’t done with the bagel shop job was choose to be there. I wasn’t choosing every day how to show up. So from that day forward, rather than focusing on the negative and being irritated that I had to be at that job, I chose to show up without resentment and make the best damn bagel sandwiches I could – with a smile on my face.
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