Your Choice Led to This

Raising children provides a never-ending opportunity to learn. Often, I am struck by how wise they are while other times they seem to lack common sense.

One theme that arises when parenting is the idea that they don’t connect their choice with the outcome they receive. They don’t see that they chose to argue with mom creating their punishment. Or they don’t realize that they didn’t return home on time causing them to be grounded. Or they are upset their tablet battery drained but don’t take responsibility for forgetting to charge it overnight.

But this isn’t something that only applies to kids. We all do it. We let our emotions direct us to frustration and then yell at a coworker. When they are upset with us, we don’t realize it was our choice to act that way.

Often the reason it is so hard to connect the choice to the outcome is that the choice isn’t a one-time choice. Instead, it is a multitude of many choices, spread out over time, that determines the outcome.

We go to the doctor and hear that our BMI is very high, and we need to lose weight. We don’t connect the daily donut or the extra dessert multiple times a week to the news from the doc.

This isn’t to be judgmental. Again, we all do this, including me. It is human nature and is as common as enjoying a donut or dessert.

It is also confusing because the lines are blurred. Many people ate a donut today at work. Why are you the one getting the negative feedback at your physical?

It isn’t the donut you ate today. It is the culmination of all your healthy decisions over the past few years. This blurs the lines. It makes it almost impossible to tie one decision directly to an outcome.

But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a decision we made. We had choices and the culmination of those choices create our lives.

To gain control, we must accept this. We must understand that it is us who has the control, but we often let it slip into our unconscious decisions. In other words, too often we choose by default by not choosing what will lead to the brightest future. Instead, we accept the easy, pleasurable decision right now.

Most people reading this will point out that we need willpower here to help us. Sure, willpower is part of it. But willpower isn’t as concrete as you think. It comes and goes. It fades away at times when we really need it. It withers as the days goes on if we are constantly tapping its force to help us avoid what we really want to do.

The cure for me has been to shift from worrying about willpower all the time, to trying to find ways to make those default decisions better. I do that through systems and habits.

I love donuts. But I rarely eat them. Not because I’m so great and have powerful willpower but because I put in place systems to override my craving for a donut.

You could be proactive, banning donuts from your office or your cubicle. You could avoid grabbing coffee from the donut shop if that is your weakness. You could find healthier substitutions for breakfast. Or you could simply pass on them each time they are offered. Using willpower to just make that choice right now is easier. Then tomorrow, you proved you could do it, so it takes a little less willpower.

This creates a chain of motivation. After enough time, it shifts to become the normal way. That makes it become automatic. With enough time that automation turns into new habits that make it easy to pass on the donut. It takes almost no willpower to pass on the daily donut.

But this isn’t easy, normal behavior. This takes a specific approach. I refer to the approach as the systems and habits approach to improvement. It looks at situations wholistically. It drives home the idea that we are all flawed humans with bias and weaknesses. We all have some willpower but not unshakable willpower. But by accepting this, we can accept that our decisions create the outcome we receive and if we want something different we get into our decision-making to take a different path.