What makes authentic choices important?

Why can't we choose to do things because they're quick, they're well-done, or they're meaningful?
What are the advantages of making authentic choices in contrast to the quickest, the best and the most meaningful? . . .

Election Day Choices

It’s election day. Polls are just beginning to close back East There’s buzz in the air. The country is choosing its next president. States are deciding who to put in Congress and which ballot initiatives to pass. Will we as a country and individual states make authentic choices?

According to my four levels model, the answer is No. The choice will be complex, but not authentic. My model applies more easily to individual choices. At the country level, what's authentic is dependent on what we value. If, for instance, we value the conservative policies of John McCain, only his winning would be authentic. The opposite is true for those who value what Barack Obama stands for.

In the end, an authentic choice is quite subjective.

Making Authentic Choices Amidst Family Dynamics

These thoughts come fresh from a family visit where my 90-year-old mother, four sisters and I rented a house for a long weekend in the small town of Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania.

Have you ever visited your family as an adult and resorted to behavior and antics that you thought you’d given up years ago? Even when we resolve beforehand to do things differently, it can happen that we only recall the resolution after the trip ended. On the other hand, we might be proud to be one of the lucky ones who successfully follow through with trying on new behaviors only to have our family soundly reject the new me.

If any of these scenarios sound familiar, you’re not alone. Most of us either succumb to the family patterns we played so easily or go overboard in our efforts to forge new ways of behaving with our families. In the first case, we might leave feeling guilt about defaulting to the familiar. In the second case, our efforts at differentiating ourselves are rarely appreciated by those who count on us to act a certain way. Rarely does either scenario satisfy us. We then feel justified in shrugging our shoulders and trying to postpone another trip back as long as we can.

Confusion originates when we don’t know which inner voice to listen to. If we obey our good boy/girl voice, we’ll reinforce the implicitly agreed-upon family dynamic. If we speak from our contrary voice, we’ll upset that very dynamic. Most of us have adapted either some variation on “doing the right thing” or being rebellious. Many of us play both roles at different times or even from moment-to-moment. (I played the good boy through my first marriage then became a rebel once I divorced.)

There comes a time in our lives, however, when we realize that neither of these parts is a genuine expression of who we really are. While both may have aspects of truth that ring somewhat true, from neither part can we make authentic choices. To speak with our own adult voice and truly make authentic choices requires finding a voice that’s beneath both.

During this family vacation, my oldest sister, Jane, started spontaneously calling me Charles. This shocked me since I’d never been anything but Charley in the family. Around about the fifth time she said it, I asked her about it. She hadn’t even noticed the switch herself, but quickly added, “Well, I guess you’re an adult now.”

It wasn’t that I hadn’t been an adult—after all, I’m in my fifth decade—but calling me Charles may have marked another voice. This voice differed from the nice guy that did the right thing. This voice also differed from the one that readily—and almost gleefully—stood smugly apart from my family to claim a precious uniqueness. This Charles voice came from somewhere beyond either role. While it may not sound so different in our own throats and mouths, the truth lies inside others’ spontaneous response to it. We may scratch our heads wondering not only where it came from, but how it got here. And yet, with committed practice, I believe that this more authentic voice can be cultivated to be a regular part of our daily being, doing and choosing.

For those of you interested in exploring this concept further, here are some questions to consider: Which of these voices is your primary default in your family, the pleaser or the rebel? Where did each of them play out? Beneath either of these parts, what does your deeper, more authentic voice sound like? What does it say? What reactions have you received from expressing it?

Choosing with Body Knowing

Have you ever been surprised to see yourself lurch towards something or pull away from someone?
Have you been embarrassed, shocked or amused by these unbidden impulses?

Many of us have tried to control these impulses and there's certainly a place for inhibiting impulses in any civilized society. And yet, I contend that our choices become more authentic as we include more awareness of these bodily impulses. Why? Our bodies "house" our unconscious impulses and desires. When we learn to access our whole body, we tap into that unconscious knowing. This body knowing offers us access to wisdom that, though often different from more familiar thinking patterns, may lead to making authentic choices, albeit more surprising.

Self-Reflection Questions

Stepping towards making authentic choices begins with a self-assessment of your own patterns around making choices. The more we know about how we currently make choices, the more we can both honor what we know we're doing and change our patterns to deepen our authenticity. Given that, what follows is a list of questions to ask yourself about the choices you've made and how you made them.

A. History with Making Choice
a. Growing up
i. Who made the decisions growing up?
ii. When did you begin making your own choices?
b. Memorable choices
i. What were your most authentic choices? Why?
ii. What were your most inauthentic choices? Why?
iii. What’s the difference between these sets of choices?
iv. What “results’” confirm authenticity or not?

B. Making Authentic Choices
a. What are your criteria for making authentic choices?
b. How do you know in the moment when your choice is authentic?
i. What goes on in your mind?
ii. What do you feel in your heart?
iii. What does your gut do?
iv. How else do you know?
c. What motives are behind your authentic choices?
d. What are the benefits of soulful choices?

C. Making Inauthentic Choices
a. What are the costs of making inauthentic choices?
b. For the sake of what do you compromise your authenticity?
c. Under what circumstances will you not compromise? Why not?

D. Process for Making Choices
a. Who do you consult? Friends? Family? Experts? Inner Guides?
b. What do you consult? Tarot? YJ? Google? Books?
c. What less conscious influences may affect your choices?
d. What’s your pace for making choices?
i. Do you mull or decide quickly?
ii. How does your pace differ based on the circumstances?

Using the I Ching to Make Authentic Choices

The I Ching is an ancient Chinese book of wisdom that dates back more than three thousand years. Used by rulers to take appropriate action for the benefit of their kingdoms, this book of wisdom is just as applicable today in assisting us with our modern-day dilemmas. The I Ching offers perspectives deeper than surface appearances and helps us access our own intuitive knowing. Since there are many websites and books dedicated to helping others learn from this book of wisdom, I will only touch on how it can be used at the four levels of choice. Paradoxically, only one level offers value for I Ching wisdom.

At the no choice level, with one exception there is no place for any I Ching discernment. We merely follow what's in front of us. The exception comes when we realize that, though we may be at effect of external circumstances, we have a choice about the attitude we hold inside ourselves. In the book, Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl describes his experience of choosing his attitude while being in concentration camps. Likewise, we can use I Ching wisdom to offer us a frame of mind to hold while moving through the inevitable external circumstances.

At the simple choice level, most choices are made without an awareness of their deeper implications. Nor are the choices seen as having much importance in the grand scheme of events. Again, there's no place for I Ching discernment except when we see ourselves inside a multi-leveled universe that happens to be offering simple choices.

At the fourth level, where authentic choices are made, I Ching wisdom is not necessary either. For when we reach this level, we know in our heart, mind and gut what choice we're making.

It is only at the third level, where complex choices are made, that I Ching wisdom is not only useful, but it can be used to discern various levels of meaning and import that surface distinctions can only hint at. (A future blog will talk more about this level in detail.)

Four Stages of Choice

As we mature, each of us move through four primary stages of choice making:

1. No Choice
2. Simple Choices
3. Complex Choices
4. Authentic Choices

While at any give time, we may be at any one of these levels and we move through all of them throughout our lives, there is also a natural progression through the levels for those committed to their own personal growth. What follows is a brief description of each stage.

Stage One: No Choice
Before we can acknowledge we have choices, we must move through a time when we have no choices. All decisions are made for us as children. While [hopefully] that decreases as we become more capable, this stage acknowledges the times in our lives where we are hardly aware of the need to make choices or circumstances prevent anything but the obvious choice. For instance, where we go for holidays and how we do family events are sometimes so prescribed that it hardly even concerns us that others make choices for us. Dealing with emergencies require only the most basic survival choices. The only choice we have in these circumstances is accepting the things we cannot change.

Stage Two: Simple Choices
Eventually, we come to a place where we can make simple decisions on our own. These choices are often inconsequential in the larger view of our lives. Whether or not we buy this kind of shampoo or another, going to one restaurant or another for lunch, taking the scenic route or the most efficient route to get somewhere are the kinds of choices that have insignificant, long-term ramifications on our lives. What we don’t realize is that these choices are often linked to the conventions we grew up inside. We often either strictly conform to those conventions or rebel against them. Mostly our choices are limited to being "for" or "against" something. Growing up, we were either "good' and did what our parents or teachers wanted or we were "bad' and rebelled against them.

Stage Three: Complex Choices
At some point in our lives, the choices are more complex because what we choose entails significant long-term ramifications. The considerations at this stage of choice require juggling a number of factors that consequentially shape our future. (My first significant choice was which college to attend. Where I spent my next four years of life away from my family mattered. The choice would also influence my first career step.) It is amidst complex choices, that we have the opportunity to differentiate ourselves from the conventions we grew up inside. If we can move beyond rebelling from those conventions, we may come to find some sense of ourselves and learn to make choices based on what we want, not what others want or don’t want us to do.

Stage Four: Authentic Choices
At this stage, we know ourselves well enough and understand the circumstances within which we must choose sufficiently that choices are made so effortlessly that it almost feels as if they happen of themselves. Before moving to California, over twenty years ago, my wife [at the time] and I were so certain of our choice, that the cross-country move took place without a hitch in less than three months. In Chinese philosophy, it might be called living in the Tao, or Way.

More description of each of these levels will come in future blogs.

Why Blog on Making Authentic Choices?

Have you ever made a choice that you knew wasn't genuine, but you went through with it anyway only have to pay a price later? One woman I met told me that she knew on her wedding day that marrying her fiancee was a mistake. While they divorced years later, and she has gotten over the "mistake," what if she, and the rest of us, had more understanding about what we need to make authentic choices? What if we could learn discernment skills that could help us choose? What if we could learn ways to tap into our own inner conflicts around choices that might help us resolve those conflicts before we chose?

This blog offers a forum for dialogue around making authentic choices--what it means to make them, what it feels like to make them, how to make them and the effects of making them. At the outset, that requires learning when to make different choices versus following habitual streams of action. We must also delve more deeply into the differences between authentic and inauthentic choices. We’ll also look at the internal processes that support and hinder choosing from our real selves.

My hope is that, through this dialogue, we learn together how to better make authentic choices, not only for ourselves, but with our friends, families, communities, organizations.