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.