The Book of Choice

PART 1

Your Choices Are Your Teacher

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

–J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

1

CHOICE MAPPING

THE WHAT AND THE WHY

A map is a visual representation of a singular choice you made, a choice you are making or a choice you will make. A map is a vehicle to take all the details you can derive from a choice and organize them simply so the insights you gather are easily accessible for your review.

Since creating this process, I’ve been using mapping as a tool to live an examined life, turning to it when I want to flesh out and make sense of a gamut of thoughts, or look at puzzling situations through a lens of expansive curiosity.

Maps are a powerful tool allowing you to become your own guide, a self-discovery method helping you find your way from where you are to where you want to go.

As you experiment with the practice of mapping, you’ll frequently ask these questions:

What has happened because I made this choice?

What will happen when I make this choice?

The mapping process allows you to draw yourself out by asking questions and paying attention to the first answer that presents itself. As you capture your answers in bite-sized nuggets you’ll continue probing with the next intuitive or logical question, listening for a succinct answer. In the following chapters, I’ll provide you with more targeted questions to serve as a jumping off point to build your maps, and more deeply explore your choices.

Mapping gives you the opportunity to stop, reflect and move forward with greater cognizance. As you pay attention to the details of your choices, the perspective with which you view your life will become richer and more expansive as you notice and foster consciousness about the journey your decisions are creating.

Mapping supports you to get clarity around your choices, and guides you through the confusion that surfaces when you become mired in your choice’s details. So often big choices feel overwhelming. Mapping creates a tangible framework to organize the details of the difficult decision, providing structure to even the most complicated choices, making a challenging decision feel more manageable.

Over the years I’ve been using maps to guide myself as well as coaching people to guide themselves by creating maps of their own. The mapping process extracts the intricacies, nuances and key reflections around the complexity of your choices and distills them into tangible, salient points you can visually grasp and interpret.

The act of creating a map urges you to stop and contemplate your choice in greater depth. By translating multifaceted emotions and experiences into clear, digestible words which populate your map, you have the potential to better understand yourself and what you’re navigating.

Mapping is an opportunity to gain insight and self-awareness as it aids you in being more present. As you practice mapping, your sensitivity to the nuances of your choices will increase. You will see clearly how each choice has led you to where you are today, and you’ll bring greater mindfulness to making your future choices.

How Mapping is Different from Journaling

Mapping is distinct from journaling. In journaling, your words, thoughts and feelings flow fluidly onto a page. Key turning points are often obscured in the myriad of details within narrative journal format causing you to lose sight of what’s truly significant.

The goal of mapping is not to free-write as you would in your journal, but to engage in a dialogue with yourself, asking incisive questions and capturing the answers as short truthful statements. The brevity of the format encourages you to hone your words into gems that resonate as your truth. Your questions and corresponding answers will form the foundation for your map.

When I began writing this book, I feared the specifics of mapping might be overwhelming for those not technically inclined. What I’ve come to understand is that the actual process of how you document your choices is secondary to what you discover as you immerse yourself in the inquiry and exploration of why you made or will make a choice. More important than what your map looks like is the process you undertake to uncover your truth.

As you reflect upon the decisions you’ve made in your past and visualize those you’ll make in your present and future, you create an opportunity to impact your relationships, your career path and your confidence. Expansively considering your choices allows you to venture into a profoundly personal and spiritual journey, noticing the richness of the terrain you’ve traveled, seeing where you’ve been stuck, while recognizing untapped paths of potential.

The inquiry process, which I’ll guide you through, supports you to flesh out the components of your choice and continue asking yourself questions that enable you to go deeper, accumulate more details, gather more insights and learn more about yourself—who you were, who you are, who you will be—so that you can use this information to make more thoughtful choices going forward.

Mapping is a tool for exploration that is always available to you, and gives you an accessible process for approaching big issues. Asking curious, pointed questions as you pull back layer upon layer of your truth allows you to comprehend all that’s happening and discern what may be keeping you stuck.

During the journey of exploring my choices, there have been times I’ve actively mapped, and times I’ve lost sight that I have access to this tool. When I inevitably reach for this trusted companion, I’m astounded at the clarity I feel.

Giving greater attention to your choices is a practice you have the opportunity to embark upon daily. Should you find that you fall out of the habit of examining your life, as you may with any healthy discipline you’ve cultivated, you can carve out quiet time to resume it again. It’s as simple as that.

As you move through the book, you’ll use the maps and accompanying questions to support you in the following ways:

How to view your past choices with compassion and forgiveness.

How to reflect upon your past stories with a fresh and objective perspective.

How to engage in the inquiry and exploration of why you made or will make a choice.

How to coach yourself through choices you’re making in the present to ensure you’re heading in a direction that matters to you.

2

WHAT CHOICES REVEAL

Every day you make choices—some big, some small—but particular choices are deeply meaningful because they demonstrate who you are, what you value, where you’ve been and where you’re going.

Looking back and exploring what emerged from a choice you made gives you permission to take 100% ownership of it and any subsequent actions.

Certain intentional, proactive choices will stand out clearly in your mind; these are the BIG ONES—the ones you can easily recount—whether you married, what you chose to study in college, what job you took, where you moved, whether or not you chose to have kids. Then there are your smaller, seemingly less life-altering choices, often not on your radar, such as: choosing to attend a workshop, accepting an invitation or deciding to begin a yoga practice, that may require delving deeper into the recesses of your thoughts to excavate and uncover. Often, it’s only upon reflection, as you retrace your steps and look for connections, that you can appreciate the great impact a small choice had in your life.

It’s possible you’ve spent countless hours ruminating upon whether your big choices were right or wrong and how their consequences affected you along the way. You may wonder what could have been had you chosen a different path, causing you to feel self-doubt. It’s natural when thinking about past choices to focus on a simple binary question: Was that choice good or bad? This type of thinking is tied to judgment, shame and doubt, and distracts you from the abundant information that is concealed within each choice.

There’s more to gain by approaching choice from a place of deeper exploration and inquiry—seeking to understand what your choices can teach you about yourself.

Becoming an investigator of your life, excavating your past for answers and clues, lets you view yourself with kinder, more soul-seeking eyes. When perched on your own shoulder as an observer, you create emotional distance. This space enables you to sit with your questions and allow your answers to present themselves. During this process, you don’t need a plan of action for what you’ll uncover—keep asking, keep listening, allowing your answers to flow without any attachment or worry as to what you’ll do with them. Trust that as you gather the answers to your challenging questions you can handle whatever arises.

During my first mapping year, I was profoundly introspective and reflective. I carefully examined my past in an attempt to understand what truly motivated me, what got in my way, what mattered to me, and how I wanted to show up as I moved into the next phase of my life. Acting as my own coach, I used guiding questions to dissect my key choices so I could better understand who I was and how I’d gotten to this place in my life.

What motivated me to make that choice?

Why did I choose that option when others were pushing me in a different direction?

Did I listen to my intuition or ignore it?

How did I show up at the time?

Did I make my choice to please someone else?

What did I hope would happen?

Did I make the choice on my own or with support?

What became possible because of that choice?

How did I shift after the choice?

In asking these questions, I sought to understand details about my past thoughts and actions. I used my new tools of inquiry and mapping, plus my deep desire for answers, to explore the lessons I’d learned in making my key choices. Putting my life under deep scrutiny allowed me to see all that can be revealed through sustained inquiry. With continued practice, I honed this process and now share it so you can apply it to your life in the way that best suits you.

Over a decade ago, I began inviting groups of women to meet at my home based on one singular criterion—they each made me happy. Connection is my highest value, and bringing great women together brings joy into my life. At one of these gatherings, with choice very much on my mind (as it often is), I asked everyone to indulge me by sharing five key choices that define who they are and how those choices set the foundation upon which they’re proud to stand.

Some of the women I knew well, others were new to my circle, but hearing the details of each woman’s choices forged an immediate sense of deeper connection. No matter how different our backgrounds and stories, or how painful our choices may have been, we felt the humanity of each story, and appreciated a sense of deep solidarity as each woman spoke her truth.

A handful of the women made a meaningful decision related to being a parent. At twenty-two, one woman chose to have her boyfriend’s baby against her parent’s wishes, knowing she’d be disowned. A married woman with one child consciously chose not to have a second baby, a decision that bucked the desires of her close friends and family. A fifty-year-old grandmother, educated at an all-girls Catholic school, chose not to have an abortion at sixteen and insisted she get tutored, allowing her to graduate top in her high school class.

Many of the women walked away from corporate and supposedly stable professions to write a book, learn new skills, launch a start-up or pursue an entrepreneurial venture. They chose to leave relationships, take a stand for themselves and be alone rather than settling. Many shared personal stories that involved taking a leap to relocate to a new city, having an intuitive sense they needed a move to shake up their lives.

While there was great disparity in the choices the women shared, there were also striking commonalities: a deep inner strength, a courageous desire to take meaningful risks and a willingness to make big life changes even when it contradicted other people’s wishes for them.

You have a choice in how you reflect upon the past. You can look back from a place of judgment, assessing what you did wrong and beating yourself up for all you wish you’d done differently, or you can mine your past for your key choices, made in a moment of strength, that set the tone and inform who you are today. These choices will stand out as lighthouses, each guiding the way to the next.

While there’s certainly a place for, and a benefit to, looking at your dark spots, those parts you might wish to keep hidden, in the upcoming chapters we’ll focus on examining your past choices to see how they tell a story of strength that informs who you are. Then, later on, we’ll delve deeply into how to recover from any shame or guilt you may feel over perceived bad choices.

Five Intentional Choices

I invite you to take yourself on a journey. Look back over your life to identify and focus on five intentional choices that led you to where you are. As you begin, you may find this process challenging because your life has been full of choices. How do you sift through the multitude of decisions to determine the important ones that best illuminate who you are?

Let me demonstrate how I walked two clients through their pasts, supporting them to determine their five choices so you can get the gist of how to apply this exercise to yourself. Then I’ll invite you to witness examples of a more involved exploration process. Equipped with both options, you can choose how deeply you’d like to go and how closely you want to examine your life.

During an intimate workshop I hosted, I encouraged eleven women to reflect upon lessons they learned from past choices and examine stories they’d created about themselves because of those choices. I guided them through an exercise to gain clarity on their significant choices and then assisted them as they narrowed those down to the ones that were most informative about who they are today.

As we began the exercise, my client Becca said, Kim, I’m confused, I’ve made so many choices in my life, how do I choose the ones that are most meaningful?

Focus on the substantial ones you consciously made, I advised. The ones that were intentional, the ones you had a reason for making. Don’t focus on the ones you made without awareness.

The first choice Becca recounted was going to college because she had to prove something to herself. As the pretty sister, she wasn’t raised to believe she was smart and had to work diligently to get high grades and graduate magna cum laude.

Her next meaningful choice was to start her first wellness business because she craved independence and dreamt of making a difference. Her third choice was to move away from the pace of New York City to the rural and bucolic environment of upstate New York. Her next choice was to take all she’d learned over the years to become a coach and help others.

Years later, Becca became ill, and in spite of her medical knowledge, wasn’t getting the information and support she needed to heal. She felt despondent and frustrated. Wanting to help others avoid what she’d experienced, she made her fifth major choice to return to her medical and wellness roots.

After Becca completed the exercise, I invited Julia to share her five choices.

In college, I made the choice to take an art course. It was more fun than my other options and it paved the way for my becoming an artist.

What about your next choice? I questioned.

"I needed to find my voice and chose to enter a 12-step recovery