Ep 142 Feeling Stuck? You Might Have More Choice Than You Think

A shorter, gentler one about choice; not the tidy 'take control of your life' kind, but the honest kind. 

The choices we don't realise we're making, the ones we only spot after they've passed, and why 'I get to' doesn't always feel true when life is hard. If you've been feeling stuck lately, come and sit with this one.

Interested in exploring your life choices more deeply? Get in touch at carlykillen.com

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Transcript

0:00

Hello and welcome back to Rooted in Presence. I'm Carly, breathwork facilitator, strength coach, and your host and guide for today's episode, which is number 142. Now, before we get going, I am going to be completely honest with you today, because this week I almost didn't record a podcast at all. I've been away for a few days with my daughter, which was very lovely, and by the time I got home I realized I hadn't done any prep to, uh, create this podcast this week. My usual routine has completely gone out the window. All those days I usually think about research, record, edits, have been spent elsewhere doing very nice things. But yeah, that time is no longer available. And for a moment though, I caught myself thinking, "Well, I can't do the podcast this week. There is no time." I had to do other things instead. But then I noticed something, 'cause that's not actually true. I had lots of choices available to me. Yes, I could choose to skip a week. I could choose to write a full episode and scramble to get it done. I could record something much shorter, or I could simply trust that something meaningful might emerge as soon as I sat down and got a little curious. So here we are, a short episode, ironically or not so ironically, about choice, which, yeah, feels pretty fitting because it's the choosing that has essentially become the whole point so the thing I want to share here really is that life handed me this very neat little lesson alongside this episode. But as I was reflecting on all of this, I realized there was actually another choice available to me last week. One I didn't even see at the time. If I'd have thought ahead, which I usually do, to be fair, if I'd fully registered that I was going to be away on exactly the days I usually prepare and record, I could have recorded two episodes before I went. I've done things like that before, before holidays and Christmas and time off. Yeah, it's the organized thing to do. Get ahead, bank an extra episode for the week away. But I didn't. I just didn't quite clock the impact of being away until I was already in it, and I know that might sound a little bit silly, but there we go. Turns out I am also human, and these things happen. So that choice is gone now. I can't go back and take that choice, which might have been a bit more convenient. Can't travel back in time and become the organized one that recorded two episodes. And for a moment it would be quite easy just to tell myself, "Well, now I don't have a choice." But that's also not quite true either. I don't have that choice anymore, but I do have different choices Did you hear what I said there? It's not that I don't have a choice, I just don't have that choice. But there are still choices available. And I think that applies to so much more than podcasting. It shows up everywhere in life, right? In relationships, health, careers, parenting, grief. So often we look back and see a choice we didn't know we had at the time, And it can be tempting to sit in the regret a bit, or to decide that because that door is closed, we're now stuck. But usually we're not actually stuck. We just have a different set of choices than the ones we wish we'd taken. You can't choose what you didn't know then, but you can choose what you know now. So this is a shift I've noticed in myself, so I'd like to bring it up here. There was a time when I'd have treated the whole thing as evidence that I was disorganized, and used it to tell myself off. Uh, I should have thought ahead, I should have known better. But, but now I'm trying to treat it as a bit more like information. So instead of a, "I should have," it's a bit more like a, "Oh, yeah, interesting. I, I missed that one." So next time I have some different choices, and the next time I'll probably remember that when I go away in the early part of, of the week, I could do to get ahead with some of my weekly jobs. And that's a much kinder relationship to have with myself But actually, the whole idea of noticing the choices we're already taking and making, it reminds me of a client I worked with quite some time ago. She would often apologize for not completing workouts, and when she explained why, it would sound something along the lines of, "Oh, I had to do the washing," or, "I had to catch up on housework." And she'd say it as though life had simply just happened to her, as though these things had landed on her from the outside, leaving her no room to move. And yeah, she was very busy, so there was some truth in that. But there was something I could gently reflect to her, and it was that she didn't have to do the washing first, but she chose to, and that's okay. Now, I'd like to be really clear here about what I say. I'm not doing that we all have the same 24 hours thing, I promise. And I'm not saying exercise is more important than clean clothes. It absolutely isn't, and there are plenty of days the washing genuinely matters more. And not because she'd made the wrong decision or anything. She, she didn't choose the wrong thing. I said it to her that way because I just wanted to give something back to her, the recognition that it was actually her choice. And that moment she realized she was choosing rather than simply reacting, simply being swept along, something be- came to change for her. She stopped seeing herself as someone life happened to. She became someone who participated in her own life. And strangely enough, she began making different choices. Not because I told her to or because I guilted or shamed her, not because I instructed her to prioritize differently. I didn't use that, "Well, it's a case of priorities," line either. But once she really realized what her choices were, she could organize herself accordingly. That choice was now consciously hers Now, I've nodded to a few common coaching phrases there already, and there's another one that I'd like to bring up as well. There's a, a very common reframe in the coaching world that tends to come up around this. That shift from I have to, to I get to. I have to exercise becomes I get to exercise. I have to go to work becomes I get to go to work. And there's real value in it. It can genuinely open something up and remind us of the privilege tucked away inside a lot of the things that feel like obligation. But I want to be really honest with you because I think this reframe can also fall a little short, and it can feel quite shallow or hollow, I think, at times, because sometimes I get to just doesn't ring quite true. When life feels like it's not really going your way, and when you're in one of those seasons where you just feel like none of the choices in front of you feel good, when you're choosing between difficult and slightly less difficult, to slap in, I get to on top of that, can feel like we're bypassing something. You're skipping over the recognition of how real, of how hard, and those feelings that really are truly valid at the root of all of this. So, I want to offer a gentler version. Of course I do. I always do this. So not the I get to with that kind of cheerful sense, but simply I get to choose. The choice is mine. Even when I don't love any of the options, even when none of them feel joyful, the freedom isn't loving the choice. The freedom is in recognizing that choice is still mine to make. And let's just take a little pause here too because just to give a nod and some respect to acknowledge something that's very present in the world right now. That very freedom to choose in itself is a kind of privilege, and it's one that not everyone in the world holds right now. There are people, especially many women in particular, in some parts of the world, who really have had their choices taken from them. And I'm not gonna go deep into that today because it deserves far more than a passing mention. But I don't want to talk about freedom of choice as though it's universal when for some, it simply isn't. And perhaps holding that awareness gently can make choices many of us do have, the small, daily, easily overlooked ones, feel a little less like a burden and perhaps a little more like the gift that they really are So let's talk about some of the choices and some of the things that we might include in our life. So even something as simple as the Wonder Walk that I've been doing recently, it really reminds me of this. If you've not heard me talk about this before, the Wonder Walk is a slow, intentional walk where the whole point is simply to notice. And the thing I really love about it is that we can all walk exactly the same route, and nobody notices quite the same thing. Somebody might spot a tiny flower growing through a crack in the wall. Someone else notices light on the water. Hmm, that one might be me. Another person hears birdsong, and I might have completely missed that one. So nobody's right and nobody's wrong. We're all just simply choosing, and perhaps without realizing, but choosing where our attention goes. And that, I think, is one of the quietest and sometimes most rebellious freedoms available to us every single day. We don't always get to choose our circumstances, but we do have some say in how we meet them We don't have to do it all at once. None of it has to be perfect, but just making choices moment by moment. Where do I place my attention? What feels true right now? What needs my energy today, and what can potentially wait? So when we stop saying, "I have to," and start saying, "I choose to," even softly, even if it's just to ourselves to start with, something really interesting happens. We essentially stop giving our power away. We might not always like our choices. Sometimes we're choosing between two really difficult things. Sometimes we're just choosing the least difficult option available to us that day. But it's still our life, and recognizing that lets us participate in it much more fully. And for me, that's exactly where presence begins. Not in having complete control over life. We don't, and we never will. But in just noticing, oh, yeah, I get to choose here. And sometimes the most compassionate choice isn't the one that looks the most productive from the outside. Sometimes it is rest. Sometimes it's choosing to ask for help. Sometimes it's changing your mind, and sometimes it's saying no, and yeah, sometimes it's saying yes wholeheartedly. So whatever this week holds for you, I hope you might simply become a little more curious. Not about making the perfect choices, please. Let's just let that pressure go. But about noticing the choices you're already making all of the time, and a lot of them without realizing. And perhaps that's all any of us are ever really doing. We make the best choice we can with the awareness we have at the time, and then life gets to teach us something. And next time, we might have a few more choices available to us than we did before And to me, that's never really a failing. It's definitely part of the learning and not really something we can optimize for. For me, I think it's all about the participation and when we start to notice, I think we become just a little bit more free. So thank you so much for being here this week, especially for the slightly shorter, more spontaneous episode. It turned out that choosing was the whole thing all along. So until next time, may you meet yourself with compassion, walk with presence, and remember you already have everything you need