If You Could Choose a Life to Live... Would You Choose the One You've Got?

If You Could Choose a Life to Live… Would You Choose the One You’ve Got?

Most people spend years trying to improve themselves.

They analyse their thinking.
 They try to regulate their emotions.
 They push themselves to build better habits.

But what if the real issue isn’t you?

What if the real question is whether the life you're adapting to was ever consciously chosen in the first place?

In this episode of Rise Up, Vicky Ross explores a powerful and uncomfortable question:

If you could choose a life to live… would you choose the one you’ve got?

Together we explore:

• Why people often try to change themselves to fit a life that doesn’t align with them
 • How childhood meaning-making shapes identity and life choices
 • The difference between the protective voice of fear and the deeper voice of truth
 • Why wanting to “do nothing” may actually be a sign of mental exhaustion
 • The reflective questions that can help you reconnect with the life you would truly choose

This episode invites you to pause, reflect, and ask yourself a deeper question:

Are you trying to improve yourself… or are you trying to survive a life that doesn’t fit you?

If this episode resonates, you’re warmly invited to explore these ideas further inside Vicky’s membership community.

Links are in the show notes.

Transcript

A Bold Question About Choice

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hi, and welcome back to Rise Up and Live Podcast. My name is Vicky Ross, and I'm your host here. And today, this podcast is about understanding yourself more deeply so that you can live a life that is truly yours. Not a life that you've inherited from other people or a life that you've adapted to, but a life that you consciously choose. So today I want to ask you a question. But it might feel a little bit uncomfortable and controversial. But let's go for it. It's worth asking anyway. Here it is. If you could choose a life to live, would you choose the one you've got? Not the life you show people, not the life you've learned to manage, but the life that you actually wake up to every day. Would you choose this life again? If you could. So just pause for a moment and just sit with that. If I could, if I had the choice, would I choose this life? Because I can tell you now from what I hear with most people, most people would choose a different life, or some people would choose some parts of their life to be different, not everything. Well, what how do you see it? How do you feel? What would you do? So something very interesting happens when life doesn't quite fit

When Life Doesn’t Fit You

SPEAKER_00 1:46

you. Instead of questioning the life itself, you start trying to adjust yourself so that you can live inside it. You start working on your behavior, you start questioning and working on your mindset, you look at your habits and you try and change your habits, you analyze your thoughts because you assume your thinking must be the problem. And it is. Some of those expectations are yours. So perhaps you experience something as a child and unconsciously you kind of made a pact with yourself that you would never do this, or you would never put up with this, or you would never behave this way, or betray someone, or whatever it is. So there's an expectation that you've created. You've created a role that, oh, when I become a parent, when I go to university, when I go to work, the job that I would choose, because what you're witnessing and observing at that time doesn't feel good or right, and therefore you kind of say these things to yourself. And and also, you know, you you create life around responsibilities and how you feel about those responsibilities and the meanings that you were never really, that you've never really questioned. So for instance, everything in our life has a meaning. If I think about the weather, it means something. If it's hot, it means something. If it's cold, it means something. And if it's raining, it means something else. Is this my meaning? Or is this a meaning that was assigned to me? In other words, I observed how other people behaved around the weather patterns, and I just assumed that that's how it is, that's what it means, and that's how I should feel. And now when it rains, I feel one way, and when it's cold, I feel another way, when it's hot, I feel a different way.

Meanings We Inherit Early

SPEAKER_00 4:22

But when life doesn't quite fit, there are usually three things that you try to fix. First, you analyze your thinking and you assume that something must be wrong with the way you think. So you try and change those thoughts. And you know, sometimes your thinking is wrong, but maybe it's not wrong in the ways that you think. A lot of thinking going on here. Perhaps it's wrong because you're thinking about what is wrong with you when you feel resistance in doing what the outside world is expecting of you, and you're following your heart's passion, and therefore you analyze that thinking and you think to yourself, what is wrong with a thought? But maybe there's nothing wrong with the thought other than you think that the thought is wrong. So you try and change your thoughts. Because if you could think, just think differently, maybe, just maybe life would be easier. The second thing that we try and do is we try and regulate our emotions because often the way that we feel doesn't match the life that we're living. Maybe you feel tired, maybe you feel frustrated, maybe you feel restless. And from a very young age, you may have heard things like stop crying, stop complaining. Do you want something to cry about? I'll give you something to cry about. You've got nothing to complain about. The kids in the world that have got nothing and they're not complaining, so you stop complaining. Oh, don't be so sensitive. Have you heard any of these things? So you learn that your emotions are inconvenient. The conclusion becomes: if I feel wrong, then I must be wrong. Because children are very, very good at blaming themselves rather than blaming the environment. So you try and change how you feel because it's not convenient, it's not appropriate, it's not and and you know, I know you can argue that there is a time and a place for everything, and perhaps it's not appropriate for you to have a tamper tantrum and throw all the, you know, your dolls up the pram in a work environment. Maybe then you need to be a little bit more controlled. Having said that, you still need to go and deal with that emotion. If that emotion's coming up, it's not coming up because it's random and it's useless, it's coming up for a reason. And you need to give yourself that space and the time to understand what is causing that emotion to come up so

Alignment Over Endless Discipline

SPEAKER_00 7:01

that you can understand it and work with it. The third thing that we do is we try and improve our habits. So you try and become more disciplined because you we've been told that you don't have discipline, and that's why you're not getting anywhere in life. You become more productive, you know, because you're not productive enough. You decide that your way is not structured enough, so you try and bring structure, you know, like you've got to get up at six o'clock and you've got to do this by seven, and you've got to meditate for three hours, and you've got to drink two liters of water and all that kind of stuff. You try and get more structure. Because discipline is often presented as the solution to everything, you know, wake up early, work hard, be organized. And sometimes the real issue isn't discipline, but sometimes the real issue is that life that you're trying to live doesn't match your nature, it doesn't match your core, your energy, your soul. Maybe you're someone who needs space to think, maybe you're someone who notices beauty, ideas, and connections, and that inspires you. And maybe you're someone who wakes up and wants to step outside, look at the sky, walk through a garden, sit quietly, reflect. And if your life demands constant structure and constant output, you can end up feeling like you're fighting yourself all the time, and that kind of life becomes exhausting. So part of the reason this happens goes back to our early years. When you were very young, especially the first seven or eight years of your life, your brain was operating mostly in a slower brainwave state like the delta and the theta. Those are learning states. You were observing and absorbing everything around you. But you weren't yet able to analyze life the way that you can now. As a child, you experienced things in the moment. You had no reference and no experience to give you reference and to say this is good or bad, right

Two Inner Voices At Work

SPEAKER_00 9:20

and wrong, even though I don't believe this good or bad, right and wrong. So you felt sadness or you felt joy, you felt fear. But once that moment passed, the experience often passed with it. What tends to stay with you isn't just the experience, but it's the meaning that gets attached to it later. So meaning like I must prove myself, I must not disappoint people, I must take care of everyone. For those meanings quietly shape your identity. And from that identity, your life begins to take form and shape. It starts to affect your choices, your relationships, your responsibilities. And by the time you reach adulthood, it can feel that this life was always yours. It feels normal, it feels right, but something deep inside doesn't. And here's something worth considering. If the life that you live truly reflected who you are, you wouldn't need constant self-correction just to function inside of it. You would not need endless discipline so you can tolerate it. You wouldn't spend years trying to adjust your thinking and your emotions just to make the whole thing manageable. Because when a life is aligned with who you are, effort exists, challenge exists, but that constant internal resistance disappears. So here's a question worth asking yourself Are you trying to improve yourself or are you trying to survive a life that doesn't actually fit you? Just sit that for that for a moment, just let that sink in. Because that question can change everything. I don't know if you've noticed that, but inside you there are usually two voices. The one voice is protective while the other voice is expansive. The protective voice is that that many people call ego. It's cautious, it's fear-based. It prefers what's familiar, it wants to recreate what you already know because that makes it feel safe. But there's another voice, a quieter voice. The voice that pulls you towards something meaningful, something towards growth, some towards passion, something that you don't know why. You just have to hear it, see it, feel it. Because it's towards something that feels true. So the next time you hear yourself say, I have to do this, pause and ask yourself something very, very simple. Is this fear speaking or is it truth speaking? Now, when I ask people what life they would choose if they were completely

Rest, Exhaustion And True Desire

SPEAKER_00 12:28

free, many people will say something interesting. They say, I would do nothing. God, if I if if I could do choose anything, I would just sleep all day. I would sit and do nothing. I would sit by the sea and just look at the water and drink coconuts. And if that's your answer, that tells you something really, really important. Because when your mind and your nervous system are deeply exhausted, all they want is rest. They want space, silence, relief. So imagining doing nothing isn't necessarily the life that you truly want. It may simply mean you are tired, really tired, mentally tired right now. And once your energy starts to return, something interesting starts to happen. Your curiosity comes back, your creativity comes back, the desire to build something meaningful comes back. Because human beings aren't designed to do nothing forever. You are designed to create meaning, and you can't access that energy when you're exhausted. So if you want to explore this honestly, ask yourself a few questions. Don't rush them. Sit with them, write them down if you can. So here are the questions. If you could design your life from scratch, where would you live? What would an

Designing A Life From Scratch

SPEAKER_00 14:07

ordinary day look like? Not a holiday, just a normal Tuesday. What would you spend your time doing? Who would you spend your life with? And perhaps the most powerful question of all is what part of your current life feels like a genuine choice? And which part feels inherited? Because sometimes when you ask yourself these questions, honestly, really, really honest, you realize something surprising. That you have spent years trying to improve yourself so that you can function inside a life that was never consciously designed by you. I remember doing work with a director of a company. He was a quantity surveyor. He'd been working for this company, I think, 35 years, very, very successful. And something inside of me came up with a question and I said to him, if I had the magic wand and I could go abragadabra, I can grant you your biggest wish. What would that be? And without him even thinking twice, he said, I would quit, I would start my own consultancy and I would travel the world with my wife while I work. So it would be like half work, half traveling with my wife, and just enjoy my life. And then he went, and he his eyes got big and he looked at me and I went, Okay. Here's the interesting thing, is that I came back a month later, and just before I went there, because I sent him an email to say, just confirming our meeting, blah blah, which I normally do, and he sent me a letter to say, I'm sure you've already been told by HR that I have resigned, and they have said I can carry on working with you at their cost and all that, and I'm leaving in whichever month he was leaving. So when I went to see him and I said, So what actually happened? Because it was in the last half an hour of our meeting that this question came up, and by the next month he had already put his resignation in and he started to formulate his life, his new life,

The Director Who Chose Freedom

SPEAKER_00 16:27

because he had never allowed himself to take that leap of faith and create the life that he wanted, which was one on his terms. And I asked him, and and the biggest question when when he did that big, I said, what stops you from doing that? And that's where all the conditioning of like what I should and what I must, and what are this and what are that. And he just never allowed himself to think further than that. He just adapted to the life. So choosing a completely different life doesn't mean that you have to retrain. I mean, sometimes it is, but it's about living life on your terms. That's my biggest, biggest question. Are you living a life that is on your terms? That's the work that I do. I get so passionate and so excited to help people become the best version of themselves and live a life that's on their terms. So you started listening to this episode because of a simple question. If you could choose a life to live, would you choose the one you've got? And maybe today's conversation isn't about finding the perfect answer. Maybe it's just about being honest enough to ask the question and listen to what comes through, what comes up. Because the moment you start asking better questions, new possibilities begin to appear. So if this episode stirred something in you, I genuinely would love to hear what it made you reflect on. You

Live On Your Terms And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 18:00

can journal about it, you can talk about it with someone you trust, or simply sit with the questions. And if you'd like a space where you can explore these ideas more deeply, we can do that together. You're very welcome to work one-on-one with me or join my beautiful membership community. You'll find your tribe. And you'll also find the links in the notes, the podcast notes. So until next time, keep asking better questions because better questions have a way of creating entirely new lives. And share this with somebody quietly or loudly that needs to hear this, and until next time, hears to your success. Lots of love.