Choice Awareness

[Daniel E.]

Make a Choice When It Doesn’t Matter
By Pavel G. Somov, Ph.D.​

In the next several posts I’d like to share with you a few Choice Awareness Training exercises that I’ve been using with my clients since 1999. Choice Awareness training is designed to leverage a greater sense of freedom-to-change, to awaken the living zombie, to facilitate change-process.

Choice Awareness Training
Freedom manifests through the awareness of a choice. But what is a choice? We say we “have a choice” when we are aware of options to select from. Thus, the notion of “choice” refers to:

a) the awareness of the options available, and
b) the act of selection of one of the options.

Becoming aware of the options restores our sense of freedom, takes us off the auto-pilot, off the zombie mode, and gives us an opportunity to change our patterns, habits, rituals, routines.

Theoretical Freedom
We are fundamentally free. And yet, in our everyday life, we do not feel free. We mindlessly repeat the same patterns over and over, and, as a result, end up feeling caught up in a vicious cycle of sameness, feeling powerless to change. This kind of mindlessness, this sense of being stuck, is true of all of us, and is particularly true of compulsives (such as perfectionists, substance users, etc.).

Operational Freedom
Operational (or practical, actionable) freedom is proportionate to our mindfulness, i.e. to our presence in the moment, to our awareness of the options available to us at any given moment. The more options we are aware of at any given moment, the freer we are.

Increasing Operational Freedom
When you are stuck in a “should,” when you are mindless, when you are flying blind on an autopilot of a given habit, you don’t see any options other than the course of action that is expected of you. Your operational freedom is close to zero. You are a zombie, a robot, a passenger of what’s been programmed into you. Acceptable alternatives, of course, exist but you are not in a habit of looking for them.

The goal of Choice Awareness Training is to increase operational freedom by looking for the alternatives and by practicing the psychomechanics of choice. Ultimately, the goal of Choice Awareness Training is to de-program the zombie so that he/she can consciously re-program oneself, in order to own one’s life rather than to keep living out someone else’s expectations.

Choice Awareness Exercise: Make a Choice When It Doesn’t Matter
If I offer you a $20 bill or a $100 bill and ask you to choose, the choice is more or less predetermined by the pragmatics: as such, it’s not really a choice. Now, what would you rather have: a red or a blue, one or one point three, a glass or a cup? This offer seems meaningless. And it is. Meaningless offers, however, represent the opportunity for a pure choice.

So, when someone asks “What do you want to do?” and you have no preference, instead of copping out and saying “I don’t care, you decide,” I recommend that you decide. Make a choice when the actual choice doesn’t matter to you. Practice making a choice when it doesn’t matter so that you can make a choice when it does.

Resources:
Lotus Effect: Shedding Suffering and Rediscovering Your Essential Self
for clinicians: Choice Awareness Training

 

[Daniel E.]

"Empowerment"--that's what the realization of choice can give you. According to research cited by Sheena Iyengar in The Art of Choosing, infants as young as 4 months enjoyed the power of choice to turn on music by their own volition. In adults, "neurons in the striatum...respond more to rewards that people or animals actively choose than to identical rewards that are passively received." Isn't it amazing that our very brain cells vibrate happily to our active choices?

As George Bernard Shaw said, "To be in hell is to drift, to be in heaven is to steer." If this is so, you can create a little bit of heaven for yourself right now by making a voluntary and deliberate choice to improve your life. Of course, that's not all there is to successful change, but the awareness of choice could be the first step towards willingness to start down the path.

excerpted from: The CHOICE Motivator - Psychology Today

 

[busybee]

It seems amazing to me on the journey that I have embarked on that just at the time when answers are being sought or information that describes what I am searching for suddenly appears. I have heard it said that the universe looks after you and so it certainly appears Daniel. Many of the resources or information that you have posted is relevant, reliable and valuable. Thanks

 

[Daniel E.]

Freedom-to-Change and Self-Efficacy
By Pavel G. Somov, Ph.D.

Bandura (1977) defined Self-Efficacy as a person’s belief in (or confidence in) his or her ability to successfully carry out a specific task. Freedom-to-Change is a belief that one is fundamentally free to change, i.e. that one is free to perform or “can” perform a given task.

The “can-do-ism” of Self-Efficacy and the “can-do-ism” of Choice Awareness Training, as similar as they may seem, are fundamentally different issues. The “can-do-ism” of Self-Efficacy, with self-efficacy being defined as confidence in one’s ability to succeed, is a probability of success issue, whereas the “can-do-ism” of the Freedom-to-Change is a capability issue. The Freedom-to-Change construct is designed to reflect the species-wide range of human capability (is a given endeavor within my human capacity?); whereas the construct of Self-Efficacy is a person-specific estimation of the probability-of-success (will I succeed at this endeavor if I were to attempt it?). With these distinctions in mind, the thrust of Choice Awareness Training is not to nurture the client’s belief that he or she will successfully carry out a specific task, but to nurture the client’s realization that he or she can carry out the task in question. With this distinction in mind, it could be said that the “can-do-ism” of Self-Efficacy is really a “will-do-ism.”

This conceptual differentiation might seem like clinically insignificant hair-splitting. But it isn’t: the difference between Freedom-to-Change (which delineates one’s capability) and Self-Efficacy (which predicts the probability that a given action will be taken) is no less significant than the difference between capability and motivation. If treatment fails to differentiate between the constant of “capability” (can-do) and the variable of motivation-contingent “probability” (will-do), the individual, faced with a lapse or a relapse, is certain to attribute his or her failure to lacking “capability,” i.e. to being globally unable and incapable to meet and maintain the recovery goals. This catastrophized “I can’t do this!” conclusion will, unfortunately, take the place of an otherwise more self-accepting conclusion of “I know I can do this, but I have not yet succeeded in doing so.”