How to Make Better Life Choices
Revisiting the death of Princess Diana during Part 1 of the sixth and final season of The Crown prompted me to reflect on the gravity of our choices.
Everything can turn bright due to one choice. Everything can turn dark due to another. Other choices lead to the gray, neutral zone.
Can we ever know the right direction to take?
Let’s look at a few pivotal choices made in The Crown and how fateful they turned out to be. Then let’s explore better choice-making in our own lives.
Scenario One
Charles married Diana even though he was in love with another woman. He sad he didn’t have a choice. The norms set forth by the British Monarchy and the Church of England at the time did not allow him to wed the woman he loved.
If Charles had never proposed marriage to Diana, perhaps she would have met the perfect “frog” (a term she used for an ordinary man) and lived a happier life. Or maybe she would have chosen a single life and been equally as happy.
Scenario Two
If Diana had trusted her intuition the day before her marriage to Prince Charles and run the other way, she may never have become a celebrity. She may never have been subject to the crazed paparazzi, who pushed her toward an untimely death.
Scenario Three
If Mohamed Al-Fayed hadn’t pressured his son Dodi to romance Diana, due to his own obsession with personal acceptance in the West, perhaps Dodi would have married his fiancé, model Kelly Fisher. The two might have led an entirely different life together in Malibu, California.
Each choice proved to be intricately entwined with a particular fate. For Diane and Dodi, it turned out to be a deadly one.
Diana spent part of her summer during her last year with Dodi on his father’s yacht floating in sparkling waters near Saint-Tropez, France. She admittedly enjoyed her time with Dodi.
But in a moment of clarity, Diane realized this was not who she was or where she wanted to be. She had been lured by excitement, thrills, and drama once again due to her childhood emotional wounds.
Diana concludes, “I don’t know how I got here.”
Have you ever asked yourself that very same question? It can seem like invisible forces move us from one life destination to the next and then to another.
What are these invisible forces? How can we make them conscious and thus make better, more conscious choices?
Let’s take a look at a few life-determining influences.
Conditioning
We’re all conditioned as children by our parents who teach us the rules of life as they understand them. This conditioning takes place through a system of rewards and punishment.
We come to understand what will evoke a “good girl” or a “bad girl” from our parents and adapt accordingly. We internalize the rules and attempt to follow them precisely.
As we grow up, societal conditioning kicks in too. Television underscores what’s good and what’s bad. It shows us what a desirable life looks like and all the material possessions that go along with it.
Even if you rebel against your parents’ rules or societal norms, you may simply be counter-conditioned. Although you live by a different set of guidelines, have you consciously chosen them?
You can continue acting out of your conditioning—most people do.
But if you want to make better choices, decide instead to examine your conditioning. Consciously choose what you want to embrace and what you want to discard from your past brainwashing.
Action Step: List out the conditioned beliefs that operate your life. If you’re not sure at first, consider what you think you “should” do or “must” do as a starting point. You could also add whatever causes you embarrassment or shame and anything else comes to mine. Then reconsider if you want your life run by those rules
“That is why we need a great deal of courage to challenge our own beliefs. Because even if we know we didn’t choose all these beliefs, it is also true that we agreed to all of them. The agreement is so strong that even if we understand the concept of it not being true, we feel the blame, the guilt, and the shame that occur if we go against these rules.”— from The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
Emotional Wounds
When a child feels consistently wounded by a parent, they often develop survival strategies to cope. They might withdraw, turn clingy, or become aggressive.
Many people bring these childhood survival strategies into adult life along with a particular—a lack of self worth, an overestimation of one’s abilities, or anything in-between.
Left unresolved, these emotional wounds govern one’s life.
Like Diana, I just wanted to be loved and accepted. That led to risky behavior as a young adult when I engaged in serial sexual encounters in my search for love.
In time, I realized I needed to focus inwardly and learn to love, encourage, and appreciate myself.
It’s almost impossible to make the best choices when dominated by your childhood wounds. People tend to play the same dysfunctional pattern on repeat. But as you heal your wounds, you’ll find you make better and better choices.
Action Step: Journal about your childhood. What hurt you the most? What made you angry? How did you react? Did these events leave emotional scars? How do these wounds direct your beliefs about yourself as an adult? How do they govern your life as an adult? If you find this too painful to do on your own, consider seeing a therapist.
Values
The willingness to see your conditioned responses and acknowledge your emotional wounds is the first step towards healing. Slowly, you can wipe the slate clean of past influences and get to know the real you.
What is it that you truly value? Once you know your values, your choices can become values-based rather than conditioned.
What are your personal values? Let this tiny list get you thinking:
Authenticity
Curiosity
Kindness
Justice
Social Connection
Clarity about your values helps you stay aligned to your true self rather than your conditioned self. This enables you to make choices that will more likely lead to happiness rather than suffering.
Action Step: Do an online search for a list of personal values. Write down any that resonate for you. Now whittle that list down to your top 3–5 choices. Journal about each of your top values. How have you lived up to it? Have you sometimes failed to live up to it? Write down specific examples. Explore them in depth. Keep your values list in a visible place and use it as a framework for making important decisions in the future.
Self-Awareness
We all have some degree of self-awareness. We know when we feel angry or sad, hungry or thirsty. But to make better choices, we need to deepen and expand our self-awareness.
Ideally, self-awareness will include thoughtful analysis, intuition, and listening to your body.
You can develop greater self-awareness through daily journaling or self-reflection. When it comes to important decisions, instead of acting impulsively, ask questions like:
Is this what I really want to do? Or is this what someone else wants me to do?
Is there an emotional wound driving this decision?
How will this decision impact my life now?
How will this decision impact my life in the future?
What does my heart say?
What does my gut say?
Learning to be more self-aware is a practice that takes time. But you’ll develop more confidence as you go and grow.
Action Step: Start growing your self-awareness with the small choices you face every day. Where do you want to eat? What do you want to wear? What kind of flowers do you want to plant in the garden? Check out your mind, your heart, and your gut in relation to these small choices. Gradually, you’ll be able to make bigger decisions from your true self rather than your conditioned or wounded self.
Learning to Let Go
Sometimes the universe makes decisions for us. But often we resist this unwanted or unexpected change when it occurs.
For example, when Dodi romanced Diana he cheated on his fiancé, Kelly Fisher. Fisher hired feminist attorney Gloria Allred and sued Dodi for breach of contract. She dropped the lawsuit after the fatal crash that killed Dodi on the spot and hours later, Diana.
Who knows what would have happened if Dodi and Kelly had married. Would Dodi have been a faithful and responsible husband? Or would he have constantly snorted cocaine as his Hollywood productions failed one after the other?
Maybe the affair with Diana, as painful as it probably was for Kelly, showed Dodi’s true character, and in a mysterious way, turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Eventually, Kelly married a pilot she met on a safari. They moved back to South Carolina where they live together to this day.
Learning to let go when the writing is on the wall can be just as important as making better choices. In fact, it is a better choice that will save you loads of unnecessary pain.
Closing Thoughts
The Crown is based in part on historical facts and in part creative imagination. We’ll never know for certain what the individuals said to each other in private.
But we do know the decisions that were made and how fateful they turned out. That aspect of the series made a profound impact on me. It made me realize how important it is to look at my own choice-making.
Is my choice-making based on conditioning? Is it based on emotional wounds? Or is it based in a clear mind and a peaceful heart?
While we don’t have complete control over every decision in our life and can never know the outcome for certain, we can learn to make better choices. But doing so depends on taking the time to go beyond our conditioning, heal our habitual wounds, and establish our real values.
And since sometimes, others make decisions that by default decide for us, it’s equally valuable to learn to let go.
Thank you for your presence, I know your time is precious! Don’t forget to sign up for Wild Arisings, my twice monthly letters from the heart filled with insights, inspiration, and ideas to help you connect with and live from your truest self.
You might also like to check out my Self-Care Shop. May you be happy, well, and safe – always. With love, Sandra
