How to Choose Again When Things Don’t Go As Planned

If you saw my Instagram stories yesterday, you may know that Raffi had a fever and had to stay home from school for the day. Luckily, he was feeling better rather quickly (and especially after a three hour nap), but at the first sign of him feeling unwell, I immediately started to feel a familiar sense of anxiety and worry. I want to say this was out of pure love and concern for him, but it was actually more from a professional perspective. I knew he would be okay, but would I?

You see, during the height of the pandemic, we didn’t have childcare for about 10 months. That is nearly a year of being home with him while Inge and I were both working demanding full time jobs. If you’re a working parent with kids (especially little ones), I think you know what I am talking about. Those days were long and hard. The constant juggle of who would watch him during the other ones meetings and phone calls and zooms is enough to make my heart sink now just thinking about it. And even though some time has passed since then, it feels like a minor form of post-traumatic stress that I am still healing from. So the moment I was confronted again with the thought of him being home with us on a workday, I had some major feelings arise.

I’ll be honest. I felt resentful. The hours he is in school is my time and quite frankly, it never feels like enough. So I huffed and puffed for a bit. Then I rescheduled my appointments for the day and cleared my calendar. Once all of that was taken care of, I then heard my inner voice talk to me. “You can choose another feeling.”

The thought both surprised and delighted me. It’s true! I could have easily chosen to be mopey for the day, silently upset and frustrated. But what good would that do? If I chose that, then Raffi would feel my negative energy and it would make Inge feel stressed and guilty for being the one whose workday was prioritized. The circumstances could not change, but I could change my perspective on it.

Now look, this is not about toxic positivity and pushing down my real feelings. Instead, I gave myself the grace to feel my feelings. I vented safely and privately to Inge (kids hear and absorb everything), and then I proactively chose to feel another feeling. So I chose gratitude.

I chose gratitude because this is actually the life I dreamt about having years ago. It’s a cliche, but life is short and kids grow up so fast and how lucky am I to get to spend a day with my kid, and be the one to take care of him? That in itself is a huge privilege. I also felt immense gratitude that he wasn’t even too sick! We often don’t appreciate our good health until something happens.

I could go on and on about how happy and lucky I am, but that’s not really the point of this story. And also, I don’t always feel this way of course. But I wanted to share today because I think there’s a big lesson somewhere in here, despite me being long winded in getting to the point.

The point is, we can choose again. We can purposefully shift the direction of our lives and point it to where we want to go and to how we want to feel. It sounds simple, but it can be quite hard to do in practice. In fact, I think it takes a lot of practice and it’s an ongoing, lifelong exercise. But I do think I have gotten better at it over the years because I fully believe in the concept of mind over matter. There are only so many things we can control and the way we think about things is one of them.

I wanted to share this here because I think this concept can be applied to our everyday thoughts and actions. For example, I’ve worked with health coaching clients where they’ll share that once they do one “bad” thing, it’s a lot easier for them to continue on a path of unhealthy patterns. But there’s no agency in that and we don’t have to live that way. Our minds are incredibly powerful and if you train it to “choose again,” you can shift your energy and redirect your life so that you can get back on your desired path.

I’d love to hear if this story resonates with you and if you’ve put this mindset shift into practice. Feel free to comment below or send me a DM.