Have you ever taken a moment to think about how many choices you make in one day? Have you ever contemplated the number of choices you had in one hour? More importantly, have you reflected on how those choices have impacted your past? How they impacted your present? How will they shape your future? In every one of my keynote addresses, I always remind audiences to stop and think about how many decisions they make, and to think about the tremendous impact they have on our lives and all agree, it is truly astonishing. We are choosing all the time, and while we are choosing we are creating because: Every choice creates a result, and those results create our lives. Can we conservatively agree that every minute we are awake we make 10 choices? I think it is much higher, but let’s start low. If you want to plug in a number you think is more realistic, calculate away. We will use 16 hours per day, under the assumption that most of us sleep on average, 8 hours per night. Numbers, please: Hours awake each day 16 Minutes in 16 hours 960 Choices per day 9,600 Choices per week 67,200 Choices per month 268,800 Choices in a year 3,225,600 I love seeing the faces of leadership teams, company employees, sales people, a church congregation, or a youth group when I tell them to just think of the possibilities, based on this example alone, if you were able to make better choices only 1% of the time. The improvements you would experience would be drastic and life changing! You can filter most, if not all of your choices down to this: we can either choose TO or choose NOT TO. Take reading this article. You either choose to read it or you choose not to. You will choose to do the action step or you won’t. On a bigger scale, you have to choose what you are going to do with your life! You want more? That requires discipline and sacrifice in which case you will be choosing TO do certain things and NOT TO do others. But, you can also choose NOT TO take certain action and not give yourself the success you desire. Looking at a successful life versus an unsuccessful life from a black and white perspective, one would see that it takes just as much energy to devote oneself to being miserable, anxious, and down as it does to be optimistic, purposeful, and success driven. You do have a choice in all you do. You can either choose TO or choose NOT TO. During our day to day life, it becomes very easy to feel overwhelmed by the hassles of the day: taking the kids to school, sporting events, paying the bills, seeing the dentist, selling the house, and all of the other thousands of life “fillers.” Ironically, it is the “fillers” in life that distract us from choosing TO take the life we want. I have decided that in my life I am a TO person, not a NOT TO person. At the end of my life, I am going to look back and say I chose TO in life. What are you going to say to yourself? When you reflect back on your life, are you a TO person or a NOT TO? Giving yourself more of what you want requires baby steps. Challenge yourself today to take just one area you’d like to experience more. In this area of your life, just pick one choice you will choose TO do where previously you have chosen NOT TO. Start small and enjoy BIG!