Life is all about making a choice at every moment. Each day when you wake up, you wake up with a choice that you have made for that day. We, in fact are a product of our choices. Choices can be good or bad, right, or wrong but these choices shape our future. One needs to be an independent decision maker to be able to be more self-aware and freer in terms of what they choose to be in life. For instance, the kind of clothes you choose to wear everyday involves an informed thinking which many of us are unaware of. Choosing to wear Indian clothes to office on one fine day because they are airy and more comfortable or wearing light-coloured clothes on a hot summer day or changing your colour choice from sky blue to fuchsia pink is all a matter of choice. In another instance, from waking up one hour before or after time to choosing to commute via public transport is all dependent on your choice.
We make so many unrealised choices from the moment we start our day. What if these choices were not there? What if we were all dependent on each other for the slightest of decision we had to take? We must make our kids inherit the habit of independent decision making since their growing years. We must teach them small habits like choosing the clothes they might want to wear, the topic for their creative writing, team project work or for that matter just giving an answer confidently without caring about it being right or wrong in the class.
I remember one of my students coming to me one day and saying, “Mentor didi, I did not give an answer when ma’am asked a question in the class today.” I being puzzled by her response asked ‘Why so?’ to which her reply clicked my head, “Didi I am scared that if the answer would be incorrect, the teacher would have scolded me in front of the whole class and my peers would make fun of me that I do not know even this bit of the concept.” That was the day I decided to prepare all my students around me for making informed choices confidently. We must always appreciate a person’s abilities rather than scolding or embarrassing them for what they have said wrong, be more welcoming of different opinions of the same topic. Everyone’s perceptions are different. I told the kid that you must give an answer confidently without thinking about right and wrong as it was your understanding of the question. If it would be right, you would be appreciated and if it would be wrong, you would learn. I realised that we in some domains lack faith on ourselves and that lack of faith stops us or pulls us back from making an informed choice.
The development of that trust, that faith within us is so important as that faith would lead us to developing the same in the kids around us. Proper growth is all a result of decision-making ability. The decision to choose the path less walked by, the decision to nourish the unique choices we have internally made, the decision to carry ourselves around the world with complete faith in our abilities and moreover, the decision to love others and be loved. Even in the everyday scenario, you can find someone who is absolutely negative in approach and constantly looking at the problems that a situation throws and on the other hand you can also find someone who is looking for solutions instead of the problems. Life is a challenge where everyone is having some or the other problem. I believe that problems would hit your life every single day but how do you make your choice and choose to look at them is up to you. Whether you want to hit the problem clean bold on the face by its solution or want to sit back and think repeatedly upon the problem, feel stressed and irritated and keep cribbing over it. One must make the choice towards a solution-oriented approach rather a problem oriented one. Your approach towards life is also a choice that you are making.
Everything is a choice in life because here in this front everybody has their own set of issues and problems but its all a matter of your approach of dealing with them. Make your child an independent decision maker but before that, be one yourself too. Let us grow and pull each other up to be confident members of the world and make it a more accommodating space for each other’s choices without judging them.
