I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and she's pretty successful in her industry, and she was telling me about a project that she's working on.

While describing the project, there was passion in her voice - she was angry. At the same time, she was processing her feelings from the client's experiences. And there was this compassionate empathy, this visceral anger that was coming up from inside of her. And you know she was talking about how people don't have access to certain information and the choices they make as a result.

And as I was listening to her.

I was thinking about my own life and the lives of other people.

And just my observations of things that I had seen, and I would come back in and listen to words as she was saying, and it was all boiling down to choices.

And a lot of people say if you know better, you do better. Well, that's not necessarily true because we can have a tremendous amount of information, but we don't do anything with it. We can. We can spout it out; we can recite it. We can verbalize it back to other people. We can give them advice from that information that we've provided, and it can help them because they go and put it into action. But if we're not utilizing that information, it's just information.

And what I was realizing was that we don't realize that we have choices many times, and that can be in any area of your life that could be purchasing a home—having a better relationship.

Living in a different environment, living in a foreign country, starting a business. Going to school, not going to school. Choosing who you want to love.

Depending upon the environment that you're in and how your mind processes information, and their previous experiences that you've been a part of, you don't sometimes realize that you have a choice. You know you see women that were battered and abused, and people say, well, you know why stay in that relationship. Sometimes people don't realize they have a choice.

And then when you realize you have a choice, or you get that epiphany or that IHOP moment.

Then something else comes in and is like, well, what do I choose? And there's so much that's available in this world today. Suppose you're not accustomed to making choices for yourself. If that's not something that you've done before, you've always done with other people wanted you to do. You've never taken the time to sit out and think about what it is that you want. Think about who you are. Think about where you want your life to go. Then you have no idea, no concept that you can make a choice. And what are your available options?

A lot of times, we choose from the lesser of two evils.

But guess what, you don't have to choose from a list of two evils if you have choice A and choice B. Guess what? You can create a choice C, Or you can select neither of them.

But many times, we don't realize that we have those options available to us and then the other thing you could live in a community. Let's use housing as an example. You can live in a society where there are homes, and other people live in homes, and it never crossed your mind that a home is available to you.

And then if when you purchase a home, what community do you want to live in? Do I have to live around the people that I grew up around? Can I move to another state? Is it OK for me to live in a specific community? Do I have to live in this country, you know? And so, there are so many other things that go along with making choices. But the primary thing that she and I were talking about was.

Many people don't realize that they have the ability or the option to choose.

I know for myself I didn't have.

The understanding that I had a choice. I grew up in a family where I didn't choose what I ate.