The Big Difference: Life Works When You Choose it [Paperback]

"Sometimes choices are a bit like American TV - you’ve got 200 channels but you can’t find anything you want to watch." Nicola Phillips Making choices. It’s very hard to do. There are books that tell you how to get what you want, but that’s not much use if you don’t know what you want. This book tackles the toughest issue - how to make choices and find what it is that would make the big difference to you. Making choices is often the hardest part of life and work - in fact it’s so hard, most of us avoid making any at all. We let others choose, or just stick with the status quo. But why is it so hard? And can it be made easier? Most books and articles work on the basis that you know what you want, and go on to suggest ways to get it. They don’t tell you how to make the actual decision, just that you should - yet that’s the part that causes problems. The Big Difference is a book about choices. Choosing your goals, choosing your way, choosing how to get there, choosing what not to do, choosing who to be and not be. It recognises that with every choice, you’re losing something. That’s one reason choosing is so hard, but it can be made easier. This is also a book about momentum, and how to make that leap from understanding to action. By combining the right choice with your own momentum, you make big things happen for you. What this book will do for you: Tackle the issue that other books and articles skirt around – how do you actually make a choice? Really get you to be doing what you want to be doing,  by stimulating you to think about when you are choosing (or not) Shows you how to get momentum for yourself and your life Inspire you to direct your own life, and not just go along with somebody else’s version Are you doing what you’d rather be doing? 

Nicola Phillips has been an independent consultant and author on management and organisational development since 1981, in Europe, the US and the Middle and Far East. Her assignments include projects in the media, finance, commercial, information technology, production and public sectors. Nicola has an executive coaching practice, which deals with work and personal issues ranging from mentoring new executives and directors, to OD interventions.

"All organisms with complex nervous systems are faced with the moment by moment question that is posed by life: What shall I do next?" Sue Savage Rumaugh and Roger Lewin

So how do you get to do what you'd rather be doing, and why is it you think there may be something else you would rather be doing? Numerous media constantly exhort that you always have a choice. You may always have one, but you don't always take one. Making a choice involves knowing what we want, before we can choose what to do next. If we do not know that, life becomes a series of actions without fulfilment. Deciding what to do next in a vacuum usually leaves us feeling dissatisfied. Why did you take the job that you have - or get married, or go to college, or take some advanced training? There would of course be specific reasons you would give for each of these decisions, but you probably have not thought about a powerful thread that runs through every decision in your life and lies at the basis of everything that all of us do. Choosing. What is choice? Do we always have it? Free will. Is it the same thing? For you to see you have a choice, you have to be aware of the meaning you attach to it. "If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for."

Thomas Merton The definition of us is the thing we want to live for. At different times in our lives it may be different things, but usually an underlying value, known or otherwise, will shape our ends, rough hew them how we may. We are usually at the happiest moments in our lives when that value is being met. It could be something like freedom, creating something, or being cared for. It is less likely to be the things we often wish for, such as money, good health, a promotion, a child. These are really manifestations of the things that are of value. Sometimes that indefinable feeling of wind in your hair and the sun shining on you just makes you grin uncontrollably. Are these things we can choose, or are what we need to be able to choose the opportunities that will enable us to experience and have those things? "Je ne sais peut-etre pas ce que je veux mais je sais ce que je ne veux pas."

Samie Farah We don't know what we don't know, but when you are open enough to see it, it becomes a possibility. Not knowing is often so scary that we have to shut down and say there is nothing else. We very rarely know nothing. It's just that what we do know seems confused and without any clarity. Is there a way we can make more conscious some of the ideas that flash through, but get dismissed as not being concrete enough? If we can maintain our gaze on new things for long enough, new things evolve. When you look again, you see more possibilities. It is almost like turning over the soil to aerate it. It is the same piece of soil, seen from another angle. Sometimes the truth we seek is lurking, waiting for us to have the guts to see it. Don't know is a strange state of mind, but it doesn't mean we have no answers. It means we don't know, and there is a process we have to go through to change that state of mind. "In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know."

Marsilio Ficino Why on earth do we expect to know what we want? So hard to distinguish between needs and wants, and sometimes one becomes the other. It is harder to say what you want than what you need; what you want is way more personal. Saying what you need is almost verging on the practical and therefore justifiable. Maybe saying what you want is hard, for fear ... That you might get it ... That you might not get it ... It's not true ... It is true. "I don't know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful it will make little difference whether she lives at all. And by true I do not mean what is righteous, but merely what is so."

Cormac McCarthy Children know what they want in that moment, but have no interest in knowing why it is important to them. Indeed, why would they need to know? As grown-ups, we often miss the beauty of doing something in the moment because it is what we want, and feel the need to justify it and rationalize it - even to the point of criticizing others we see doing things because they want to. This isn't about totally selfish living, although it could be. It's about understanding how we often do know what it is we would rather be doing, but we bury it under all sorts of disguises.