What Are You Willing to Stop Choosing for the Life You Want?
We hear a lot about choosing ourselves.
Choose yourself. Protect your peace. Put yourself first. Build the life you want.
I understand the sentiment behind all of it. I tell folks “Take care of you first”, all the time. And I mean it. I truly believe that in order to be the best human you can be, you have to take care of yourself first.
But taking care of yourself and choosing you are different things.
Taking care of you means doing those things that keep you aligned and at peace.
Choosing you means making choices based on the life you want to live.
And there comes a point when you realize you can't keep living your life based entirely on expectations you inherited, decisions you made years ago, or a version of yourself that may not fit anymore.
But lately, I've been thinking less about what it means to choose yourself and more about what happens after you do.
Because choosing yourself sounds empowering when we talk about what we're choosing for.
The life we want. The work we want to do. The relationships we want. The freedom we want. The person we want to become.
What we don't talk about nearly as much is what choosing those things may require us to stop choosing.
That's where it gets complicated.
Because choosing isn't only about adding something new to your life. Every meaningful choice eventually competes with something else for your time, energy, money or attention.
And sometimes what it's competing with isn't something bad. It may be something you still value, something that has served you well or something you're genuinely good at. It may even be something other people still expect from you.
The hardest choices aren't always between something good and something bad. Sometimes they're between two good things that can no longer occupy the same place in your life.
I've been thinking about that a lot in my own life lately.
I'm becoming more intentional about what I want this next chapter to look like. And I'm realizing that deciding what I want may actually be the easier part.
The harder question is:
Once I choose me and the life I want, what does that choice require me to stop choosing?
What Are You Giving Up When You Say Yes?
I don't think I ever thought about choices that way until recently.
When an opportunity presented itself, I tended to look at what came with saying yes. Money, position, respect, recognition. All good things.
I thought about where it could lead and what I could learn.
What I didn't always consider was what saying yes would make unavailable.
Now, that's become harder for me to ignore.
Time has a way of making that lesson clearer. Not because you suddenly become obsessed with how much time you have left, but because you become more aware of how you've spent the time you've already had.
At this stage of my life, five years means something different to me than it did when I was 25.
So does a year.
So does a week.
That's changed the way I think about opportunity.
The question isn't simply whether I can do something anymore. I've spent enough of my life proving that I can work hard, carry responsibility and figure things out.
Being capable of doing something is no longer enough reason for me to do it.
I'm becoming much more interested in whether something deserves the time it will take from something else.
Because that's the part we tend to ignore.
As I become more intentional about designing the life I'm building, I've realized that time may be the most valuable thing I'm choosing with.
If I give the next three years to one thing, I'm also deciding not to give those same three years to something else.
If I continue pursuing every version of success that I've pursued before, I'm also deciding how much room I'm willing to leave for a different definition of success.
That doesn't mean every decision needs to become some exhausting exercise in life optimization. I don't want to spend 20 minutes deciding whether having lunch is aligned with my purpose.
But the bigger choices deserve a different level of honesty.
Sometimes what looks like a decision about whether to say yes is really a decision about what you're willing to say no to in order to say yes.
And that changes the question.
Why Is It So Hard to Change What’s Working?
Some of the choices we make are obvious. We know we're making them.
Others stopped feeling like choices a long time ago.
They became habits. Expectations. Ways of working and living that we've repeated for so long we don't really question them anymore.
For most of my career, working hard and being available made sense. Taking on more responsibility made sense. When an opportunity came along, my instinct was to figure out how to make it work rather than why it might not belong.
And to be clear, that served me well.
I built a career that I'm proud of. I had experiences I never imagined having when I started. I learned how to lead, how to make decisions under pressure, how to solve problems and how to deliver when people were depending on me.
So I'm not interested in rewriting that history and pretending those choices were somehow wrong.
They weren't.
But a choice can be right for one season of your life and still deserve to be reconsidered in another.
That's something I'm paying much more attention to now.
I've written before about chasing the ghost of who you used to be and the danger of trying to recreate a version of yourself that belonged to a different season. But I'm realizing you don't necessarily have to be chasing your old self to still be living by some of that person's rules.
You can say you want something different while continuing to make decisions based on what used to matter.
That's a little uncomfortable to admit.
Because sometimes the habits that are hardest to question are the ones that helped make you successful.
If working harder has always produced results, your instinct is to work harder.
If saying yes created opportunities, you keep saying yes.
If being available made you valuable, you keep making yourself available.
And if achievement became one of the ways you measured progress, it's easy to keep chasing achievement even after you've started questioning what success means to you.
None of those things is inherently wrong.
But I'm learning that “this has always worked for me” and “this still belongs in my life” are two different things.
Something can still be working and no longer be working for the life you want.
That’s where choosing the life you want starts getting real.
Because it's one thing to stop choosing something that's clearly hurting you. It's much harder to reconsider something that has rewarded you.
I’ve been out of work for more than a year. There’s no employment income coming in. I’m surviving on a nest egg from my 401(k) and the proceeds from selling my home. Those funds are finite, and they’re diminishing.
There are plenty of days when a LinkedIn job notification pops up for a good-paying production opportunity. That should automatically get serious consideration, right?
And yes, I’ve given serious consideration to some of them because pursuing the next opportunity is what I've always done. I've even applied for some.
But every time I click send, I get this pit in my stomach.
Does that really fit the life I’m building now?
I know how that sounds.
Any logical person looking at my situation could reasonably say I should be looking for my next gainful employment opportunity. And I’m sure there are friends and family members who have wondered, Why doesn’t he just get a job?
Short answer?
A job doesn’t fit this chapter for me.
Not because there’s anything wrong with having a job. I had one for most of my adult life. And not because I’m pretending money doesn’t matter. Trust me, watching the number in your bank account move in the wrong direction has a remarkable way of keeping that particular issue in focus.
It’s because I’ve made a choice about what I want this chapter of my life to look like. I want greater control over how I work, how I use my time and what I build. And if I take another full-time job simply because that is what I've always done, I have to be honest about what I'm also choosing.
I'm choosing to give that job a significant part of my time, energy and attention.
And those are the same things I need to build the life I've said I want.
That's the cost I have to consider now.
And maybe that's the question worth asking:
Am I still choosing this because it belongs in the life I want now, or because it made sense for the life I was building then?
When Is a Good Opportunity the Wrong Opportunity?
For most of my life, I thought a good opportunity was something you were supposed to take seriously.
Maybe you didn't always say yes. But if the money was good, the work was interesting, the title was better or it could open another door, you at least considered it.
That makes sense when you're building a career.
But I'm starting to realize that the more intentional you become about the life you're trying to build, the less useful “Is this a good opportunity?” becomes as a question.
Because it might be.
And that still doesn't mean you should take it.
None of that tells you whether it belongs in your life now.
That's a difficult adjustment, especially when you've spent years learning to recognize opportunity and take advantage of it.
And I'm not only talking about time.
An opportunity can pull you back toward priorities you've decided aren't as important anymore. It can put you back into a pace of life you're trying to leave. It can require you to organize your days around somebody else's definition of success when you've finally started figuring out your own.
That's why I'm becoming less impressed by whether something is a good opportunity.
I'm more interested in whether it's the right opportunity for the life I'm building.
Those aren't the same thing.
And saying no to a good opportunity can be much harder than saying no to a bad one.
With a bad opportunity, the decision usually explains itself.
A good opportunity makes you wonder what you might be missing. It can make you question whether you're being foolish, ungrateful or shortsighted by turning it down.
But maybe that's part of choosing yourself too.
Not rejecting opportunities just to prove you can.
Not convincing yourself that every open door is some kind of sign.
Just becoming more selective about which doors are actually leading somewhere you want to go.
Not every opportunity that comes your way is supposed to be taken simply because it's a good opportunity.
Sometimes the better question isn't, What could I gain if I say yes?
It's:
Where will this yes take me, and is that still where I want to go?
Is Choosing Yourself Selfish?
It can be. And that's a danger in this conversation that I don't want to ignore.
There’s a version of “choose yourself” that I don’t particularly believe in.
It’s the version that suggests anything that interferes with what you want is somehow standing in your way.
“Choose yourself” can become an excuse for almost anything if we're not careful.
We have responsibilities. We have people we love. We have commitments we've made. Other people's lives intersect with ours, and our decisions have consequences for them.
I don't believe choosing yourself means pretending none of that matters.
In fact, sometimes the life you choose will include sacrifices precisely because someone else matters to you.
A parent may turn down an opportunity because being present for their children matters more. Someone caring for an aging parent may organize part of their life around that responsibility. A spouse may make a decision differently because marriage means their choices aren't made in isolation.
Those aren't necessarily examples of failing to choose yourself.
They may be examples of knowing what you've chosen.
That's the distinction that interests me.
Choosing yourself isn't the same as always choosing whatever you want most in the moment. It's becoming more conscious about what deserves to organize your life.
I've spent much of my adult life with responsibilities to other people. As a father, a provider, a leader and someone involved in my church and community, there have always been people and commitments that mattered enough to affect the choices I made.
I don't look back at that and think I should have chosen myself more often. Many of those responsibilities were choices I wanted to make. They were part of the life I wanted.
What has changed is that I'm much more conscious now about the difference between a responsibility I've chosen because it reflects what matters to me and an expectation I'm carrying simply because someone else thinks I should.
There's a difference between allowing other people to matter and building your entire life around what everyone else expects from you.
One is relationship.
The other can become surrender.
And figuring out where that line sits isn't always easy.
You Can't Build a Life Around Everything
There may be an even deeper cost to choosing a different life.
Sometimes what has to change isn't what you're doing.
It's who you believe you're supposed to be.
Most of us develop identities around the things we've repeatedly been rewarded for. Maybe you're the successful one. The dependable one. The provider. The person who fixes things. The one who never quits. The person everyone knows will get it done.
Those identities aren't fake. They often represent qualities we've spent years developing.
But an identity can become restrictive when you start believing you have to keep making choices that prove it.
I understand that one.
I spent decades becoming very good at what I do. There's comfort in competence. There's comfort in walking into a situation and knowing exactly what you bring to the table.
I'm proud of that part of my life. I'm not trying to leave it behind.
But I'm learning that being good at something doesn't automatically mean it deserves to remain at the center of my life.
And maybe that's one of the hidden costs of choosing yourself.
One of my podcast guests said something that has stayed with me: “You have to believe in a version of you that you don’t even know yet.”
You may have to stop choosing a version of yourself you've become very good at being.
Not because that person was wrong.
Because that person doesn't get to make every decision about who you become next.
That's also why I think we have to be careful about how we calculate the cost of change.
Whenever we consider changing something significant, we become remarkably good accountants.
We calculate what we could lose.
Money. Security. Status. Relationships. Opportunity. Familiarity.
Those calculations matter.
But we're much less disciplined about calculating the other side.
What does staying cost?
Staying often feels like the absence of a decision. If I don't change anything, I haven't really chosen anything.
Except I have.
Keeping the job is a choice. Maintaining the schedule is a choice. Continuing to pursue the same definition of success is a choice. Putting something off for another year is a choice.
And every one of those choices eliminates something too.
That's why I keep coming back to something I wrote about recently in your life can be good and you can still want something more.
Wanting something different doesn't mean the life you have is wrong. But once you've become aware that something needs to change, continuing exactly as you are isn't neutral anymore.
It has a cost.
Maybe it's time. Maybe it's energy. Maybe it's the chance to build something you've been thinking about for years.
Maybe it's simply waking up twelve months from now having had the same conversation with yourself for another year.
We tend to calculate the cost of changing while treating the cost of staying as free.
It isn't.
That doesn't mean change always wins.
It means staying belongs on the same ledger.
And I think that's where all of this has been leading me.
For years, I thought freedom meant having more choices.
I'm beginning to think real freedom may also require being willing to make fewer of them.
Because you can't build a life around everything.
You can't make every opportunity a priority. You can't give everything your best energy. You can't preserve every identity, maintain every commitment, pursue every ambition and still somehow create unlimited room for the life you say you want.
Something gets more.
Something gets less.
Something that once occupied the center may need to move toward the edge.
And something you keep saying matters may finally need enough room to prove that it does.
That's a different way of thinking about freedom for me.
I wanted greater freedom to decide how I work, how I use my time and how I live this next chapter of my life. What I'm learning is that kind of freedom requires discipline.
If everything gets a yes, I haven't really designed anything. I've just created a different version of the life I said I wanted to change.
I spent years learning how to handle more.
Now I may need to become equally good at deciding what deserves less.
That's not retreat.
It's recognizing that if I know what I want at the center of my life, I have to protect enough space for it to actually be there.
Final Thought: Are You Ready to Choose You?
Maybe you already know what you want next.
You want more freedom.
You want to build something of your own.
You want more time with people you love.
You want work that means something different to you.
You want more peace.
You want a different relationship with success.
Or maybe you simply want your life to feel more like yours.
Knowing that matters.
But eventually knowing what you want creates another question.
What are you willing to stop choosing for it?
That's the part we don't put on inspirational graphics.
Because choosing yourself isn't only about having the courage to say yes to what you want. It's also being willing to say no to some of the things competing with it.
And none of that requires you to hate what you're leaving behind.
I've written before about what happens when you become willing to bet on yourself even though you don't know exactly how the story ends. But making the bet is only part of it.
Once you choose, the choice has to mean something.
For me, that's becoming less about adding more things to my life and more about becoming intentional about what deserves to remain at its center.
I don't have every answer to that yet.
I'm not sure I ever will.
But I know I don't want to spend this chapter trying to preserve every part of the last one.
Some things have earned the right to come with me.
Some things need a different role.
And some things I may simply have to stop choosing.
Because you cannot design a life around everything.
Choosing what belongs at the center also means deciding what no longer does.
That's the cost of choosing you.
So, are you ready to choose you?
Maybe being ready doesn't mean knowing exactly what comes next.
Maybe it means becoming willing to make your choices reflect the life you keep saying you want.
Ready to Choose Differently?
I’m still figuring some of this out in my own life.
I haven't reached the top of the mountain with all the answers. But I've navigated enough rough terrain to understand how difficult it can be to question what has worked, reconsider what you want and make choices that actually reflect the life you're trying to build.
If you know you want something different but you're struggling to get clear about what that means or what you may need to choose differently, I invite you to a PR4LIFE Strategy Session. This is a safe space for you to get honest about where you are, what you want and what may be standing between the two.
You don't need to have it all figured out. You just need to be ready to have an honest conversation about what you want next.
Live on Purpose. Lead with Clarity. Thrive by Design.
TL;DR
Choosing yourself isn’t just about deciding what you want. It’s also about being honest about what you may have to stop choosing to make room for it. A job, opportunity, responsibility or version of success can still be good and no longer fit the life you’re building. The real question isn’t only “What do I want next?” It’s “What am I willing to stop choosing for it?”
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