Are You Choosing Option 1 Or Option 2?

Did you know that you can make yourself into anything you want to be? That you have the power to create who you are and what your life and reality looks like?

You do.

It’s inside you. Right now.

It always has been.

It’s been with you since the beginning of time. Just sitting there, waiting for you to use it.

But you have to actually use it.

There are two ways to go through life:

1. Reacting to everything that happens around you in your current reality

2. Intentionally creating everything you want to experience, be, do and have

Which one sounds like more fun to you? Which one excites you with possibility and opportunity?

Option 2. Obviously.

And yet so many people are choosing Option 1, living their lives being reactive to all the shit that goes on around them. Letting the energy and vibe of their day be decided by the first Facebook posts or emails they read.

Getting out of bed and reading the newspaper or watching the news on TV, first thing, before they’ve even finished their morning coffee.

It’s like playing roulette with your life. Having your vibe for the day decided by someone or something else… and you never know what it’s gonna be. 

Some days it might be uplifting stuff that makes you feel really good. While other days it may be stuff that makes you angry or annoyed or feeling like the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

You never know what kind of day it’s gonna be until you check your social media or emails or whatever other thing you read online first thing in the morning.

And this is your life. Over and over again, every day. Reacting to things that are happening around you.

I used to wake up and the first thing I did was check my Facebook alerts and my emails. Most days would be a good day, because I tend to follow positive, uplifting people online.

But some days I’d get a hate email or some other kind of bad news, and it would throw my day and my mind into a tailspin for the rest of the day. (Back to bed, try again tomorrow.)

It wasn’t until I started to choose Option 2—to consciously create how I wanted to feel, think and be all day long—that my life got better. 

And then even when I’d get bad news or saw something that didn’t make me feel good, I had already decided on how my day was going to be, and nothing was going to penetrate that decision.

How do I create my day with intention? Here’s what I do…

  • Get outside and breathe in fresh air first thing in the morning when I take the dog for a walk (or even just outside to potty if the weather prevents us walking)
  • Write a freestyle entry in my journal and then write out my reality as I want to see it in my actual life—I declare who I am now deciding to be, what I’m now deciding to have, and what I’m now deciding to do.
  • Visualize for 5-7 minutes a day—I have to force myself to do this one some times (and sometimes I only do 4 minutes, which is my bare-minimum), but visualizing the reality that I want to see in my actual life helps me to feel like I already have it. And that helps me to bring it to life.
  • Put first things first—after my mindset practice, I move on to writing my daily think different blog post, sharing what I’m thinking and feeling in the moment. After that I spend 30-60 minutes working on my book(s). Then I post my blog on my website and set it up to be sent out as an email to my community. And then I do at least 15 minutes of fitness (aka: yoga, another walk with the dog, weights, cardio, etc).

I do all of what I just listed out BEFORE I check my emails. BEFORE I go on Facebook. BEFORE I read my text messages. BEFORE I’ll answer my phone (I rarely ever answer my phone anyhow). BEFORE I let anyone else interfere with my vibe or my energy. 

It took time to develop this daily habit of not choosing Option 1 and not allowing myself to be reactive to the world.

Now I intentionally create my day and my life. I make myself. Every single day. Over and over again. 

I decide who I am and who I’m choosing to be. I declare it in my journal every single day…

I am a bestselling author. I am the best at what I do. I am growing a multi-million dollar writing empire transforming writers, authors and creators lives, doing all the things I love to do and making a fuck load of money from it.

I used to be afraid to write things like that on paper. I felt ashamed to even want the things I wanted. Because it was programmed into me from a young age that you should feel guilty when you have more than other people or when you have something that someone else doesn’t.

And so I always played life small. I always kept my dreams to mediocre things that I felt were possible for me. If I didn’t know how I could make it happen or if I didn’t believe it was possible for me, I wouldn’t allow myself to want it. I’d push it down and pretend like I didn’t care and it didn’t matter to me.

But inside I was dying.

Because you can’t push away the things you desire and the dreams you hold in you and think you’ll be OK. You won’t be.

You’ll think about it all day, every day. Even when you manage to push it away, it will still pop back to remind you that it’s there and that it wants to be expressed.

You can’t run from your dreams and think they’ll eventually leave you alone. They won’t. They’ll be there with you ’till the day you take your final breath. 

And it’s up to you to decide how your life goes down before that happens. You can either choose Option 1 and spend your life reacting to the world.

Or you can choose Option 2 and create yourself and your life exactly as you’ve always dreamed it to be. 

I’m not gonna lie—choosing Option 2 takes work at first. Because you’ve got years of momentum going with the old programming that tells you to choose Option 1. It’s a lot to overcome and the momentum gives it power.

So you have to build a habit around choosing Option 2. You have to make a conscious choice every single day, to create yourself and your day and your life exactly as you want it to be.

And you have to decide that you’re not gonna let the world in until AFTER you do that.

I know it’s SO HARD not to check your email in the morning or to see what’s happening on Facebook. But even taking an hour for yourself first, to do your mindset practice and handle your first things first activities, will totally change your life.

One of my mentors always says you get to choose what you give your life for. Because you’re always giving your life for something.

You can either give your life for your dreams, or you can give it for the other BS excuses and life chaos that’s happening around you. The choice is yours.

So…which option do you choose?

Share With Us

Which option are you choosing from here on out? Share in the comments. 

And speaking of creating yourself into who you want to be… if who you want to be is a published author, I’ve got something for you: Write and Publish Your Nonfiction eBook in 10 Days. This action-taking workshop will help you take that idea in your head and turn it into a published eBook that can be purchased on Amazon.

Every time I run this workshop, more than half of the students who sign up actually go all the way and publish their eBooks. Including Joanne Young Elliot, author of Find Your Writer’s AHA!, who had this to say about her experience in the workshop:

If you’re a procrastinator and dream of publishing a book, you have to check out Jennifer’s eBook course. I swear I don’t know when or if I would have ever published my book if I hadn’t. She walks you through all the necessary steps to get your book out there. Doing this took away the overwhelm and fear about the process. Once you learn it, the world of authorship opens up to you. I can’t wait to publish my next book!”

Are you ready to write YOUR nonfiction eBook? We start on March 13!! 

>> Check out the details and sign up here 

4 Replies to “Are You Choosing Option 1 Or Option 2?”

  1. It’s been said many times, by different people: nobody else is going to make sure you take care of your own needs.

    –Or, almost nobody. Friends who actually do that are some of the best, rarest treasures in life.

    But mostly, we go through life *outnumbered*: surrounded by people who don’t know who we are, or bumble through their own lives. And we’re social animals, who’ve spent most of our history taking our cues just from each other. No wonder Option 1 is always the easiest… even without Facebook. 🙂

    Unless we choose something else. Every day, every minute, we can choose to remember who we really are, and re-create our lives and our relationships in a shape that *does* work for us and for everyone around us.

    All we have to to is see past those cues. The crowd only *thinks* it can tell us how to live… not even that, the crowd is mostly people who don’t think about our choices at all, and the group pressures that drive much of it are thinking even less. One aware mind against a thousand unaware ones (that don’t actually want to hold you down anyway) is as easy a fight as it sounds.

    If we stay aware.

        1. @Ken Yeah, I’ve been sending emails with blog posts to my email list but not adding the posts to my blog very often. Trying to remedy that now by actually posting them to my blog before I email them out to my list. And trying to move some of the emails to my list over to the blog. It’s a process! LOL

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