choose your adventure

september 3 | weekly warm-up

image by Trif Razvan via Unsplash

Choose a decision you made recently or one that you are in the process of making right now. Journal about the options available to you. Which options align with your authentic self and which options align with your fears? Which ones seem to fall on both sides?

Which decisions will send me on an adventure that invites more of what your authentic self wants to experience?

Did you know that they still make those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books?! If you’re not familiar with them, they are chapter books that start with a story and at key choice moments, they offer the reader different paths like “To unlock the black door, go to page 25.” “To unlock the red door, turn to page 35.” The story changed with the choices, so you actually got many stories out of one book because of course you go back and read again and again to see how the different choices play out!

As I’ve been working on my book-in-progress, sometimes I feel like I’m using a choose-your-own-adventure method. The chapter I’m working on right now (and according to my process journal, I’ve been working on it for over a month!) seems to be taking forever because there are so many different paths I could take and examples I could give to get my points across, and I’ve been allowing myself to see what happens if I unlock the black door versus unlocking the red door versus the green door or the blue. Some days I am frustrated because part of me wants to be a more straight forward thinker and just write the damn thing the way I have it outlined. But my brain does not work that way. No matter how much I narrow the chapter down to bullet points, my mind keeps offering me different ways to get from point to point. So this project is helping me learn how to patiently work with my beautiful brain the way it is, and figure out processes that work for me.

This indecisiveness affects my daily life, as well, which can cause a great deal of anxiety and overwhelm. To cope with this decision fatigue, a few years ago I developed a way to significantly narrow down my choices. I never called it choosing my own adventure, but this exercise has me inspired to frame it that way from now on. When faced with a decision, I ask myself what kind of experience (or adventure) I want to have. Do I want an adventure that aligns with my authentic self or do I want an adventure that aligns with my fearful self? This perspective takes the emotion out of it and eliminates the choices that don’t align with my values.

So imagine that each decision you make is sending you on an adventure. How do you decide whether to unlock the black door or the red door versus the green door or the blue? Do you choose the black door because it’s just a few feet away and the others require more physical effort? Do you choose the red door because your mama taught you to always choose the red door? Do you choose the green door because you heard that this is the door that the cool kids are choosing? Or do you choose the blue because even though it’s the one that is most unknown to you, it’s also the one that calls to your soul?

There can be a myriad of factors that affect your decision-making process, and this is where you can exercise some kind of control because you know you can’t control the specifics of the outcome. But you can ask yourself: What have I learned from using this thought process in the past? Which thought process aligns most with the values of my authentic self? Which decision will send me on an adventure that invites more of what my authentic self wants to experience? This process may not get you all the way to one specific choice, but it will narrow things down, and whatever you decide you’ll know that you’re choosing an adventure that aligns with your authenticity, embodies meaning and purpose, and enhances your life in some way.