The Power of Choice

This is a guest post from Jason Reid. In addition to being a consultant and coach, Jason writes about chronic illness and high performance at Sickwithsuccess.com

In this post, Jason writes about the critical element that choice plays in the creative mindset.

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Choice. It is a word that comes with all sorts of associations from personal autonomy to political freedom. More importantly, choice is at the heart of virtually every creative endeavor from inception to execution.

Perversely, the two biggest problems we have with choice are thinking we have no choice when we do, and not limiting our choices when it benefits us.

I recently attended an intensive workshop on coaching. A major tenant of coaching is the identification of choices. I had a spirited discussion with one of the other coaches when he insisted there are some instances in life where people don’t have a choice.

I disagreed. “There’s always a choice on some level,” I said.

He looked at me suspiciously so I recounted my own experience with choice: A little over twenty years ago I lived an ideal case study on the subject.

I was in my final year of high school and unbeknownst to me I had been walking around with a perforated intestine. Eventually, I went into septic shock and ended up in the hospital. After emergency surgery I found myself in the Intensive Care Unit. I was flat on my back in ICU for a week. I also had a ventilator down my throat, meaning I couldn’t move my head, eat, talk or even feel myself breathe.

There was absolutely nothing I could physically do but stare at the ceiling. There were no windows and the lights were on at the same brightness all day and all night so there was not even a way I could mark the passage of time.

If anyone was living a life without choice that week it was me. My external circumstances were always exactly the same. Minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day. There was nothing I could change.

The odd thing was that there were changes. Sometimes I felt sad, other times happy. There were times when I realized I was living a glorified lab experiment and found it philosophically interesting. Despite the fact my outer circumstances did not change, I realized I had quite a bit of choice in how I felt about myself.

If my thoughts focused on the soul-crushing elements of my current situation, I quickly felt panicked and upset. If I thought about all the wonderful things I was going to do once I got out of the hospital, I became calm, happy and even creative.

With no physical distractions in my outer environment I found the rest of that week to be one of the most creative periods I had ever experienced in my life. I became totally immersed in my own thoughts.

Since that time I have been sensitive to what others say about having a lack of choice. I have become acutely aware of our human tendency to be self-limiting in a way that hurts our ability to be creatively fulfilled.

That being said, limits to choice can be important to creativity if we realize them for what they are – artificial limits.

This goes back to the idea of the creative self I felt in the hospital when my physical boundaries were severely constrained. Once one accepts certain restrictions, it becomes easier to fully explore the areas we choose to control.

One of the best examples of this can be found in music. The blues is an incredibly limiting art form that can also inspire awesome creativity.

In its purest form, blues music is 12 bars long, and consists of only three chords and a handful of notes. Once you accept this simple structure however, you begin to find infinite ways to express yourself within those notes.

The fascinating thing about the blues music is how many experienced musicians keep coming back to it to find creative inspiration. From Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page to Keith Richards and Jack White –these influential talents keep mining this most limiting of art forms and finding within it ways to express their infinite creativity.

Such is the awesome creative power of choice – knowing that you have it, and understanding when not to use it.

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