Your life is nothing but a series of decisions and choices you have made along the way.
The history of free man is never written by chance but by choice – their choice. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
Sadhguru once said, “When a child is born, for a few people a great many things are already determined; but for most people very little is determined – everything else is wide open. So being physically born is not of much consequence. The day we come out of our mothers’ wombs is only a birth of a possibility. Biology just delivers you as an animal; it is you who can make yourself into a full-blown human being, or a divine possibility. When a person is willing to die the way he is and be born once again within himself, when he is willing to make his birth a conscious process not just a biological process, when the necessary awareness arises in a human being that he kills the animal within himself and allows the divine to flower – that is when the birth becomes really significant.”
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In those choices lie our growth and our happiness. When we live our life with consciousness and awareness, we craft a life that we choose, and not what others choose for us.
The maverick psychiatrist R. D. Laing captured in the words below that failing to notice that we have this space kills our ability to change. Humans alone have self-awareness.
Q: Are leaders born or made, meaning environmentally conditioned and trained?
A: This question is based on a false dichotomy, a flawed paradigm of determinism. Because of the space between stimulus and response, people have the power of choice; therefore, leaders are neither born nor made – meaning environmentally trained and nurtured. They are self-made through chosen responses, and if they choose based on principles and develop increasingly greater discipline, their freedom to choose increases. Because of the intense transformational experience , they make those choices that enable them to become a leader. Leaders aren’t made or born, they are self-made – leadership is a function of choices.
