I went to a brilliant workshop at the weekend by Anita Moorjani (http://www.anitamoorjani.com/) who shares her incredible story of a Near Death Experience. There were many insightful comments that she made but a particular one that struck a chord with me was this: “Every decision that we make is either made from love or fear.” I’ve been pondering this over the last few days, noticing it in clients and friends, and just becoming more aware of how many decisions we all make from a place of fear. We are conditioned from childhood to do this e.g. ‘if you don’t work hard, you won’t pass your exam, then you won’t get a good job, and you won’t have enough money’ etc etc. And how many people follow this route and end up in a job they hate or that exhausts them? Whereas when you make a decision from ‘love’ you follow what brings you joy, what fulfils you, what you love to do. Anita’s view is that decisions made from a fear place generally don’t bring us happiness, whereas those made from love work out and bring us joy. She asked us to look at what decisions in our lives we made out of fear. For me, we bought the house we now live in out of fear – ‘the baby is on it’s way, we can’t have a baby in a flat, we’d better move before the baby comes as it will be harder afterwards etc’. And so we bought this house and I have NEVER liked it. But it’s not just the big decisions, it also is about the energy behind what we do. Take going for a run. Fear based is something like: I have to run even though I hate it or I’ll get fat / die early / everyone else keeps fit so I should etc. A love based decision to run is: I love the feeling of running or of being fit and I’ll run until I fancy a walk and then I’ll enjoy the walk. Even the job might be: I’m going to enjoy it as much as possible and know that it provides money to do fun things with. Again this has a very different energy and will impact your experience of that same job.
Clearly there are plenty of grey areas. But it’s really interesting (for me anyway!) to start looking at what decisions, big or small, we make every day and what’s the energy behind them, Loving what you do or Fear of Consequences?