The choice point

How can I make choices that improve my life? Learn to identify and make ‘toward moves’ that enhance your life and avoid ‘away moves’ that hinder it.

We are always doing something, even if it is just sleeping. And when we do something, we either do something that helps us move toward or away from the life we want. We can call those behaviours ‘toward moves’ and ‘away moves’ respectively. 

During toward moves, we behave like the person we want to be, responding proactively to our challenges, and doing things that make life better in the long term. Toward moves are things you say and do that enhance your life. Things that make it richer, fuller, and more meaningful.

When we behave unlike the sort of person we want to be, doing things that keep us stuck or make life worse in the long term, we are doing ‘away moves.’ Away moves are not just constrained to the physical realm, but also include worrying, ruminating, obsessing, and overanalysing. Away moves make our lives worse, keep us stuck, exacerbate our problems, inhibit our growth, negatively impact our relationships, or impair our health and well-being in the long term.

Toward and away moves are highly personal and situational. The technical name for it is workability. Something that is a ‘toward move’ to some person in some situation, might not be in another, or to another person in the same situation.

Choosing toward moves can be hard, especially in difficult situations. When difficult thoughts and feelings arise, we easily get ‘hooked’ by them in one or two (or both) ways:

  1. Obey mode: our thoughts and feelings dominate us; they command our full attention or dictate our actions. We give our thoughts and feelings so much attention that we cannot focus on anything else, or we allow them to tell us what to do.
  2. Struggle mode: we actively try to stop our thoughts and feelings from dominating us. We do whatever we can to avoid them, escape from them, suppress them, or get rid of them. We may turn to drugs, alcohol or junk food, procrastinate or withdraw from the world entirely.

When our thoughts and feelings ‘hook’ us they pull us into away moves. We end up in a negative spiral that moves us further and further away from the person we aspire to be. The greater our ability to break the cycle—to unhook ourselves—the better life gets.

Cultivating this skill is what we will learn throughout this book. To work through it successfully, the following three strategies are paramount:

  1. Treat everything as an experiment. Bring an attitude of openness and curiosity to each experiment in the book. Notice your experience, try not to enforce ideas about how you are ‘supposed to feel.’ 
  2. Expect your mind to interfere. Your mind will try to protect you from uncomfortable thoughts and feelings in the short-term by pulling you away from the unknown. This prevents you form moving forward, toward the person you want to become. Be aware of what happens when it does.
  3. Practice is key. We cannot learn new skills by reading books about them. Books can help us get them, but they cannot give us the skills.

Exercise: complete a choice point

To grasp the choice point model fully, tag along the following exercise:

Identify hooks:

  1. Grab a piece of paper and draw two straight arrows diverging from one central point in the bottom.
  2. At the point in the bottom, write down the most difficult situations you are dealing with in your life today.
  3. Underneath those, write down difficult emotions that tend to recur in these situations.
  4. Write down any urges you struggle with, in response to those emotions and situations. 
  5. Write down any unhelpful thoughts that tend to occur. These include self-judgements, beliefs, and negative predictions.

What are your away moves?

Alongside the left arrow, jot down what away moves you make, whether obey or struggle-driven, in response to the difficult thoughts and feelings written below. Again, include the things you do physically as well as the things you do mentally. Remember, away moves are things you do, not things you feel.

What are your toward moves?

On the right arrow, write down what you can (and do) do as toward moves. After that, write down toward moves you would like to start doing.

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