A common reason for a client to come to me is for guidance when they feel stuck, lost or unable to make a decision. Often their beliefs and values around destiny influence how they approach their problem. Many believe in free will – that their lives are shaped on a course that they carefully plot. These clients feel that they can’t move forward until they determine a clearer path for themselves. Others find life more fateful – their genetics, environment, spiritual beliefs and other factors lead them to experience an inability to shape their life due to these influences that they feel are not under their control, and a path they don’t necessarily like or want is cleared for them.
As someone who likes to dream and set goals, it can be easy for me to become disappointed if things get in the way or don’t turn out as I had planned. My ‘free will’ can be also experienced as arrogance or stubbornness by others.
Those that leave things completely to fate can become apathetic, dispirited, and inactive.
I love this quote from Arianna Huffington (not least because I am also a dancer!).
“Life is a dance between making it happen and allowing it to happen.”
Is There a Balance Between the Two?
I propose that we each need to find balance between free will and acceptance of destiny. If we were to completely succumb to fate, there would be no point to strive for anything. If we were to completely force our free will, we would leave no room for random events to make our lives magical.
One way I help clients with finding such balance is to teach them to make decisions detached from outcomes. Life is a gamble, and we can treat it like one! Many people do not distinguish the difference between skill and luck, and we don’t like to acknowledge that outcomes are beyond our control.
How Can We Make Those Decisions In Our Lives?
To come to a decision, we can weigh up the pros and cons and consider the problem objectively. Like a poker player, we can calculate our confidence in a particular belief that will form the foundation of the decision. We can think in terms of probabilities of an outcome. We remove labelling a decision as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on the actual outcome, rather using what was the best thing to decide with the information at hand at the time as our evaluation.
Uncertainty is the only certainty in life! We tend to completely ignore the role that luck plays in outcomes we are working towards. To find more ‘luck’, look for and be open to new opportunities. Your goal should be to make the best decision possible under the circumstances, then release from the outcome. Don’t blame yourself if the outcome isn’t what you wanted or expected. You don’t have control over everything, only what you can do personally. Sometimes, an even better outcome than you anticipated is the result, and you could have missed that by holding on to an original idea.
