The You Can Choose^® Book

One of the most fundamental concepts in this book is the power of our beliefs. Beliefs influence everything in our lives, from how we interpret people and events to our ability to manipulate the world. Beliefs are like rules. They are agreements we've made with...

Congratulations! You've been doing this without effort your entire life. You don't have to understand how it happens or even the role you play to make it happen. While some of the concepts in this book may be new to you, you are already an expert at using your...

Descartes said it succinctly with his famous quote, “I think, therefore I am.” We all think. We think all the time. We sit and think about the future, and we think about the past. We wonder about the opportunities we have and those we passed up. While watching TV, we...

Your thoughts matter because they are how you interpret the world. As you see and experience life, you form thoughts which become opinions and eventually beliefs. Your beliefs, in turn greatly influence your thoughts. While it’s the beliefs that you ultimately want to...

Life is all about choices. You simply can’t do everything at the same time. With your choices, you can live an automatic life or an intentional one. How much influence do we have with our choices? In other words, does it really matter what we choose? The answer is...

Love is the most powerful and ubiquitous energy in the universe. Love is in and of everything. It bubbles to the top as soon as we allow it. You can think of it as the air that permeates all. Not just surrounding all, but infusing all as well. Love, like all energy,...

The Universe offers us love and non-judgmental support. It wants us to succeed without an opinion of how we define success. As we live our life, we have the opportunity to define success. If you want to become rich and powerful and have the thoughts, beliefs, and...

We are told throughout our life to think of others or not to be selfish. We are frequently reminded that what other people think and do is more important than what we think and do. Nothing and nobody is more important than you. Everything you see and experience is...

It is important to love yourself - to unconditionally love yourself. You are unique and an extension of the Universe. You are an integral part of everything. By loving yourself, you bring positive, reinforcing energy to your whole being. When you reinforce your...

If you think you are poor or shy, then you will conform your body and behaviors to reflect that. If you think you are boring, you will broadcast that message out to those around you, "I'm boring." Most of us don't challenge who we are. We've readily accepted the...

The physical you that you know so well is just a tiny portion of the whole you. The physical you is driven mostly by your ego to deal with the day-to-day tasks of living in the world. When we say You Can Choose, we don’t mean just the you that you point to, but the...

When we say, 'I've had enough' it usually means I've had more than I want. Since most of us have grown up in this commercial society, we are taught to want more. We constantly compare ourselves with others and often find ourselves lacking. We’re not enough. We have...

Your body was custom designed just for you to help you with your life experiences and challenges. You chose everything, from your height to the size of your nose to your propensity for health or illness; everything! It is the same with all of your initial conditions...

Ever wonder why you have aches and pains? Why your shoulder hurts or you have acne? Maybe why you have headaches or can't gain weight? Your body is your most intimate representation of your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. If you believe someone in your life is hard...

Freeing yourself from expectations and allowing what comes to you, runs counter to almost everything many of us were taught growing up. Planning. Scheduling. Preparing. Anticipating. Creating the ‘how’ is what we learn to do. These are all considered good things to...

There are three levels of certainty. With each level of certainty, you increase the energy, the emotions, and the place from which the energy comes. With increasing levels of certainty, your confidence to create what you want goes up. The more certain you are of...

You are in control. In total control. We have all experienced 'control freaks,' the people who need to plan each step for themselves and everyone around them. That's not control, but the expression of fear. It is the fear of allowing. Control is having the confidence...

The limits that exist are only the limits we create. We create limits as individuals and as a society. Many of us are comfortable living within the current boundaries we’ve set for ourselves. Some see a future unbounded by others. These people believe a way around the...

Regardless of how you define it, you should aspire to be abundant or wealthy. Many of us have very different definitions of abundance and wealth. Our definition is having all the resources to allow us to have all the experiences we desire. It has nothing to do with...

You give focus by giving your attention. You do this both intentionally and automatically. Each moment, we make a choice on what to focus on. Even though there is so much around us, many of us spend so much time in our head, thinking about things we did or should do....

Everything we see and experience starts inside of us. Our mind is where everything starts. The outside world reflects our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. The world doesn't happen to us. We create the world with others, but always with our consent and involvement. We...

There is a process for getting what you want. 1. Decide what you want. By deciding what you want and having enough energy behind the desire, you create the thing you want. It is created somewhere in your future. Your job is to align yourself with the future you want....

It's not what you do, it's why you do it that matters. The reason you do something is the result of your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. You can’t fake it. If you want to go to the gym because you hate the way you feel or don't want to be out of shape, you will not...

Our feelings arise from our beliefs. They come in response to our interaction with the world based on how we see things. Feelings are a way to understand our beliefs. If we are feeling happy about most things, we likely have happy beliefs. If we have feelings of...

We use GPS all the time to get where we want to go. We simply enter the destination and follow the step-by-step instructions, reaching our destination without fail. You have something just like that in your life. It is your attitude. Your attitude is a preview of...

When we read or hear things, and they make sense to us, we tend to believe them. We usually don't question our beliefs. They are such a part of how we view the world; we don't realize they are there. For example, the first time you drove to work, you saw the scenery...

It sounds simple, but being happy takes some effort. You have to choose to be happy. If your current situation is not a happy one, you have a choice. You can look around and choose to react unhappily to your surroundings, or you can choose to be happy. Take one thing,...

When you say you want some 'thing,' it is much more than the 'thing.' Say you want a new car. It's not just the new car you want. It's the feeling of getting a new car and driving along your favorite road. It's the joy of talking about your new car with friends and...

Your point of impact is now. Everything before now and after now is possible. The reason now is special is because it is where we are in the moment. It is where we always are. Our conscious focus on now creates our physical reality. All the possible positions of all...

Waiting is a gift in disguise. Most of us think about waiting with dread. How many times have we demanded, 'How long is this going to take?' What is waiting? When does it change from a pause to a wait? Pauses are nice. We get to catch our breath. As a friend of ours...

Sometimes, what you hope for doesn't work out. Maybe you wanted to go to a certain restaurant - had your heart set on a favorite meal - and they were closed. You can view this as a disappointment, or you can view it as an opportunity. If you are in your flow, when you...

Your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings act like filters and magnets and drive what you see and what comes to you. There is so much happening around us, but we only see a small fraction of it. The part we see is what we focus on. Like the attractive properties of...

How many choices do you make each day? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand? There are 86,400 seconds in a day. If you make a choice each waking second, you have about 60,000 opportunities to make a choice. Each of those choices impacts you and your life. We call them...

If you have the impulse to do something, don't put it on a list. Do it now! Right now you have the urge, right now you have the creativity and focus. If you wait and put something on a list, the energy dissipates. The energy becomes more aligned with checking items...

The Universe has so much more knowledge than we do. We can only remember so much and have limited knowledge of the future and our overall path. Our job during our lifetime is to choose 'what' we want, then get out of the way. Our job is not to plan or schedule the...

Many of us grew up learning the 'early bird gets the worm' and we need to 'work hard to get ahead.' We live in a society that values - even celebrates - the hard worker. Oftentimes, society’s role models are people who seem to succeed due to their determination and...

Inspired action is something you feel compelled to do, not something you should do or want to do. When you feel inspired to do something, it becomes the simplest and most important thing in the world for you to do. Getting out of bed, staying up late or skipping meals...

We fill up our lives. If we wish our lives to be larger, we need to imagine ourselves large enough to fill up the larger space. We are not talking about physical space, but about how we view ourselves. In our current circumstances, we've adjusted ourselves and our...

Sometimes, life seems hard. We find ourselves struggling to make it through the day. The Universe doesn’t want us to struggle, and we don’t want to struggle, so why do we? It’s because we get in our own way. We’ve been conditioned to expect things in a certain way and...

Sometimes, we have to fail before we can succeed. When we feel like we've failed, sometimes we let go of the drive, the push, the need to arrive at a specific outcome in a way we’ve often predetermined. By letting go, we can finally open up to other possibilities....

One of our biggest challenges in life is learning not to react to a confrontation. We see or hear something, and we often react automatically. We are taught to confront an issue head-on. It sounds simple, but the best way out of a situation is not to fight it but to...

When something happens to us, our first reaction usually is to ask, “Why me?" Why did that guy just cut me off? Why did I miss the meeting? Why is it so busy here? We wonder why things happen to us. A better question to ask is, "What does it mean to me?" What are your...

Artists create something that never existed before. They bring their creation to life. The artist may not always be happy with their work. Some ideas are never started because they seem too ambitious or are beyond the artists’ perceived capabilities. Sometimes the...

Do you wonder why our Greater-Self doesn’t just reach out to remind us how wonderful we are? Remind us that we are these wonderfully supported beings with no cause to worry? Regularly tell us we are always safe? Our life is for learning and growing. We live in a world...

Many of us approach life based on fear. We lock the doors for fear of a robbery or invasion. We buy insurance for fear of illness or accident. We work hard to save money for a rainy day, so we don't end up poor and on the streets. We have so much fear that we don't...

You will see things more clearly if you learn not to judge. We are born to judge. We compare things without any effort. This one is taller. This one tastes better. We judge everything so automatically. We make choices based on judging one outcome over another. Yet we...

Have you ever wanted to be perfect or have a situation turn out perfectly? What is perfection? It implies once it is reached, there is nothing better, no way to improve upon it. Doesn't that depend on the person’s perspective? We’ve all be in situations where the...

We all hear or maybe even say, "That's not fair." What does it mean to be fair? Does it mean the 'good guy' wins? Does it mean no one cuts in front of you while you’re waiting in line? When we think of fairness, we usually think in terms of things balancing out, like...

When someone is complaining, they are putting their focus on the things they don't want. Your empathy for another person's complaints creates a reinforcing cycle, which helps keep the person’s energy and focus on the very things they don’t want. We can empathize with...

It is not your job to help others. No one needs your help. Like you, they have access to all the power of the Universe, and like you, they are here in this physical world for specific experiences. They are working through their challenges just like you. There is much...

When unlikely events occur, we call them lucky (or unlucky). We shake our head at the highly unlikely occurrence or the freak accident, even though so many things had to happen for the event to occur. There are no coincidences. Life is not preordained. It is driven by...

You can't run away from problems. Without internal changes, the external problems will follow you wherever and whatever you do. You might not like to hear it, but you set up the problems specifically to work through. In fact, you might not want to consider them as...

We live in a society that embraces cause and effect. You work, you get paid. If you commit a crime, you go to jail. We don't need something to happen in order for something else to happen. There is no cause and effect. It seems to be the case because we observe it,...

Do you feel better when you see a sunset, a pretty garden or mountain vista? Do you feel uplifted when spending time out in nature compared to sitting and watching TV or in an office? We are of nature. We are all intimately connected. Every choice we make and...