2023.10 Safety x Choice

Because business is personal. This newsletter is dedicated to your own alignment journey.

In a world swirling with risk, I choose to anchor my safety in choice.

Hi ! 👋

Last week we discussed a way of mitigating or avoiding negative risk from extreme events — the “black swan” events that are rare, sometimes inconceivable, but have a major impact if they happen. I received many emails asking for a clarification of safety. What is the feeling of safety? Where does it come from? How do you grow it?

Let’s start by sharing the obvious. People are fallible, even when well intentioned, and sometimes they aren’t well intentioned at all. This is why the institutions, structures, systems, and language crafted by people are not without flaws. And these flaws can sometimes be very damaging. So we do not live in a risk-free world (positive or negative). And the potential effects from natural disasters or physical ailments underscore this further.

This is where choice comes in:

• We participate in, expect, and deserve the continuous improvement of our institutions, structures, systems, and language.

• And even as we do these things, by participating in daily living, we are choosing to engage in a world that has negative risk.

How choice is connected to safety:

• If the feeling of safety on an individual level required living in a risk-free world, none of us would feel safe. Yet many people feel some sort of safety.

• So I look at the feeling of safety on an individual level from a different perspective. I first look at something that feels the opposite of safe: a traumatic event, something that has happened to many of us. If the definition of trauma, is removal of choice without your consent, safety can be thought of as recognizing your full capacity to choose.

• Recognizing your full capacity to choose is not usually something that happens all at once, it unfolds over time the more you contemplate it.

And by choice I am not talking about impulsive choice, blindly rolling of the dice at a craps table. I am talking about choices made with your own discernment — intentional choices made with your needs, and the needs of others, in mind. And even when you make choices with discernment and intention, life can sometimes feel like a roll of the dice at a craps table anyways. So choice also includes how you relate to experiences that have removed choice without your consent. Choice isn’t just in the actions you take or the words you say (or don’t), it is also how you relate to the world around you, how you relate to concepts, and the values & beliefs you choose, etc.

Your journey to cultivating alignment is all about choice. As you connect with yourself and others on deeper and deeper levels, you can choose to update your choices to reflect your newfound awareness.

Growing recognition of your capacity to choose changes the way you respond, think, speak, and relate to yourself, others, systems, concepts, and the world. When I more fully recognized my capacity of choice, I stopped thinking in terms of life happening “to me”. It shifted to life happening “for me”. Over the years, as I continued contemplating my full capacity to choose, I stopped thinking in those terms too. I shifted to thinking in terms of life happening “through me”, as the lead author of my story.

And connecting this back to safety, you can feel safer when you are intentional and discerning with your choices. Because in a world swirling with risk, you can choose to anchor your safety in choice.

Now that you’ve read this, you can more intentionally contemplate your own capacity to choose, increasing your feeling of safety as an individual — even in the midst of institutions, structures, systems, and language that aren’t flawless.

So what is something that you can choose to respond to, speak about, or relate to in a different way — one that more aligns with you as the lead author of your story?

Cheers,Rachel

P.S. I welcome any thoughts you’d like to share — I read them all, always. Just click reply. 👍

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