The Most Powerful Thing in Your Life: Choice (Part Three of Three)
Apr 23, 2026
The Most Powerful Thing in Your Life: Choice
No circumstance, no loss, no season of life can take this from you. And when you truly claim it — everything changes.
We've talked about happiness. We've talked about peace.
Today we get to the foundation underneath both of them.
The thing that makes either one possible — not just when life is good, but when life is genuinely, devastatingly hard.
You always have a choice.
Not over everything that happens. Not over every circumstance, every loss, every season that arrives without your permission.
But over something far more important:
Your response. Your perspective. Your way of being within it.
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The Space Where Everything Changes
Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist living in Vienna when the Nazis came. He lost nearly everything — his home, his manuscripts, his family, his freedom. He survived four concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
And in the middle of the most extreme suffering imaginable, he discovered something that no one could take from him.
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
— Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for MeaningLet that really land.
Even in the most unimaginable conditions a human being can face — there was still a space. A space where no one else had authority. A space that belonged entirely to him.
That same space exists within you.
Every single day. In the ordinary moments. In the unbearable ones. In the moments when everything in you wants to collapse, react, or hand your power over to whatever is standing in front of you.
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When Choice Is the Only Thing Left
I want to share something personal with you today. Something I don't talk about often, but that shaped everything I believe about the power of choice.
When I was six months pregnant with my second daughter, I received a call that my older brother was on life support. He wasn't going to make it.
The circumstances surrounding his death were deeply painful — beyond the grief that any loss carries. For months, there was uncertainty and heartbreak layered on top of heartbreak. I did everything I could to seek answers, advocate for his children, and understand what had happened. And ultimately, I had to accept that some things would remain beyond my knowing.
I came home to a small town 2,000 miles from my family and friends, with a 15-month-old, a baby on the way, and a grief so heavy I could feel it in my body. My husband was a steady, loving rock — holding me while I sobbed through the hardest nights. But there were long hours alone, and I could feel myself beginning to slip into a darkness I had never known before.
For about two weeks, I could barely function. And then something shifted — not all at once, but quietly, like a light coming on in a dark room.
I became aware that some of the thoughts I was thinking, and some of the things I was doing, were adding to my pain. I was carrying things I had no power to fix. I was trying to control an outcome that was no longer mine to control. And that awareness — as gentle and simple as it was — gave me a choice.
I started thinking differently. Through prayer, journaling, meditation, and honest conversations with people I trusted, I began to see what I actually needed — and I started asking for it. I reached out and built a circle of support around me. I found a nanny to help with the house and my daughter. I made sure I was never alone for that stretch of late fall and winter.
And slowly, day by day, I began to feel lighter. Not because the grief left — it didn't. But because I stopped fighting what I couldn't change, and started choosing what I could.
I left the things I couldn't carry in God's hands. And I turned toward the joy that was still right in front of me — my growing family, the baby coming, the love that surrounded me even in the dark.
That is what choice looks like in real life.
Not a dramatic declaration. Not a sudden transformation. But a quiet, daily turning — toward awareness, toward what you can control, toward the light that is still there even when everything feels impossibly heavy.
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The Ways We Give Our Power Away
Most of us don't give our power away dramatically. We do it in quiet, everyday moments — without even realizing it.
This is just how I am.
I can't help it.
They made me feel this way.
I'll feel better once things change.
Without meaning to, we hand our inner power to our circumstances, our past, to other people's choices, to the way things "should" have gone.
I kept doing this in those early weeks of grief. Reaching for answers I couldn't have. Trying to carry things too heavy for any one person. Outsourcing my peace to an outcome I couldn't control.
It wasn't weakness. It was human. But once I saw it clearly, I couldn't unsee it.
And that is exactly what Jung meant when he wrote that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. The moment you become aware of the pattern — you have a choice about whether to keep living inside it.
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What Choosing Actually Means
Let me be clear about what choice is not.
It's not pretending everything is fine. It's not bypassing real emotion or performing positivity over genuine pain. Grief is real. Hard seasons are real. There is no shortcut through them and no spiritual bypass around them.
What choice is — is the recognition that even inside the hardest things, you are not entirely powerless.
The thoughts you practice — even when the old ones feel automatic and loud.
The meaning you assign to what has happened — which is never fixed, and always yours to interpret.
Whether you ask for help or carry it alone.
Whether you surrender what you cannot control — or exhaust yourself trying to manage it.
Whether you turn toward the light that is still present — even in the dark.
This is personal agency. This is sovereignty over your own inner life. And it is the most quietly powerful force available to you.
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The Shift That Changes Everything
At a certain point, if you genuinely want your life to feel different, something has to shift in how you see yourself.
You have to stop relating to yourself as someone who is at the effect of life — and begin relating to yourself as someone who is creating within it.
Not controlling everything. Not manufacturing outcomes. But consciously, deliberately choosing — again and again — who you are going to be.
"Life is happening to me"
becomes
"Life is happening, and I get to decide how I meet it."
That is where your power lives.
Not in what happens. In how you meet it.
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This Is What We've Been Building Toward
Three posts. Three truths. And they all point to the same place:
Happiness is not something you chase — it's something you cultivate.
Peace is not something you find — it's something you return to.
And both are made possible by the choices you make inside your actual life.
Not the big, sweeping choices. The quiet ones.
Choosing a different thought when your mind pulls toward the old story.
Choosing to pause instead of react.
Choosing to ask for help instead of quietly drowning.
Choosing to surrender what you cannot carry.
Choosing yourself — gently, consistently, even when it's hard.
These choices are invisible to the world. No one applauds them. No one sees them happening.
But over time, they become your life.
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You Don't Have to Get This Right
You will forget. You will react from the old place. You will slip back into patterns that feel familiar even when they no longer serve you. We all do.
That is not failure. That is being human.
I spent two weeks barely functioning after I lost my brother. I didn't choose peace immediately — I found my way there, slowly, imperfectly, one small decision at a time.
The power is not in getting it right. The power is in coming back. In remembering. In choosing again, in the very next moment, to meet your life with a little more intention than the moment before.
That is the practice. That is the whole thing.
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A Gentle Invitation to Close
Right now, wherever you are — pause. Take a breath. And ask yourself:
Where in my life am I giving my power away — to a circumstance, a person, or an outcome I can't control?
What is one thing I've been trying to carry that I could choose to surrender today?
What would it feel like to meet today's challenges as someone who is creating within life — rather than at the mercy of it?
What is one choice I can make today that moves me a little closer to the woman I want to be?
Not ten steps ahead. Not a full life overhaul. Just one.
Trust that it matters. Because it does.
Thank you for reading this series. It has meant a great deal to share it with you.
My hope is that something in these three posts has sparked a new idea, a new possibility, or even just a small shift in how you see yourself and your life.
That is your happiness habit — already in motion. ✨
With love, MeganMiss a post? Read the full series:
Part One: What Is Happiness, Really? · Read it here
Part Two: Finding Peace in a Chaotic World · Read it here
Part Three: The Most Powerful Thing in Your Life · You're here ✨
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