P3 - How to be happy about the choices we make in life.

On 27th May 2010 I gave my P1 speech in this very same room; wherein I mentioned that - 'In august 2009 I had left the comfort of my friends and family to join Infosys knowing not what I want and that I was still without a clue.'
In August 2010, today I leave Infosys, at least knowing what I don't want.
Good evening Toastmaster, fellow Toastmasters and dear guests.
I made a choice. And I was constantly been asked this question - 'If I am really happy about it?'
Fed up of answering, I planned to put up the answer in the form of this speech and will probably later just share the link of this speech if ever faced with this question again.
The question I answer here is 'How to be happy about the choices we make in life?'
This is a issue a lot of people face. If you really think about it, SO MANY choices to make in life. SO MANY. And with that come regrets. So many “If only’s”.
How do we deal with all that?
Well, if we break down what makes people unhappy about the choices they make; we can put it into 3 broad categories.
The first is: How do I know if this is the right choice to make?
Let me share a personal experience. One day I happened to go to my favourite ice cream parlour with friends. And I was confused as to what to have? A scoop of vanilla or chocolate, a cone or a sundae?
We have so many choices to choose from, that we feel like if we stick to one, we’re missing out on all the rest and on top of all that, we can’t even know for sure if the choice we make is the right choice or not because we haven’t tried them all.
The second is what I call “present regret”.
Now at the parlour I finally decided to have a sundae which had vanilla, chocolate and strawberry.
I thought I chose the best until I turned around to see my friend holding this big bowl of chocolate choco-chip ice cream! Instantly I knew I had made the wrong choice.
That leads to the third category which is long term regret, the one people most struggle with.
A week after this ice cream adventure I happened to have an unpleasant confrontation with the weighing scale! And it was clear that the sundae was the worst decision of that week!
Now, let’s tackle each issue, one by one.
The first is we have so many choices in front of us that we don’t know which to pick and we’re hesitant because there is always a chance of something “better”.
The question we ask our self in this situation is - What is the best one?
We all want the best one.
That’s our usual decision making process.
But best is all relative.
What’s best for one is not best for another. One may want to live in Bangalore. The other might loath that kind of atmosphere and would like to live in a smaller city like Mangalore.
We therefore use our values as filters to choose what the best “choice” is for us. If values are not clear, it’s easy to get trapped into indecision.
The method that I adopted to realize my values was to answer this question:
What do I want in life?
I wrote it down on a paper. It started off with the material possessions – I want a house, nice car, clothes, lot of money, etc., then it went on to what I want to do, pretty superficial stuff at first but as I keep writing and writing, I got to some deeper, core type ideas. Finally recurring themes come up. Pretty soon I could see a hierarchy come into play.
I used this as help guide to make the best “choice”.
The second issue is we make a choice and we feel initial regret; that it’s not the right one.
Here’s the thing.
Life is a figuring out process. Nobody makes the exact right choices all the time. We need to acknowledge that. Respect the exploration. Appreciate the journey. Give our self the freedom to experiment.
It’s only by making these types of choices that we get good at making the “right” ones for us later on.
Then we come to long term regret.
Reality is all in our mind. You change the programming in your mind, you change your reality.
We just need to exercise our choice to change how we view reality.
A ton of people have always said the best thing that ever happened to them was because of this huge mistake they made. Still, a ton of other people says they just made the worst mistake of their life and leave it at that.
Both groups made the same mistakes with two different viewpoints that altered their lives forever.
Those who say it’s the best thing to happen to them confess how it really clarified a lot of things, gave them a fresh start, gave them the much-needed-push, etc.
Those who say it’s the worst thing just get caught up in this cycle of regret and playing the victim and can’t get out of that pit of despair.
Rewrite your history - Rewrite your reality.
It’s all in our head.
We can choose to see how that “bad” choice we made benefited us and operate from there.
If we put all three of the actions discussed here into play, chances are, we’ll be pretty happy with the choices we made and will make.