This is Optimal Living Daily, Episode 1635. Everything is a choice by a still on George of

Spiritual Living for BusyDepal.com and I'm Justin Malik, your personal narrator,

reading to you with permission from the authors. I cover lots of topics like personal development

or self-help, mindfulness, happiness, anything that I think will help you live a more meaningful

life in just a few minutes every day. So with that, let's get right to it as we optimize your life.

Everything is a choice by still on George of Spiritual Living for BusyPeople.com.

Quote, I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become. Carl Young.

Do you feel like you're suffocating under the weight of your own life? You've got so many things to do,

you don't know where to start. You wonder how life got this way, you're earning for a time when

you didn't have to worry about the next thing on your to-do list. Take a look at that list.

Now ask yourself, who put that item on my list? Now do that for the next one and the next one

and the next. Let me guess, was the answer me, me and me? If so, go find a mirror, take a hard look at it

and then jump for joy. If most of the things that keep you bogged down in your life were put there

by you, then you have a simple solution to your problem, right? The power of a little phrase.

Well, not quite. The reason it's not so easy to tame your busy life is that most of us don't

experience the things we do as choices of our own making, but as external forces acting upon us.

I have to make dinner for the kids every single night. I have to fix the back deck by next week.

I have to find Mr. Wright by this time next year. After work seven days a week to keep food on the

table, I have to accept every after work gathering invitation. I have to read these 10 books by the end

of summer. All of a sudden, life is filled with that thing that you have to do, but you can't

possibly find the time to fit them all in. Furthermore, you find no joy in them. You suffocate.

The reason? Because of the little phrase, I have to. When your self-talk includes these three

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