Bright The Day

Greetings, and welcome to another issue of e-divine, the newsletter dedicated to helping you Build a Better Life and a Better World through the Spiritual Practice of Everyday Life.

This newsletter is meant to serve you. I would love to hear your feedback on what inspires you, what resonates for you, and how I can do more of both of those! Please don't hesitate to send your comments, insights and suggestions to me at adam@dailydivine.com!

Enjoy!

Featured Article

Choice-Based: The Fifth of the Seven Cs of Spiritual Coaching

We are beings of choice. We have the power to choose where we stand, what we hold dear, and how we react to life's challenges and opportunities. Moreover, we have the power to consciously and continuously choose proactive ways to shape our lives and our world. Will you choose to know more and understand more tomorrow than you do today? How will you choose to act today, and how will that shape your ability to react tomorrow? What kind of legacy will you choose to leave for the children of the future, and for seven generations hence?

Coaching is about making choices – the choice to hire a coach, the choice to make the coaching powerful by fully engaging and committing to the process, and the choice to shape and act on new ways of being and doing in the world. Spiritual Coaching is also making choices – the choice to search for and define personal meanings of spirituality, the choice to see spirituality as integral to every facet of life, and the choice to explore and act what spiritual practice enables in everyday life.

When I was young, I greatly enjoyed reading Choose Your Own Adventure books. On every page of these book were a few paragraphs, and then a choice; each choice took you to a different page somewhere in the book, and changed the flow and conclusion of the story. I had a rather unorthodox way of reading these books, as I would search through the book for an ending I liked, and then would work my way backwards (no easy task, I might add!) to find all the choices that needed to be made to enable that particular ending.

Making powerful choices in life is a combination of that unorthodox style, and the more traditional path of following choices made wherever they might lead. We have the power to visualize desired outcomes, and then map out the steps that need to be taken to get there; at the same time, we are still often confronted by unexpected choices along the way, and how we react to those choices will change our life story as we live it. The clearer we can be about where we want the story to eventually lead, the easier it can be to make those unexpected choices along the way.

Practice Tip: Choose a situation in your life where you want to be experiencing greater success. Now take a large piece of paper (the bigger the better!), and a variety of pens or markers, and mark a box for where you are now at the top of the page, and another at the bottom of the page with a word or two that encapsulates where you want to be.

Map out a flow diagram with as many possible choices as you can think off, and all of the choices those open up. Continue doing so until you think you've captured all of the possible choices, no matter how obvious or outlandish. Also include some boxes for conclusions other than the one you put at the bottom of the page; some of these conclusions may be negative outcomes, while others might simply be different or even surprising possible outcomes that come to you as you work. Now step back and look at the big picture of all the choices available to you, and how much power you have to shape the future!

Next week…

Calling-Focused: The Sixth of the Seven Cs of Spiritual Coaching

Wind To Thy Wings

In each issue I will highlight a resource I think you'll find powerful and uplifting. If you have a suggestion for a book, movie, album or other resource that you have found significant in your journey, and would like to share with others, I would love to hear from you – email your suggestions to adam@dailydivine.com!

Today's resource comes to us from Barry Townshend, the Manager of the Centre for New Students at the University of Guelph. Barry's pick is a short anecdote found on pages 81-84 of the 1993 paperback printing of the Robert Fulghum book Uh-Oh.

Barry recommends this particular story because it 'talks about the power of the choices that we make and how we see the world, and that even when we see the way that things work, that doesn't have to take the mystery out of life.' Thank you, Barry!

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