Do you remember how back when you were a kid, you had to listen to everything your parents told you to do whether you wanted to do it or not? Some of these things happened to be for your own good. Like when your parents made you eat vegetables, they did it because they wanted you to be healthy. And when they made you do your homework in school, even though you didn’t want to, they taught you the importance of discipline and hard work.  Or when your parents made you share your toys with your younger sibling they did it to teach you the importance of being generous and a team player.

On the other hand, some of things that your parents made you do as a child didn’t necessarily make you a better person because of it. Now as I reflect back on some of the extra curricular activities that my parents made me do when I was younger I still can’t see the purpose of doing it. I don’t think I’ll ever see the importance behind taking piano lessons that I had absolutely no interest in taking. Nor do I see how playing soccer has shaped me into becoming a better person. And I’m pretty sure that the accordion lessons that I took for many years will never help me out down the road.

When you were a child, your parents made a lot of decisions for you, but as you got older they started to loosen the reigns, and you were able to use your brain to make some decision of your own. By the time you reached high school your parents or guardians had enough trust in you to believe that you would use those life lessons that they taught you to make informed decisions for you own life. So, it was okay if you stopped playing basketball because you didn’t find it fun anymore. You didn’t have to wear the clothes that your parents picked out for you because you were old enough to make style choices by yourself. And they let you make the decision to take the foreign language that you wanted to take. Even though you were still under their control, you started to develop your own sense of autonomy which would help to shape you into the person that you would one day become.

And now that you’re an adult, you have complete freedom to choose how you want your life to look like. You no longer have your parents or guardians telling you what to do. No one gets to pick how you want to spend your life but you.

And you probably have much bigger decisions to make besides whether or not you’re going to learn how to ballroom dance or not, but if that just so happens to be one of the decisions you need to make then that decision is completely up to you.

Positive thinker if you want to be a doctor then do it.

If you want to change religions or give it up all together then do that.

Want to get married? Do it.

Want to stay single? You could do that too.

If you want to uproot your life and move halfway across the world then that decision is entirely yours to make.

And if you are ever worried about a decision that you have to make, remember that you can draw upon those life lessons that your parent or guardian taught you. In life you will come across many paths that lead to very different places, and choosing one of these paths over the other may seem very daunting, but the elders in your life taught you important life lessons so that choosing a path wouldn’t seem as scary. They taught you those lessons for a reason, and now that you’re out on your own in this world, you can use those lessons to help you to make important decisions in your life. Not everything that they made you do can help you out, but those important lessons will always be with you to guide you during your troubled times.

So go out there in the world and pick the path that you want to choose positive thinker, and choose that path knowing that it’s what you want to do and not what somebody else wants you to do.

And never forget, “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose!” -Dr. Seuss