Some might say it happens either/or.
Either you make your own choices, and you are seen as a confident person, someone with grit, someone who is ready to stand their ground. Or you constantly adapt to the choices of others – and risk being seen as someone without real conviction or direction. But what if the most powerful place is actually neither of those two? What if it sits somewhere in between – and what if getting there requires something more nuanced than simply choosing or simply going along?
In my experience, the most confident people consciously choose when it matters and adapt when it’s wiser to do so. The real power comes from awareness of which response each moment requires. To illustrate why, I want to use a medical analogy. It’s a slightly unusual one, and I’ll admit upfront that the connection is a stretch. But bear with me.
Have you heard of congenital insensitivity to pain – CIPA – the physiological condition where a person cannot feel pain at all? Most people, when they first hear about it, assume it sounds like a relief. It isn’t.
The average life expectancy for people with CIPA is about 25 years, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Nearly 20% of patients die within the first three years of life. The reason is both simple and profound: pain is a protective mechanism. As children discover the world, they learn not to touch an open fire, not to jump from heights, not to ignore signals that something in the body is wrong – and they learn this not through their parents’ explanations, but through the immediate, undeniable feedback of pain itself.
Take that feedback away, and the world becomes dangerous not because it changed, but because the signal is gone.
The analogy connects to my point this way: making our own choices – especially the bold, first-hand ones – works much like that pain signal. When a child reaches out to touch the dancing red light on top of a candle, they are making a choice – and the lesson arrives immediately. Those painful, self-made mistakes carry a kind of learning that no amount of advice or observation can fully replace.
But pain is not the only way we learn. We also study, listen to the wisdom of those who have been here before us, and observe the world, adapting to what we see. Both paths are real. Both are necessary. And the most capable people I know move between them – consciously, not by accident.
In a grown-up world, this tension becomes sharper. Because we don’t navigate life alone.
Whether it’s with colleagues at work or family members at home, we are constantly caught between our need for independence and the reality of being co-dependent on the people around us. That friction doesn’t disappear with seniority or age. It just changes shape.
When I was growing up, I was quite rebellious as a teenager – not unusual, I know. I dreamed of the day I would leave for university and finally live on my own terms. What I didn’t anticipate was that, for years after leaving my parents’ home, living alone would remain financially and practically out of reach. Independence wasn’t waiting for me on the other side of that door. It kept moving further away.
Early in my career, I dreamed of becoming a director – someone who could call the shots and shape the direction of a company. Eventually, I got there, only to realize that unless you own the business, the final call on where it goes is never fully yours.
So, somewhere after 33 years of learning through physical pain and psychological pain alike, I decided to ask myself a different question. Not when will I finally be free to make my own choices – but: where exactly is my agency? Where can I actually call the shots? Where is the place in this world where I can feel genuinely independent – and maybe, finally, stop having to adapt?
I was almost on a spiritual journey in search of that place, though without special drugs or gurus to guide me. Along the way, I changed jobs and moved countries, met new partners, made mistakes, and felt that teaching pain firsthand. I wondered about the past – whether I had made the right choices, and how I would make better ones in the future. I watched how others exist, how they achieve or fail, and I failed myself, then got up and tried new routes. Years of therapy, hours of self-reflection and self-coaching, and a stubborn refusal to stop asking the question.
And finally, I found my answer.
The place of confidence and power is not external. It’s a mindset.
Mindset is the lens through which we experience reality. It is the quiet, often unnoticed background made of our thoughts, preconceived notions, assumptions, stories, and meanings we attach to life as it happens. These are shaped not only by what we’ve learned or where we’ve been, but by how we choose to interpret and re-interpret events before us. It determines what we believe is possible, what we think we deserve, and how we interpret what happens to us. Our mindset shapes our values and our principles, and therefore affects every action we take – or decide not to take.
But when I say mindset is the place of power, I mean something specific. I’m not talking only about self-awareness – the ability to notice a problem and name our place in it. I’m talking about what comes after that awareness: the thought process that follows. What do we decide to do? How do we decide to react? Do we even need to react – or is this simply not a problem that should concern us?
That space – between what happens and how we respond – is where our real agency lives. And it belongs to us, regardless of our job title, our living situation, or who we share our lives with.
I still don’t have all the answers. What I do have is a set of questions I come back to – quietly, regularly – whenever I feel that tension between my need to choose and the pressure to adapt.
- Am I consciously responding to this situation, or just defaulting?
- Is this my choice to make, or am I trying to control something that isn’t mine?
- What would I decide here if I weren’t afraid of the reaction?
- Am I adapting because it’s the wiser move right now, or because it’s easier?
- Whose voice is driving this decision – mine, or someone else’s I’ve internalized?
- If I look back on this moment in a year, what will I wish I had chosen?
- Do I even need to react to this, or is it not my problem to solve?
These questions don’t always make things easier. But they remind me that the power was and is always here with me. In my own mindset.