Welcome to the Daily Quote, the podcast designed to kickstart your day in a positive way. I'm your host Andrew McGivern and this episode is brought to you by the Great News podcast. Today's quote comes from Laurie Buchanan, holistic health practitioner, transformational life coach, and award-winning author whose entire career has been built around one foundational belief. She once said: "What we don't change, we choose." This quote has only six words. And they may be the most uncomfortable combination of six words in your vocabulary. Think about that for a moment. What we don't change, we choose. Not what we can't change. Not what circumstances have forced upon us. What we don't change. Most of us have a running list of things in our lives we don't like. The job that drains us. The habit we know is holding us back. The relationship dynamic that keeps repeating. The goal we keep saying we'll pursue when the timing is better. The conversation we've been avoiding. The version of ourselves we keep promising to grow into, next month, next year, when things settle down. And alongside that list, we carry a set of stories about why nothing on it has changed yet. The timing isn't right. The circumstances are complicated. We're waiting for a sign, for motivation, for the right moment to arrive. The stories are comfortable. And they are, in the most important sense, a fiction. Because if there's something in your life you don't like and you're not doing anything about it, you've chosen it. Every day you don't act, you are silently saying: yes, I'll take more of this. And when you think of it that way it changes your perspective. At least for me it does. And Buchanan spent her career offering exactly this kind of clarity to the people she worked with, not because it was comfortable, but because it was the only thing that actually helped. The insight is that ignoring something doesn't minimize its impact on your life. In fact, ignoring it often increases its impact, because it winds up operating out of your awareness, and therefore out of your influence or control. The thing you refuse to look at doesn't shrink in the dark. It grows. There's an important distinction worth making here and Buchanan makes it herself. Some things are genuinely hard to change. Illness. Loss. Systemic circumstances beyond any individual's control. This quote isn't a dismissal of real difficulty. But even in those cases, there's still something you can control, your mindset, your effort, your response. You can't always change everything. But you can change how you show up in it. The question the quote is really asking isn't why haven't you changed this yet? It's quieter and more useful than that. It's simply: is this a choice? Because if it is, even a passive one, even an unconscious one — it can be made differently. There are things I tolerated far longer than I should have, in my work, in my habits, in how I was spending my time, not because I couldn't see them clearly, but because changing them felt harder than enduring them. And Buchanan's quote has a way of cutting through that reasoning very precisely. The endurance wasn't neutral. It was a choice. One I kept remaking every day I didn't act. The moment I started seeing inaction as a decision, rather than a pause before a decision, everything became clearer. And considerably less comfortable. Which is exactly the point. So here's the question, and it's worth asking slowly, honestly, across every corner of your life: What are you currently not changing that you have been telling yourself you simply haven't gotten around to yet? Because Laurie Buchanan is asking you to see it for what it actually is. Not a pause. Not a delay. A choice. Made fresh every single day you let it stand. You can make a different one. Starting today. What we don't change, we choose. Choose deliberately. That's it for today. I'm Andrew McGivern and I'll see you in the next one with another Daily Quote.
