Life is a Choice and The Choice is Yours

Life is a Choice and The Choice is Yours

When it was released in 2011, Rhiannon Rees' first book How to Climb Mount Everest in Sandals quickly became a best seller on Amazon. It inspired many people to live extraordinary lives and those who read it have been excitedly anticipating a follow up. And here it is, titled Life Is A Choice And The Choice Is Yours.

This book is a bible for successful living. Rees, human behaviour expert, executive and elite performance coach for the likes of the X-Files, Grey's Anatomy, and Private Practice cast members, has drawn on all her mentors in a range of wellbeing subjects for their best advice. The result is 233 pages of gold from counsellors, coaches, experts on women's issues, international speakers, experts in Chinese medicine and naturopaths.

The contributors all have huge followings – some even their own TV shows – and many have their own personal stories of triumph over tragedy. Rees herself has gone from hitting rock bottom, being homeless and living in a tent with her child to earning at the top of her game and touring the world helping people realise their dreams.

"The book's goal is to help people better understand themselves and the obstacles that are holding them back in life" says Rees. "It's basically me and nine other self-help experts imparting our knowledge and wisdom learnt over years of training and life experiences to help you live the life you want!"

Exercises provided in this book show readers ways to improve their lives. "You'll need to be truly ready to look at and examine yourself, your strengths, and your weaknesses and to know that at the end of the day, we are all loved and we all have a reason for being here" says Rhiannon.

She shares her personal and professional experiences and her private arsenal of resources and references. The very same resources that she used to create her dream life. Her book shows readers how to identify their -blocks' and help remove them. Coaching has taught her that we are all very capable of mapping out the steps to our dreams, yet these blocks stop us from getting too close to achieving our goals.

There are three critical messages in the book:

Get real with who you are. Be honest " REALLY HONEST. This allows you access to unlock and unleash your inner power to dream realistically, wholesomely and wholeheartedly.

You don't have to do it alone. YOU HAVE LOTS OF HELP! Rhiannon's hand-selected team of experts will help you to heal, set goals and to live your dream. If one form of therapy doesn't suit what you need at a certain point in your life, there are many more to choose from.

THE LIFE OF YOUR DREAMS CAN BE YOURS (for real). You can build and create the life you deserve. You have the power to choose to live fully and you have all the tools you need within you. You just need to make that first step in choosing something other than what you are doing now

Life is a Choice and The Choice is Yours
Partridge Publishing
Author: Rhiannon Rees
ISBN: 9781482832822
RRP: $29.95

Interview with Rhiannon Rees

Question: What inspired you to write Life is a Choice and The Choice is Yours?

Rhiannon Rees: I never planned to write another book.
My first one, 'How to climb Mount Everest in Sandals" was it.
It was the one.

I was never writing another one after that.
Then the feedback started coming in.
People were asking me 'How I had changed my life?"

Specifically 'What were the steps I took?"
Like, 'How did I get out of housing commission, how did I get out of the tent, how did I then build a successful business with nothing?"

When I said it was all in the book, I was told that was not true, that in fact it wasn't.

I had to think about this. As I did, I realised they (readers) were right. Then I was absolutely horrified at the idea that I would need to write another book to explain what it was exactly that I had done to change my life.

I thought about this for many months.
Pondering what I had done.

Then I realised that I had had a great deal of help over many years to change the way I looked at the world, the way I saw myself, my values and beliefs.

I knew that I had to take care of 3 people on my payroll and that alone was enough for me to dedicate every spare hour and every spare cent to improving me, each and every day.

Each and every day I learned, I grew, I became more confident, I tried things, I read, I was coached, I went to seminars and networked, I interviewed the best coaches in the world for their theories about creating a successful life, I saw psychologists, kinesiologists, naturopaths and homeopaths. There was nothing I would not do to improve my life, and all this while I was wearing my mum's clothes to work and catching public transport as I would much rather spend money on 'fixing me" than a nice set of wheels.

Over time, it all came together, but then I am the most driven person I know, because I did not want a life of discomfort.

I wanted something more, something better. I wanted to offer my son something else. I wanted my mum and my son to have choices.


There was nothing I would not do. To date, I have not met anyone else who would forego any of these creature comforts like having more sleep (I often worked and studied till 10pm – honing my craft) and would be awake again at 3am to catch a train and a bus to my 7am meeting.

I put all my money into my greatest investment.
Myself. Most people I know would buy a car, new clothes or a holiday rather than investing everything in themselves. It is after all a choice. A choice that most people do not want to make.

I am glad I chose discomfort over comfort while I was undergoing massive transition.

It has given me an incredible skill set and cracked my heart open to be an even more loving and more compassionate person.


Question: Can you share your top tips to stop self sabotaging?

Rhiannon Rees: Great question – the most important thing here is the actual awareness that you are self sabotaging in the first place.

This is about noticing your behaviour, noticing the patterns of self-sabotage. The self talk that repeatedly occurs. Notice when you say 'No" to something – is that sabotage?
Or do you pull the plug on something when you are getting really really close to your dream.

I have been coaching now for nearly 8 years and the thing I see over and over is that much of this self sabotage boils down to a few very human elements.

Usually it is a manifestation of a client not feeling that they are truly deserving of something great. They do not feel good enough of loved enough to be able to receive the very thing that they want.

So it looks something like this, I had clients who had a 6-figure business. During the course of coaching them, they were offered a contract that would have brought them business that amounted to a 6 figure sale every month.

Not only did they tell the customer that they could not provide the goods, they never even mentioned it to me, and when it was mentioned they mentioned it as a total after thought. This is such an act of self -sabotage. Like holding the winning lotto ticket that you cannot cash in because what if people start to think you are 'rich", or how will the earnings change your life and can you handle that? Or even worse, you cash the ticket in and spend the lot on temporary things that cannot bring you heath and happiness so that in a relatively short period say a year or 2 – you are right back where you started wondering how this happened.

It's because your self sabotaging compass never changed, so whatever you believe about your life and what you deserve, you will make sure that you live that reality unless you have help with creating a new 'beliefs" compass.

Question: What do you hope readers take from Life is a Choice and The Choice is Yours?

Rhiannon Rees: I invited the best of the best to participate in this book, to share all their tips about living an amazing life that they had acquired and learned over a lifetime, then I added everything that I could think of in terms of my own arsenal of life changing tips, practices and advice. It took 4 years to put this book together and my intention was that this book would be an absolute encyclopaedia of help. Where one chapter may be extremely helpful for one person, another chapter may the key to set someone else's life on an incredibly upward journey. I wrote it packed full of tips to help as many people as I could, since my lifetime goal is to transform a billion people's lives in my lifetime. This is my calling. It is my destiny and with everything in my heart I will dedicate my life to this.


Question: Was it difficult to relive hard times in your life when writing Life is a Choice and The Choice is Yours?

Rhiannon Rees: It is not difficult to re-live hard times through my writing. I have written about and spoken about my hardships ad infinitum. What is difficult is when I am tired, or have been talking about a particularly challenging time in my life, then my feelings will surface and I will become emotional and this is a very raw space to be in – it's particularly worse when it is on National Television and my fly is completely down! (that's another story), needless to say, I like to wear elastic pants now!


Question: What did you learn about yourself when writing Life is a Choice and The Choice is Yours?

Rhiannon Rees: Life is a Choice more than anything else taught me patience, it has taught me the value of keeping regular contact with my contributor's since I was not so good at this at the beginning. As putting the book together took so very long, I was able to treat this book as an artist would treat a canvas and like my first book, one of my very best ideas for the book, came about 10 days before it went to print and this is the most talked about piece in the book.

It also taught me that there is a veritable plethora of help out there, if only you are brave enough and committed enough to seek it out. We all want instant results, but I am sorry to say there simply is 'no quick-fix pill". I absolutely love the process of writing a book and I have 3 more books in the pipeline as well as a movie.

Right now, I am focussed on helping people face to face through my National events at www.rhiannonr.com/events and towards the end of next year we will roll out a speaking events tour for New Zealand.

I have to say, that I am truly blessed and everything I have been through and then transformed into something amazing has meant that I am one of the happiest people I know and I am able to use this happiness as a drive to help many more people.


Interview by Brooke Hunter