Be more aware of how we make choices
Every day we are faced with making choices. When we act we have made a subconscious or conscious choice and this could permanently harm or enhance our relationships with our colleagues, friends, staff and our customers.
For example we face choices about how to react to a staff member who is not performing, about how to interact with a prospect or praise a sales person performance. We have a responsibility to firstly, be aware of the fact we have choices and secondly, how we make choices.
Let’s look at a real life example of making a bad choice.
In a recent client management meeting the GM was very concerned that a junior customer service staff member would not treat a major account seriously with priority and that she may not be up to the task. When asked why he said ‘Well when I see her in tray it is over following with outstanding follow ups - I don’t think she understands the importance of it”.
Asked why she would not understand the importance of it he stated that “Management of that area is weak and everything seems ‘lapse’”.
Asked why it is ‘lapse’ he reverted to the fact he simply did not trust managers or staff to take the same care of major accounts as he would. When asked was there any specific incident his answer was ‘no’.
When asked what that had to with the situation he could not answer the question. At that point he realised that he did not have trust in others - a behaviour he always had. It actually had nothing to with the person in question.
What has this got to do with being responsible?
When we are responsible ‘we own our own stuff’. Our ‘stuff’ is our preconceptions, the ‘programming’ or conditioning we received as a child which includes beliefs, values, behaviours and ideas which can be positive or negative.
When we ‘own our stuff’ we empower ourselves by knowing that we have the look closely at tour programming and examine it to decide whether it is helping us to act in the best way possible.
THIS IS A CHOICE POINT.
In most situations as in the one above we are faced with a number of choice points where we can positively affect the outcome.
Sometimes those choice points have been influenced by previous choice points, for example in our situation the GM, when finally pushed, admitted he didn’t trust managers or staff to take the same care that he would because he had made a choice to behave in a certain way following a bad experience in the past where someone had let him down.
To have this lack of trust present in him, there was a choice point in the past when he decided to let this opinion form.
We call this the ORIGINAL CHOICE POINT. He had decided from the point onwards that this was the way he would behave to protect himself.
You might question whether you can stop your own belief or opinion forming around a situation, but actually it is a crucial part of being self-aware and self-responsible.
Being more aware enables better choices
Being self aware and self responsible means you can make better choices and better decisions. Unless you are aware of the thoughts and feelings you have how can you possibly know if they are useful to you or not? Otherwise you are just on auto-pilot collecting more un-conscious possible negative ‘programming’ which will on impact your actions right now.
By taking control of your moment by moment choices you give yourself the chance to be a greater leader and you can inspire others to act with awareness in their working life.
The path to greatness vs. the path to less than you are .
Let’s look at another example.
You are working on a project, it has been progressing nicely, you have landed a couple of successes, then out of the blue comes a fire you need to fight elsewhere.
This distraction has caused a loss of focus, momentum and interest, and you can’t get your head back into the space to accomplish that task.
This is a choice point.
In this moment you will make a choice in how to proceed. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the quality of choice you make each moment determines whether you are exercising your ability to be great or less than you are. Lots of factors determine what choices we make: habit, conditioning, past choices, awareness of choices available etc.
Try this technique....
A technique for noticing your moment-by-moment choice points is simply to notice the individual moments as they happen. This seems simple, but we live life at such a pace, and in the flow of our next thought, or thing we have to do , that the act of being really present in each moment can be quite a revelation.
So, close your eyes, and start to slow down your thoughts, feelings and concept of time until you are actually in the space between each moment before the next one arises.
Make a change
What makes the difference is how conscious we are about our choice to behave . In our example we have a number of choices which could be positive. We could choose to do something which gets us back in that space, do something else that is productive for now that fits our mood and come back to it later, or practice our ability to rapidly switch into the right frame of mind.
The path of less-than features the same choice points but the choices here could be remaining unmotivated, getting stuck in your lost-ness, beating yourself up about it or trying the same thing but wanting a different result.
This is not to say that in order to be great will never have those behaviours. Having sky high expectations of yourself, or a holier-than-thou attitude are just as unhelpful. What is useful is to catch yourself doing those unhelpful behaviours and make a different choice there and then. The more positive choices you make, the more you are on the path of greatness.
