Are people who make good choices born or made?

As I shared with one of my Aikido friends this morning during training about my idea of writing a book on Making a Choice, he asked an extremely pertinent question, "why did you choose to write about making a choice?"

Great question! It has continuously amazed me that the way in which companies choose to embark on strategy A or strategy B can lead them to greatness or cause them to disappear from the surface of the earth. There are so many illustrious examples you can find. Just take a read of Jim Collins' Good to Great. Also, there are many individuals who made certain choices in their lives and that completely change their paths. Again, many examples to quote. Just look individuals like Oprah Winfrey and you'd know what I'm talking about.

I believe that when it comes making a choice, we all go through a process. For us, some of our choices are rather personal and we sometimes feel that as its a personal choices it ends there. Period.

What we sometimes don't see, or choose not to see, is that some of these choices we make will have an impact on the people around us. Think about a spouse who chose to quit on a job without an impending offer, and worse without a discussion with the other, and you will know what I mean. On a larger scale, the choices we make at work will also impact on the people who work with us, whom we work for, and even on our community to a certain extent.

With that in mind, we must take responsibility for the choices we make consciously, and more importantly for the choices that we make subconsciously. As a result of our subconscious choices, we fail to notice how our behaviours can cause others to like or dislike us. In terms of our professional lives, our subconscious choices can lead us to success or, yes, failures (let's call it feedback from hereon).

Expanding on that, working with executives and leaders some have shown to make really good choices, and what's equally important is their ability to make their choices in an extremely timely manner. Oftentimes, their choices will lead their organisation to leverage on a rising trend or avoid an expensive mistake.

So one could ask, are people who make good choices born or made? Of course, if we are not able to decipher how these great executives and leaders make such timely good choices, we'll tend to lean towards it being born. But once we realise that certain patterns are surfaced and when we are able to go to those people who make really good choices, ask them in retrospect to re-construct it, we are then able to allow individuals to learn how to make better choices.

Now, being able to learn how to make better choices not only help those of us who sometimes feel we can make better choices, but also to enable us to continuously and consistently make better choices. The reason why consistency is so critical is because if we are not able to make consistently better choices, then our journey towards excellence will be paved with speed-bumps. Sure, there will be time when despite all our efforts we still end up making not too wise choices (in retrospect), but because we are able to decipher why we made those choices, we can then heighten our awareness of the particular cause that trigger us to make such a choice.

From today onwards, I will want to challenge you to model what we discuss here.

Challenge for you: Be mindful of your choices!
You may want to take the following steps:
Step 1: Look out for 5 choices that you have made.
Step 2: Identify which of those choices were good or not so good ones.
Step 3: Then identify what is the particular cause that trigger you to make those choices.

Love and respect,
Melvyn Tan