Your Future – Your Choice – Yeah, right!

Naked Leader Week – 215 (w/c Monday 16 July 2007)

Your Future – Your Choice – Yeah, right!

 In my IT Leadership Blog (Stephen please link to it) I ran a competition, setting the following challenge:

My fundamental belief is that no matter what our circumstances, our future is always our choice. To win one of six copies, post a short comment, which must disagree with my belief. It must be original and it can be amusing. I will be the judge and am looking for my belief in choice to be shattered.

I received seven entries that were all outstanding in their own way – please send in your thoughts and comments on these before my hope and belief in choice is destroyed forever!

From Jim Baxter: My wife has a difficulty with choice. She researches to the Nth degree, arms herself with every available choice for the decision to be made, and then hits a form of information overload which freezes her ability to act. The solution? It’s a bit like buying a computer. You can wait and wait for the next model and the one after that. Or, you can pick a point in time, gather your options and, at the deadline, make your decision. Yes, something better may come along ten minutes later. But you will have taken an action and be well ahead of the position you were in before you made that choice. Don’t let choice slow you down!

From Rob Wheeler : The word “choice” implies a judgement, a distinction between “better” and “worse” states or options.  There is no such thing as choice when you are doing what you love doing, and being 100% who you really are.  Then there is just a natural progression from one state to the next.

From Miriam Bromnick: Two comments. Sometimes when a project (or anything) is going really really badly it feels like there is no choice but to go on, maybe in that case the only choice is how you feel about it.

Secondly, sometimes morally it feels like there is no choice, I know this sounds extreme, but I working for a manager who was lying and I was in a situation where whistle blowing didn’t work so my only choice was to leave.

From Mike Samuels : You cannot choose your parents or when you were born, neither can you choose what happens in death, you must, therefore, make the most of all the time in between.

From Alison Owen: According to William Glasser’s Choice Theory all people can do is behave and the only behaviour we can control is our own.  Other people can only be given information to change their behaviour.

 Beyond that all of us are driven by genetically based drivers to satisfy five basic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom and fun.

 All our choices (behaviour) in the past have led us to where we are today but we can only plan to meet our current needs (and those in the future).

 Behave as you need to feel the best that you can – only you have that freedom for yourself.

From Albert Ross: James chapter 4 verses 13-15 (ESV) Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”– yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

 From Colin Beveridge: Our future may indeed be our choice but only if we live on a totally deserted island, devoid of other people and predators.

 Luckily most of us do not exist in such an emotional vacuum so our future is always an amalgam not just of our own choices but also our [often unchosen] circumstances and the various influences imparted by the choices and circumstances of others – none of us has the luxury of true self-determination.

 In the words of the immortal Mark Renton in Trainspotting: choose a job, choose a career…Choose Life!

Help me please!

David

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