Friday Focus #10
Choices
TRANSCRIPT
Today I’m going to talk about choices. Now, everything that we do, everything is the result of a choice that we make or a series of choices that we make. It goes further than that, because once you’ve made a choice, once you and I have made a choice, it we have to take action.
Otherwise the choice becomes effectively redundant. Unless, of course, it’s a choice not to do something. Because there’s always that option. I remember when I was teaching my MBA students some time ago, that when they were presented with a problem that quite often they left out that option. There is always the option to do nothing, but that is still a choice.
You can choose to do nothing and the consequences of doing nothing. Will be the reason why you chose to do nothing. But quite often we choose to do something, and that action that we take as a result of that choice will lead to some sort of conclusion.
Not by itself, because we have to do other things alongside the choice. But let’s just think about making a choice at the moment, because we may make a choice to perhaps write some copy for your website. Now, you then might make another choice, which would be to go and make a cup of coffee, and I’m as guilty of that as everybody else. It’s called a displacement activity. You decide to do something, you sit down to do it, it, or you go out to do it, do whatever you do to do it, and then you decide, oh, I’ll just go and do something else.
Which I think I need to remember to do, need to switch something on or switch something off, whatever it might be. We make those subsequent choices which impact on the choice that we made in the first place. So making choices is not as easy as it sounds in the first place.
It’s rarely between A and B because sometimes you could choose to buy one thing or another thing or not buy anything at all. The do nothing choice is always there and it’s a choice that has to be made or rejected one way or another. What I’m trying to get at is that we need to think about the choices that we are making every day, all the time, every day, every moment of the day. We’re making another choice. We’re making a choice. I’m making choices right now as to what I’m going to say next.
So we’re looking at the choices that we make, and one of the things we need to do is to coose the choices that we’re going to make. I’m getting complicated now. I know. But we don’t just make choices out of out of thin air. They don’t just come out of nowhere.
We have chosen to make that choice, and that’s another tier of choices. So think about the choices that you’re making. Think about why you’re making those choices. Think about whether you need to make the choices at all. Don’t forget the do nothing option. And next time, I’ll talk about what happens next after you’ve made the choice.
That’s Friday. Focus. Have a good weekend.
