What Choices are you Making?

As a leader, do the choices you make align with what you need and want?

Choose.  Choose often - hundreds of times a day, in fact.

Choose.  Choose based on what you desire - what you truly want for yourself and others.

Choose.  Choose deliberately and consciously.  Choose, if you want to move forward.  Don't choose, and you stay stationary or fall back.

One of the key characteristics of leaders is that they consciously make all kinds of choices - not just the big ones, such as instituting new policies or restructuring schools.  They make medium-sized choices, such as choosing not to blame themselves for failure or not being deterred from their mission by adversaries.  They also make small choices: choosing to check in on a colleague who has a serious illness in the family or picking up the coffee cups at the end of a meeting.  And each of the choices leaders make says something about what they stand for and what they want for themselves and their organizations.

As a leader in your organization, there are two choices that are essential for you to make:

1. Choose to know what you want.  Oftentimes, people cannot move ahead because they don't know what they want.  They are stagnant, often waiting for some external force to push them in a direction.  Although it is not easy, you can develop a conscious habit of knowing what you want and pursuing it.....
2. Choose to act to achieve what you want.  How much of your time to you spend doing what you want to do to achieve your goals? 

From:  Leading Every Day by Joyce Kaser, Susan Mundry, Katherine E. Stiles, & Susan Loucks-Horsley
Published by: Corwin Press