The Choice is Yours | DFS 399

Welcome to Destin for Success. I'm your

host, Jennifer Takagi, and today I want to talk about choice and

making choices, making decisions, and it's super

exciting for me. This is my 399th episode. Can you even

believe it? I kind of can't believe it. I met Michelle

Hammons at an event. No, I did not. Beep, beep, beep. Michelle

Abraham, my two Michelles, who are so influential in my life. I

met Michelle Abraham at an event in Las Vegas in the summer of

2018 and I said, I, I create things, I do things, nothing

really happens, and she said, Jennifer, you don't have an

audience, now she will tell you, she said it was much more love

and compassion, but that was it. There you go. So that was the

end of July, and by mid September I had my podcast. It

was, it was out there originally. It was New Manager

Media, manage right from the start, and then as I evolved, as

I learned, as I grew, I made a pit, and so now it's destined

for success, and I've never looked back. It's been amazing.

So today, for the 399th episode, I want to talk about choice and

the power of choice. My first main point I want to make about

this is every choice is a vote for your future self, like who

you want to become. The small choices matter more than the

drastic ones. What you choose daily, your thoughts, your

habits, your boundaries, your conversations, your actions,

those quietly and consistently create your future. Sometimes we

want to wait for motivation, but transformation happens through

repeated choices. I often hear working with clients, I didn't

have a choice. I did what I did because I didn't have a choice.

Now, not having a choice at all is typically not really a thing.

It's usually a matter of I didn't like the alternatives,

but we have choices. I love it. Love to get credit where credit

is due. What's his name? Jack Canfield drew a blank for a

minute there. Jack Canfield talks about E plus r equals o,

and e is an event, r is your response to that event, and o is

the outcome, and in any situation there is a slight

pause between the event and the response that we often choose.

Choose, did you get it? We often choose not to take, and in that

brief millisecond, we can choose how we respond. Are we going to

show up as someone who has control over our emotions, over

our responses, or not, and that is what makes the biggest

difference. Am I going to choose to throw a fit? Am I going to

choose to pause. I kind of got sucked into a situation

recently, and none of it truly had anything to do with me,

none, but I could have gotten right in the middle of it. I so

could have gotten in the middle of it, and at one point I

finally said, I'm Switzerland, I'm completely Switzerland. My

choice is not to take sides and not get in the middle of this,

or make it worse, because I had so many thoughts, so many

thoughts going through my head that I wanted to share so

desperately, I wanted to share, but I chose not to, and that was

a choice, and it was a powerful choice, and I was able to

maintain my integrity and show up the way I wanted to show up.

Do I do that every time? Let's be honest, the answer is no.

Sometimes I don't, sometimes I don't hold it together, but that

that's what we're striving for. Successful people take that

pause before they respond, and they make a choice, how they

want to show up, how they want to respond to the situation. So,

the next big piece is not choosing is still a choice. I'm

not going to choose sides. Well, I chose to be Switzerland in

that situation, which was the right choice for me, but

sometimes we don't make a choice because we're avoiding

something, we're procrastinating, sometimes we're

staying silent, staying suck, staying safe, and those are

decisions too, and sometimes I hear clients say that life is

happening to them when consciously or unconsciously

they've been choosing comfort over change, because awareness

is powerful, and I've had a conversation with a client

multiple times, in that your life doesn't have to be what it

looks like right now. You can make different choices, and you

can show up differently. You can set boundaries, you can have the

hard conversations. I don't always like to, but I can. I can

make that choice. So, if we wait long enough and don't make the

choice, make the decision, it kind of happens for us, and in

that moment we have no control, we have no power, because it

occurred. It occurred without us, without our input. So, when

you choose not to choose, it doesn't always make it look

right. Sometimes choosing not to choose sides in an argument or

debate that's different, but not choosing to have control over

your life, over your environment, over the people you

hang out with, that kind of avoidance and not making a

choice, not making a decision that's on you. I've had some

pretty deep conversations with friends of late, of what's the

saying, you're the sum of the total of the five people you

spend the most time with and I have to consider, who am I

hanging with? Are they in a better position than I am? Is it

something I can look up to? Is it something I can aspire to be?

Or do I look at it and say, holy crap, bully, I don't want to be

that. I don't want to be that. I want to be something different.

So, choosing not to choose is definitely a choice. You can

make a new choice at any moment. One bad decision does not define

your life. A powerful shift can begin in 12 minutes. The moment

you choose differently, different thoughts, different

energy, different actions, you interrupt old patterns and

create momentum toward the life you actually want. When I was

doing classes for the great state of Oklahoma. I was doing a

two day new supervisory class, and so many times working for

the federal government, our classes like that were more on

the lines of how do you follow procedure and policy versus how

do you lead people, because leading gets more out of them

than just managing. You manage tasks, you lead people. And so I

was doing this class, and it was a two-day class, and this one

state employee participant came up to me at the first break, and

I had met her in other classes, basically a bit of a reserved

woman. She wasn't going to be the one out there jumping up and

down, running the class, but she came up to me at the first break

and said it with tears in her eyes, and said, "I've been doing

it all wrong. Wrong, I'm a terrible supervisor, and I've

been doing it all wrong. And I said, oh, the good news is day

after tomorrow, when you walk back in the office, you can

choose how you want to show up. You can choose to be that

leader. Will people catch on initially, maybe, maybe not,

maybe, maybe not, but when you start showing up consistently as

the leader, as an empathetic person, as someone who listens,

all the qualities you want out of your boss, when you start

showing up with those qualities every day, people will catch on,

and just because you lost it last week doesn't mean that

that's defining who you are every day. I worked with a woman

who was hard. She was hard to deal with, and I went to a

mutual supervisor, and I said, How do you deal with that? And

she said one time I lost my cool with her, and I promised myself

I would never do it again. She made a decision, she made a

choice, she made a decision. I will not do that again. So one

bad, bad decision doesn't define you forever. Do people have long

memories? Sometimes, sometimes they don't remember five minutes

ago, but you have the choice to show up as the person you want

to be tomorrow. Pardon me, you can do it and do it better. So,

the three key takeaways today, every choice that you make is a

vote for your future self, who you want to be, who you want to

grow into. Not choosing at all is still a choice, and there

will be outcomes from that as well. And you can make a new

choice at any moment. You start losing your cool, you can catch

yourself just that fast. Make a new decision. I'm Jennifer

Takagi, your 12 minute success coach, and I look forward to

connecting with you soon.