OH! Magazine - Australian Version February 2016 | Page 22

ACTION, WHEN INDECISIVE, IS LIKE A BALD MAN’S HAIR GREG SELLAR Greg Sellar explains the importance of decision making. W hen indecisive, action is a bit like a bald man’s hair – it’s never there! Choice doesn’t always liberate, it can sometimes debilitate. When you become paralysed by possibility, work and life can become a maze and if you suck at making decisions, it gets twice as hard. The decision to create change is the first step towards action: after all, no decision, no action. Many individuals are unhappy with their status quo but remain languishing in mediocrity because the pain of their current reality isn’t large enough. They’re destined for more of the same because the decision to start doing anything differently is put off for some miracle time when the stars align. We often say to ourselves ‘our time will come’, but if you don’t do anything, it ain’t gonna happen! Making a decision is clearly an emotional response as much as we’d like to think we’re being rational when making them. It’s about reward – are the rewards from any change taking place big enough for it to be worth the while? If we look at most successful people, they don’t always make the right decisions, but they make decisions, and then make them right. We’re always told to ‘ready, aim, fire’ when what we need is more ‘ready, fire, aim.’ What torpedoes us from making tougher decisions more easily? Why do we scare ourselves into incapacity on the action front? Whether you’re in business, in a relationship, or an individual wanting action, you won’t make it in your outer world until your inner world is coherent. 22 FEBRUARY 2016 ( OH! MAGAZINE ) We have three states of ‘self’ that combine to create our ‘self-concept’, or how we think about ourselves. Brian Tracy refers to it as ‘the command centre that sits at the centre of performance and productivity.’ Our ‘self-idea’ is the summary of what we want to be in life – our hopes, dreams and goals. For an individual, this can be the desire to be more in the future. If you have poor self-image, you won’t have clarity about where you’re going and therefore find safety in staying where you are – regardless of how much you dislike your current situation. ‘Will I fail, and if I do, what will people think of me?’ The dreaded ‘self-image’ stops those of us who are less confident dead in our tracks. How you think you, or your company, are viewed by others is the basis for self-image. How you perceive your treatment on a day-to-day basis provides you with the fictional evidence to prove your point. ‘My boss doesn’t like me’, or ‘My company get so much bad press’ are lines spouted by those with poor self-image. The easy and wrong thing to tell people would be to ‘grow some’, but we all know it goes deeper than this. There’ll always be deeper subconscious values and beliefs of the individual that give rise to these feelings. Whatever they are, they result in blame on ‘circumstances’ or things ‘outside of our control’, but this is garbage. Our job as leaders, employers or significant others is to get to the root of those if we’re ever going to see a move in the positive direction. Don’t know how? Get a coach. The final one is the one we’re most familiar with – ‘self-esteem’. People who like themselves tend to set bigger goals, have higher standards and are better team players. It’s not a magic pill to all your problems, but with over 80 per cent of society suffering from some kind of self-esteem issue, it’s important to action. If you want to have creativity and productivity at work, you have to go out of your way to set-up high-esteem environments, removing fear of failure and rejection that inevitably inhibit performance. If you’re at home operating with low selfesteem, the biggest mistakes you can make are comparing yourself to others and not celebrating the small stuff. We lose perspective on what we have, what unique skills we offer, and how we contribute when we spend all our time wondering why others have more than we do. We are capable, we have had success – we just need to remember those instances and how they felt. Decisions need to be made in all aspects of work and life. There is no movement without making them, so getting good at decision-making is a skill within itself, and something that can be practiced. History proves that you’re right more often than not in your decisions, and even when you’re not, you can fix most of the poor ones. Action, results and the positive changes you create as a result of your improved position creates lasting change that benefits everyone. For a full list of workplace training and lifestyle programs that can help you enhance your decision making skills, contact [email protected] www.teamlifehack.com (Performance Coaching)