The Best Choice is...

The Best Choice is....

Have you ever heard the joke that details how a foreman puts a spade and fork against the wall of a garden and then tells the labourer—Take your pick! What a dilemma... 


It's when we have travelled down the road of our choosing a little way, that other choices—better choices—become available to us! However, as the labourer did, we make the best choice available to us in the moment, at the time.

"What were you thinking?" Famous and persistent question when our decisions have taken us into calamity. Hey, lighten up! Give yourself that break!

In dealing with the thinking patterns that bring success for the bigger 500 companies in the world, the fourth belief that fosters excellence is the basis for a little self forgiveness: We always make the best choice available to us at the time.

We each have various sources of experience to draw from when making choices or decisions for our lives or in our businesses. We use this experience and integrate it with information we receive from our values and education to form our decisions. No matter how our success is rated by others, we tend to make the best choice available to us at that point and in that moment. Until we are aware of new options, we will continue to make the best choice from the list of available options.

By taking this belief to be true, people create the space they need to make their own decisions based on choices available to them. This will often require us to "bite our tongue" when we see people do something we deem as wrong or making a bad choice. It will also give us permission to forgive ourselves when we make a bad or detrimental decision. If I am aware that I made the best choice available to me at the time of making the decision, I can let go of the guilt and get on with living and making new choices.

There is a story of a young bank manager appointed to fill the shoes of a

distinguished leader and a notable banker who had decided to retire. Hoping to get insight into the outgoing manager's wisdom, the new man asked how had he been able to build such a remarkable bank and develop such a prestigious reputation. "From making good decisions." The old man winked. The new appointment thought about the comment for a while, and then asked how did one learn to make good decisions. "By making lots of bad ones!" laughed the old gent.

Making bad decisions is not the end of the road, or of your life, it is simply a "bad decision." You can correct bad decisions with better choices once they become available to you. It is not necessary to build monuments to our failures, but it is necessary to correct our mistakes by seeking more options.

So, I think it’s time you let go of those past mistakes and current hang-ups and just say "Well, in the moment, I made the best decision available to me at that time!" Let it go and move on. Learn from your mistakes and possible develop a creative side that is diligent at seeking some alternatives that will have better results!