In this Expert Insight Interview, Dr. Lizzy Bernthal discusses essential tips for confidence, leadership, and resilience. Dr. Lizzy Bernthal has worked as a health professional and educator in the National Health Service and the British Armed Forces for over 25 years.
This Expert Insight Interview discusses:
- Why do we avoid making choices
- How putting off decisions almost always makes the situation worse
- The role of courage in decision-making
Choices
As a leader, you always have a choice, whether you realize it or not. And you make these choices every minute of every day. Once you begin to notice the choices that you’re making, you can change them to empower yourself and your team.
Not making a choice is still a choice, as convoluted as that may sound. And sometimes people don’t realize this. As human beings, we tend to avoid choices, or we struggle to make them at the very least. This is because we know that if we choose one thing, we disregard something else, and we don’t like to do that.
Procrastination
Humans have a natural need for certainty, and that is where our reluctance to make a choice sometimes comes from. By definition, making a choice implies a right path and a wrong path. But in reality, nothing is worse than sitting on the fence and not making an empowered decision.
The more you put off making choices, the worse the situation gets, generally speaking, provided you have the correct input and you’ve done the proper research. All procrastination is just fear, and once we acknowledge that we can just do whatever we need to do regardless of that fear, we can take action and solve our problems.
Courage
Sometimes we need to make choices with only partial information, and as leaders, we need to be prepared to take these risks. This brings us to the courage side of the leadership equation. People tend to think that courage is reserved for people who do momentous things, but the reality is that you have to show courage every day in whatever you’re doing.
Collecting all the evidence you can is another part of the decision-making process. We almost always have some evidence to help us make an informed choice, even if the information is not 100% complete.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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