Guilty!
- Post By: Greg Crumpton
- Date:
- Category: Blog
- Tags: airtight, personal development
A pretty harsh word for anyone to hear, especially if that someone is you! I bet that most of you reading this have been guilty of my same crime, even if you didn’t realize it.
The chain of events went like this:
A business venture that I am one-third of has a bi-weekly update call. We catch up, talk about recent victories, tragedies and strategies, and we usually dedicate an hour or so to it.
During our call this past week, we were deciding how to handle a particular situation. Bob gave his ideas, I gave my thoughts and Joe followed suit with his insights. The decision wasn’t a life or death of the company kind of decision but it was deep enough that we needed to really get this right.
The theme behind each of our ideas, thoughts and intentions were all good, but similar. Essentially we collectively said that we were willing to let a situation play out by allowing one more interaction with this specific entity before we made our decision. Most of the time, and for most people, that would be a logical conclusion arrived at by common-sense reasoning. But, as I sat there letting that thought and those words marinate in on my brain for a few seconds, I had to call BS on it.
Calling BS on yourself is normally fine because usually you’re alone and the windshield that you just confessed to can’t divulge your dirty little secret. To call BS on yourself AND two of your friends and business partners was a little more of a risk.
“What BS?” they asked, in their usual gentle manner (Not!). Hadn’t we all said about the same thing, but with different words and levels of passion about the topic? We sure had, but the kicker for me was that we all basically said that we were willing to compromise the high standards that we set for the company and that we agreed to operate under.
We were saying to ourselves, “OK, I know what we said we would hold ourselves to, but one more meeting with said entity may put us closer to the goal line”.
The question then became; do we go forward with a, “Lets see how it plays out” attitude, or do we say, “No, we are in contradiction with our Deliver Excellence” model?”
So, then I thought to myself, “Great, I just took what could have been a fairly benign conversation, and therefore an easy decision, and complicated it. Besides, no one has time for anything “extra” … or do we?”
The whole point of this is to simply point out that sometimes we unconsciously make small decisions that, if analyzed, are in contrast to our core beliefs. These decisions typically are so routine and unobtrusive that they do not require too much thought. Other times, small decisions make a huge impact and then the time required for the “extra” stuff that goes with those decisions is certainly not anything any of us have time for.
Walk the talk, say what you mean and mean what you say, yada-yada-yada, however you want to define it is fine, but you have to be cognizant of what you are doing and be prepared for the results that come with it… or those that don’t, won’t or can’t.
You cannot have a “Kinda Deliver Excellence” mind-set. Either you do or you don’t.
So what did we, The Three Amigos, do? Applied logic, reason and reached a concensus that we would address the situation before the problem metastasized any further.
We took a stand. We did something versus meandering through life and hoping.
The results? Time will tell, but we are certainly not leaving it to chance.
Let, or better yet – make, yourself make decisions and act on them, it’s true liberation.
