Robin Sieger's Column

What If I Make The Wrong Choice?

I want to clear up something right away: no one in the history of the world has gone through life without making a wrong choice. I have often made the wrong choice in life with the best of intentions, and there have been occasions when I have made the wrong choice when it came to my career.

It’s part of the human condition. You tend to learn from your failures more than you learn from your successes. This holds you back and the more it happens the more and more risk averse you become.

When you have a big life changing decision to make such as a career change, you are naturally enthusiastic about the future and keen to see a smooth and seamless transition to the new job. Many of you then go through a period of imagining the worst.

What if it doesn’t work out?
What if I can’t pass the interview?
What if I go broke?
Is this job really for me?

The list is almost endless. The key thing for you to understand is that all of these outcomes are about negative scenarios. You’re unwittingly playing over and over in your head the lessons of potential failure until they appear to be premonitions of the future.

The truth is a wrong choice may result in an outcome that you didn’t want. No matter how awful it may appear to you at the time, that is all it is, it’s not ‘game over.’ You have the option to try again.

I have read many biographies and tales of exploration where the most catastrophic choices were made and the participants in the drama were then faced with extremely difficult struggles to get back to even keel.

The one thing they all had in common was a will to succeed and survive. That will gave them the ability to choose and act until they succeeded. They accepted the fact that they made a decision and it hadn’t worked out, but the game was still on and there to be won.

It is interesting to note that in many of the stories of people who find themselves in a life or death survival situation, at sea, in the mountains, or other inhospitable environments and who battle against the odds to pull through they tell of other people who were in the same position who simply gave up. This is the most extreme example of doing nothing - just giving up. I have no doubt that many of these people had given it everything they had, but their will to live at a critical point may have deserted them. If they had hung on for longer they too might have survived.

The challenge is not that you make the wrong choice; the tragedy is that you make no choice at all and just do nothing in the hope that things will work out for the best. The English language is littered with common expressions that reflect this attitude. “It’ll be fine.” or “It will all work itself out for the best” or “ Best to just leave things as they are.”

These are ways to justify doing nothing by suggesting whatever we do will not make things better, and doing nothing will not make things worse.

It would be great if every choice was the right one, but life doesn’t work out like that. What life tells you is to deal with things as they are, then DO something about it.

The important thing to remember is that you must make choices and then use them to move to the next stage in your life. If you make a wrong choice, learn the lesson and get back in the saddle and try again, knowing not to repeat the mistake.

Robin Sieger, from Scotland, now divides his time between between Europe and America. He is a successful businessman, best selling author, and broadcaster with offices in the UK and Charlotte, NC. He is a leading success strategist and has a world-class reputation as a conference speaker who passionately delivers high-impact presentations that are informative, inspiring, and entertaining. Robin’s humor and ability to emotionally connect with audiences has seen him become the first choice speaker at major conferences around the world. For more information visit www.siegerinternational.com or email robin@gitomer.com

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