It’s Your Life: It’s Your Choice

I was sitting in a teacher’s assistant training session years ago, and the director of the training, a long-time tenured professor, posed a question, seemingly on impulse, that got everyone in the room thinking. His question was: Ultimately, what is your job as a teacher? After several responses from my peers, I tried my hand. My answer?

My job is to equip others with the ability to make better choices.

(The fact that I knew this caused his mouth to drop wide-open.) To this day, I am more convinced than ever that helping others make better choices is a primary hallmark of the exceptional educator, the exceptional employee, and the exceptional leader. Interestingly, research has repeatedly confirmed this fact.

William Glasser’s work is worth noting along this line. Glasser, a noted-psychiatrist, lecturer, and widely-published author, contends that the quality of our lives are determined not by our circumstances, but by our choices. Specifically, the decisions we make regarding what we think and how we act dictate our feelings and make-up: to put it succinctly, our world.

In brief, it doesn’t pay to blame any thing or any one else for your state in life. You are the captain of your own ship. You decide what to think. You decide how to act. You decide your journey.

Why address this now? Because it’s easy to get lost in a riptide of bad economic news. These are uncertain times, and it’s easy to let the events define you. Instead, remember, you have the power to define the events. You have the ability to plot the course to your next port of call. When you take this mindset, you will make better choices, and you will provide an example worthy for others to follow.