After watching this video I agree with Sheena’s assumptions. When she talks about the first assumption making your own choices she talks about people having to make their own choices and that you should be true to yourself. In the example with the kids it is interesting how some of the children were very happy with making their own choices whereas other children were more comfortable with the choice being made for them. A part of this is cultural and a part of it is how we are brought up. We may have a parent who wants to be needed and may want the child to ask the parent what their choices should be.
For example, I grew up catholic and was never told about any other religions being out there. My mom had made that choice for me. The fear of what would happen if I was a “bad” christian scared me too much to think of questioning anything until I turned 19. I dated someone who believed in a higher power but couldn’t acknowledge whether it was God or not. I believe this is where I may have actually started my critical thinking! I had so many questions once the “blinders” came off.
To apply this to leadership I would say choices are great and we should be able to make them but we shouldn’t be pressured to go it alone on everything we have to decide on. Having a good leader to guide and support you and your choices will go a long way. In my current position, there are choices that I have to make myself and I will look at it as, “How will this benefit the student?” “Would it be better to have someone else look at this to make sure it is the best choice?” In most instances making the choice alone is easy enough. It gets harder when it is affecting someone else’s future. Then you want support from others.
In the second assumption more options lead to better choices really made me think about how “simple” life seemed to us many years ago. The example she used about the different sodas reminds me of being in a restaurant and the waiter comes over to take my drink order. “What would you like to drink?” It is a simple question and yet it causes one to pause and think about it. How many choices are there really? If you ask for tea you get, “what kind what you like, unsweetened tea, sweet tea, raspberry tea, peach tea or hot tea?” Luckily, I only drink water and you think that would be easy enough right? “Would you like lemon with your water? Do you want bottled water or regular water?” Yes it is great to have choices but sometimes it just becomes overwhelming.
Looking at this from a leadership stand point asking for input and suggestions may seem like the right thing to do in every situation but it can cause more issues and maybe even lead to more choices and that can then lead to frustration. For example, if you get a group of ten people in one room and then ask them how they would like the training for verifications to be conducted you are going to get ten different answers. Then you narrow it down to three suggestions and that creates seven or eight suggestions off that. Perhaps if we start with three choices and have to pick from that we can still be creative and still make a good choice.
Now the third assumption never say no to choice hits home for me in a deep way. I cried listening to her example because I have been there where those couples were. In 2006, I was six months pregnant with my second child and we found out that he had trisomy 18 a genetic disorder that affects about 1 in 6000 babies. Only half of his heart had developed which by itself may have been fixable but with the trisomy 18 it was beyond repair. The disorder had already begun to attack his small body in many ways and we were told that the chances of Alejandro (we had already named him) surviving to birth were about 11%. Him actually surviving after he was born was only 3-4%.
We had a few choices here. First we could wait it out and see what would happen meaning waiting to see if he made it to birth alive. Second if by some miracle he did make it to birth we would have hospice care already set up for him and he could live out his short life in as much peace as would be possible in his condition. We were told this could be 2 minutes, 2 hours, 2 days, 2 weeks or 2 months. Third we could decide to do a KCL stick where a doctor would perform a procedure to end it. The baby would not feel anything and it would be the best for us and for the baby. I would then have to be induced and give birth to Alejandro. The final decision was ours and ours alone. How could we make this kind of decision?! The what ifs started right away. What if the test was wrong (it wasn’t)? Why didn’t God make the choice? Was He punishing us? How would we explain what was happening to our daughter? She was only a year old at the time. How would this affect her?
It was the hardest choice I ever had to make in my life. The heart ache and sorrow we experienced making that decision will live with me forever. But we made the decision out of love and what was best for all of us. Would I rather have not made the choice myself? Maybe yes, maybe no. I cannot answer that question now. Would I be upset if I wasn’t given the choice? Yes I think I would have been. As Sheena pointed out in the video, we want to think that everyone would accept our choices we make with open hearts and open minds. There were some family members who didn’t agree with our choice. My response was and still is always the same. It is easy to judge when you are looking at your own healthy children to not understand why or how we could make the decision we made but until one stands in my size 8.5 high heels they have no idea what they would do.
Life is about choices. Some will be good others will be bad but I believe what Sheena was trying to get across is that there is hope in being able to have choices even if we don’t or can’t always use it. When I accepted my management position it was a choice. I could have said no. That I would rather just continue on as a counselor but that to me would not be a good choice because there is no room for improvement, no evolving into a better person or understanding different aspects of financial aid.
When Sheena talked about her experiment with the pink nail polish “ballet slippers” and “adorable” it made me think about how we can be made to think that something is better than it may really be simply because it has “pop” to it. It seems everything has to be played up to sound better than it is. It isn’t just a laptop it is an ultra-thin, ultra-light laptop that you can’t live without. It isn’t enough to work out you have to wear these specialized shoes that do the work out for you. But at the end of the day it is still pink nail polish.
