Crossing Signals Weblog

“You are the choices you make.” I don’t know who said it anymore, but it rings so very true. The choices you make lead to actions, lead to results and lead to experience that together with the success of your actions defines who you are. If you do it right, your life will be a continuous process of improvement, an incremental series of steps that improve the person you are in any area of your life. Be it in relationships, business or physical prowess.

If you want to make choices that benefit you and give you the opportunity to improve your life, one question needs to be answered before you can start making choices and act upon them. You need to ask yourself the question: “Who am I?” For without a foundation to build upon, how are you going to make choices that benefit you not only in the short term, but also in the long term? How are you going to evaluate your choices? By what standard will they be successful? For that you need to know what you stand for, what values you attach to living your life and use these as a measuring stick for your actions.

Wait a minute? My choices lead to who I am, but I need to know who I am to make valid choices? This is what is called a conundrum, the famous chicken and the egg question. The statement in the first paragraph suggests that the choices you make lead to who you are, while the question on who you are needs to be answered before you can make valid choices.

Solving it is relatively easy if we take it to a higher level of abstraction. In this case that of intention. The intention of the question in paragraph two is the right one, and by reframing it, we retain the intention while solving the conundrum. It shouldn’t be “Who am I?” It should be two questions, the first being “Who am I at this moment?” and the second being “Who do I want to be?”. “Who am I?” suggests something fixed, something that remains constant for the rest of your life. It excludes change, since change is the opposite of remaining constant. If you always remain the same, you act in a very consistent way, and consistency is the most valued trait a person can have in our society. If someone is consistent, he can be trusted and depended upon. But, what if circumstances change and the consistency of our behavior starts to be the cause of our failure to make the right choices? One definition of insanity is as follows: ”Insanity is to over and over repeat the same behavior to get new results”. Let’s not go down the road of insanity and claim that who we are is a fixed thing that never changes. We all know the fallacy of that statement.

I suggest that in order to answer both questions and thereby setting up our identity, it is crucial to know what we value in life, how we perceive our surroundings and the effects of our actions. The values we adhere to as an individual are a much more solid base for our decision making. Our behavior may change when circumstances change, but the values we strive for rarely do. Off course even your values may change over time, but it takes many years and in most cases a traumatic experience.

To know what we value in life takes introspection and reflection on our behavior. In this process, the feedback of others we trust is essential. Not only in recognizing what we value, but also in checking whether our behavior is consistent with these values. To get a clear picture of what happens around us and our impact on these surroundings, we also need more than one point of view. We need people providing us feedback through different ways of perceiving what happens. People with different world views, but who share most of our values, so we can communicate, collaborate and achieve a multidimensional (integrated) picture of what’s going on. To grow and become more and more the person we want to be and can be, we clearly need to be part of a group (team) of people we trust. Trust to help us grow through acting together and through providing feedback on our behavior and actions.

As a team of different people with different identities, the team itself will have its own identity based on the values and the goal its members share. An identity that can be made much more clear to the individual members and thereby provide a base for the team’s choices and bring focus to its efforts. In the end the team is the choices it makes and for that it needs to know its own identity.