A Business Epiphany
Friday, June 27th, 2008Post from Leadership Turn Image credit: zacchaeus
This week we’re supposed to write about “your business epiphany – what one moment influenced your career or business more than any other?”
Epiphanies are funny things. What we think is an epiphany (AKA, an ah-ha!! moment) when it happens may become more mundane in 20/20 hindsight, whereas a passing thought becomes monumental wisdom in that same hindsight.
What epiphanies I can identify fall in the second category.
Here is the one that’s had the greatest impact on me, because it stopped my laying all those coulda/shoulda/woulda trips on myself.
Don’t judge who you were and what you did in the past based on who you are and what you know now.
It wasn’t until I had to explain it to someone else that I was forced to think through exactly what I meant. Here is how I explained it then and have continued to explain it to clients and others ever since.
Each of us is composed of multiple, past “me’s,” each a different, stand-alone version from the current one.
When you look at past actions (Why did I…) you need to first ask yourself if you made the best decision/action possible based on the information you had at the time in conjunction with the person you were at that time.
If, in fact, you did, then the you you-are-now has no right to judge, i.e., beat up on, the previous you for that decision/action.
This doesn’t mean that you need to condone everything—today’s you may decide that in the future you should move in a different direction, do more research or whatever—but it does preclude you from taking your former self to task.
I hope you’ll consider saving yourself a lot of grief by integrating this idea into your own life.
What was your most important epiphany?
Your comments—priceless
The media is awash in “leaders,” be they business, political, religious, social, whatever and this guy reminds me of so many of them.
