As we travel through the different seasons of our lives, we come across opportunities to decide who and how we want to be. Many of us have different stories we could provide. Here are three of mine.
I remember the first time I got to drive the family car and take all my friends out on Friday night. I had just completed the driver’s license test and the road test at the State Patrol office in Savannah, Georgia. I was legal and ready to go at age 16 — and I felt like I had the world ahead of me.
I was the one who chose to develop the military market for Tidewater Landscape, the business my brother and I owned from 2002 to 2015. It involved a lot of traveling all over the U.S. There were many days and weeks that I would be away from my family.
When I became a single dad in 2012, the entire process of being single again opened some strange doors. Many of these doors I had been through, but some of them were completely new. As I opened these new doors, I could only rely on my previous experiences to be able to navigate them one at a time.
In each of those experiences, I had a filter that I was running my decisions through. The filter contained the words and concepts related to position, pressure and power. I justified my decisions, and provided myself with the reasoning of those decisions, and everyone around me dealt with the fallout. When we make decisions this way, it ends up causing a lot of damage to us as individuals and, especially, to those closest to us.
That brings us back to the question, Are you still you?
If you have the feeling that the top position in your business will bring you happiness, or you need to develop and grow the business while throwing out the relationships closest to you, or having the power to treat people as nobodies — along with the economic power to spend unlimited amounts of money — you may want to consider changing your personal filter for the answers. The same is true of how you interact with people and build relationships, whether it’s in business or not.
I hope your filtered choices lead you to find your real values in this one short life, and help you keep being you.
Live inspired,
Jimmy
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