Life is full of examples that teach us lessons. When we see or hear or experience something from which we can learn, it is that example and experience that often helps us remember the lesson. That’s why stories and illustrations make learning so much more effective. When a story can be used to illustrate or demonstrate a valuable lesson, the story makes it much more understandable, relatable, and memorable. And so I am sharing examples of circumstances and stories that I have experienced in my everyday life which illustrate leadership lessons that we can learn and apply. This is one of those stories, and it teaches us that we have the ability to choose our responses and our attitudes.
My three year-old granddaughter was walking across the dining room floor. Her arms were full with several stuffed Paw Patrol characters, and she seemed to be intently having conversations with them as she was walking. Therefore, all of her attention was on these, so she didn’t see the piece of paper that was on the floor in front of her. When she stepped on it, her foot slid forward and she had to quickly catch her balance to keep from falling. With no hesitation, she kept on walking and giving full attention to the stuffed toys in her arms, but without missing a beat she also said out loud to herself, “Well, that was a fun ride!”
We laughed at her self-talk response to nearly wiping out on the floor, but the truth is that her uncle helped to cultivate this kind of pattern of attitude and response in her. Like many toddlers, as she was developing her physical coordination she would sometimes trip and fall. If you’ve ever seen a toddler do that, you know that there is usually a moment afterward when you see in their face that they are trying to decide how they should respond. But when her uncle saw this, he immediately showed her how to jump back up with enthusiasm and say, “Ta-da!” As she kept having that response anytime she would trip, it began to shape her normal responses when she fell. Ultimately, she cultivated a pattern of responding to these kinds of circumstances.
Her learned response to falling is a great example to us. It teaches us some things about how we respond when we fall. We will have challenges and difficulties, there will be obstacles that trip us up, and we will experience defeat. When those things happen, there is always a moment when we get to process how we are going to respond. Often, the tendency is to react in anger or frustration, or to blame others or the circumstances, but what I saw in my granddaughter shows us three things about this:
- You can choose how you respond. The fact that there is a moment that we are processing and deciding what we’re going to do next reveals that we get to make a choice. When something happens, in that moment, you have the opportunity to decide how you will respond.
- You can change how you respond. If you can choose it, you can change it. If you are quick to respond in a harmful or negative way, most likely it is because sometime in the past you made a choice to respond that way, and then learned to repeat it. But if you made a choice once, you can make a choice again to change it.
- You can cultivate a pattern of response. If you choose the attitude that you’re going to have in response to something and you intentionally make that choice repeatedly, over time it becomes the new way of responding.
That’s the lesson on leadership from this little thing in life, from my granddaughter’s instant response to a near fall. We will make mistakes and we will fall, sometimes as a result of something we did, sometimes as a result of something someone else did, and sometimes caused by something outside of our control. Whether or not we had control over the cause of it, we always have control over how we respond to it. We have the ability to choose our response and to cultivate a habit of that response. So, when something happens, take a moment to pause and think about how you are going to react. Because, you choose your attitude.
