Affirmation: Choose. Don't Train.
This is monthly affirmations, a newsletter from founder Sonya Yu. Each month, she imparts a saying to incorporate into daily life to live in attunement with your most authentic self.
Here’s a client story.
A few years ago, I was working with a company that looked great on paper. They had an alluring business in a very buzzy sector and a huge opportunity to showcase their concept on a global scale. After my first meeting with them, I knew I wanted the job because it would perfectly highlight my team’s skill sets. I wanted the project so badly, I overlooked the client red flags.
No history of working with creatives
A clear lack of boundaries
No true decision maker
In short, the creative relationship wasn’t great. Our team ended up using their brain power on putting out daily fires instead of creating work that exemplified their capabilities.
That’s when I told myself: Choose. Don’t train.
I spent the majority of my time training the client because I didn’t choose well.
Instead of accurately looking at the people and organization in front of me, I saw them through the lens of ego, which is normal. We do it with friendships and romantic relationships all of the time. But this ends up being detrimental to our well being because we cannot train people to be someone they’re not. We end up pushing a boulder up a hill instead of empowering ourselves and our teams to flow and fly.
So how do we choose, not train?
It requires getting clear on priorities and boundaries and sticking to them because when we compromise on those, we put that into the universe and will call compromising scenarios into our lives as a result.
Here are the three things I do to choose, don’t train.
Do the inner work. I always ask myself the following questions based on the romantic, platonic, or business scenario: What are my needs? What are my values? What is my process? What are my nice-to-haves? What are my nonnegotiables? I ask myself: Will this set future me up for success? And base my decisions on that answer. I tell myself to prioritize my needs over the nice-to-haves (even when it’s hard).
Journal, journal, journal. I write down every conflicting thought, every pro and con, every interaction I’ve experienced and piece of information I’ve obtained so the situation, its details, and my feelings are crystallized instead of left undefined and un-contained with my inner monologue running loose. Oftentimes this helps me listen to my intuition to make the right decision for me based on my needs and boundaries.
Create a counsel of accountability. Who do I trust to be brutally honest with me? Those are the people I talk to first because I know they’ll share their unvarnished viewpoints. I make sure to find the right people for the situation: I.e. ones with experience around what I’m talking about (be it hiring someone, making a client decision, or about a relationship) to reach a point of clarity.
Here’s a worksheet to scribble out all of the above.
The ability to choose, not train takes time and lived experience. You’ll inevitably make mistakes, but I’ll leave you with one last piece of advice: Sometimes it’s just as informative to learn from others’ mishaps, like mine :)
XOS