Five Simple Choices: A Brief Course in Self Leadership

By Gower D. Talley

Greatness is a choice. Failure is a choice.

People with similar potential do not necessarily achieve similar results. Some achieve prosperity and joy. Some achieve poverty and sadness. The core difference between these two groups of people lies within five fundamental life decisions: Five Choices. The greatest amoung us make these choices in one way. Those who struggle and fail seem, almost universally, to choose the opposite path in these five areas. Today, you will learn to identify these five fundamental choices. You will learn to make these choices in a way that will lead you to create the life you know you deserve. Everything changes right now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9780692316900

Book preview

yours.

Introduction and Instructions

The pages you hold in your hand are not merely the latest and greatest, multi-step, pop psychology, self-help book. The Five Choices are much more basic and fundamental than that. The Five Choices represent the fundamental differences, in mind set and in action, between people who are sad, frustrated, struggling and impoverished and people who are happy, productive, creative and affluent. There are beliefs and behaviors that lead to success and beliefs and behaviors that lead to failure. The Five Choices distills these beliefs and behaviors into five fundamental decisions.

This program does not invent these Five Choices. This book merely defines and illustrates these choices in a uniquely concise way. Through the Five Choices, this program does what all good teachers do; it helps the seemingly complex become understandable. The truth is that everyone already makes each of these choices every day. These choices are a simple definition of human decision making. For good or for ill, in one way or the other, you already make each of the five choices we are about to discuss. For better or worse, your quality of life is already a function of how you make these five choices.

The challenge faced by many people is that they give very little critical thought to their actions. They simply react – based in part on immediate circumstances and in part on their personal history. Many people choose by default. They just do what they have always done.

People seem to give even less thought to how and what they think. Very few people ever evaluate the way in which they process information or make decisions – considering whether or not it produces the results they desire. People are who they are, they do what they do, the world happens around them – creating circumstances that are good or they are not. People tend to give very little thought to the fact that they just might be able to influence their world in a much more significant way than they currently do.

Even many of the people who make the effective decision within each of the five choices do so randomly. They were taught, or were exposed to, or they simply came to adopt an effective way of thinking and an effective set of behaviors. They use these behaviors and this mind set to achieve positive results. Typically however, even the most successful among us could not clearly explain to others why their approach works and why other approaches are less effective.

Other people were taught or were exposed to or they simply came to adopt a counterproductive set of behaviors. They become largely unsuccessful and unproductive and they too could probably not explain why. Often, the least successful among us fall into a pattern of blaming others, blaming the government, the economy, the weather, the traffic or blaming fate. It really doesn't occur to them that they are the author of their circumstances.

In truth, we are all the author of our circumstances. Our own personal choices are by far the most powerful influence on us. If you would change your circumstances, the way to do that is obvious – make different choices. The key, is to understand the choices you currently make, understand the alternate choices you might make and then make and execute the choice that produces the best possible results. The key is to choose intentionally – and not by default.

There are countless choices that people make throughout their life. It has been estimated that humans make an average of 2400 choices every day of varying degrees of importance. The Five Choices are the foundational basis for all the other choices we make. As such, the Five Choices are a lever for personal change. When we come to understand the five choices and make the decision to make one (or perhaps all) of those five choices in a different way, we can change the entire direction of our lives, for the better.

The Program:

The back bone of this program is the Five Simple Choices themselves. Every section begins with one of the Five Choices – expressed as a simple binary alternative. People either think and act one way or the other within each of these choices. People who choose the second alternative within each of the Five Choices tend to have far more positive influence over their life, their circumstances and the world around them. If you come to understand each of the five choices and genuinely commit to take the second alternative within each choice – you will have gained at least half of the value of this program.

Each section contains clear explanations and examples of why one alternative is more powerful and productive than the other. Each section contains clear and specific strategies for adopting the effective alternative within each choice. The program is extensively indexed so that the explanations, the strategies and the choices themselves can be referenced in the future, as you revisit these ideas.

Perhaps most importantly, this program is not merely a written lecture. This is going to be an extremely interactive experience. In fact, the most important contributing author to this program manual is going to be you. This workbook will introduce the ideas. We will work together to illustrate how these ideas apply to you individually. The program contains a number of exercises that will both help you examine how you currently make each choice and will help you create strategies for taking the most productive alternative from this point forward. Please complete the exercises as you come to them. They will be brief – but they are all very important. If you will commit to completing the exercises the first time you come to them – they will also provide you with a permanent record of the way in which you processed these five basic choices before you were exposed to this material.

As you move forward to gaining a greater command of your life, your circumstances and your happiness – you will be able to look back at the point from which you started and see how far you have come. As you complete it, this book will become something of diary, an insight into your mind set. When completed, it may become a very personal record. It may not be something you would share with others.

Additionally, at the end of every section you will be asked to briefly synthesize your understanding of the ideas covered in that section. You will be asked to communicate three ideas you have learned in very brief bullet points using your own words. Memorizing material is the most superficial type of learning. A machine can memorize. That which you memorize you can forget. If, however, you can communicate an idea concisely using your own words it demonstrates a much deeper understanding of the idea. The very act of restating an idea in your own words crystalizes that idea in your mind. So please, complete the synthesize activity at the end of each section. You will find it to be very valuable.

Finally, at the end of each section there will be a place for notes, comments, things to remember, things to research and things to do. Feel free to use those pages as you see fit.

So we commit to you the Five Simple Choices. You are about to gain a greater understanding of how the most effective and successful people influence themselves, and through that you will learn to have greater influence over the entire set of things that matters to you.

You have always known you can. That has never really been in question, has it? But today things change. Now you will.

The Five Simple