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Decide Audio

Hello VIPs and welcome to this month’s VIP video lesson. The topic this month is very important, it’s a leadership topic. The topic is decisiveness, or to put it more simply, action.

I want to start with a short paragraph from Tom Peters, his book called Leadership. I really like Tom Peters, I think he’s a great business writer, but he talks a lot about leadership in general.

This is not just about business it’s about any kind of leadership in your family, in your job; in any situation. I just want to read this then I’m going to talk about it.

Leaders do, they do. If you don’t know what the hell is going on, if you don’t know what’s happening, then don’t just stand there do something.

It’s a common phrase, don’t just stand there, do something.

If you don’t know what’s happening stop thinking, because it won’t do too much good.

Try something. Try anything. See what happens.

That’s simple, it’s just a short quote from Tom Peters, but it really captures I feel the essence, the core of leadership. Here’s the secret; see a lot of us have this idea that the person who is the leader knows everything, they know everything that’s going on and they make all the best decisions.

This paralyzes people. To be paralyzed means you can’t move, you can’t move your body. We also use it in a general way. When we say someone is paralyzed, it means they can’t move or they can’t take action.

What happens is that a lot of people get paralyzed in their life. They get paralyzed because they are afraid of making mistakes. They take no action at all.

There’s some situation happening in your family, at your job, in your business, whatever, it doesn’t matter – playing a sport – any situation at all. Something happens and you don’t know what’s going on, maybe you’re a little confused, maybe you’re a little afraid, maybe it’s a new situation or an old situation that has been a big problem for you in the past.

You kind of get paralyzed. You freeze, oh my God I don’t know what to do, and you start thinking and thinking and thinking, and thinking and thinking and thinking. In business especially you’ll get together with your partners or your team or your boss, and everybody starts talking about the problem – talking, talking, talking, thinking, thinking and thinking.

Everybody is always worried. Someone will say – why don’t we do this? Someone else will say no, but if we do that maybe it will be a mistake, maybe it will cause a bigger problem. Another person will suggest a different action, why don’t we do this? Someone else will say no, if we do that then that problem could also happen and maybe this will happen.

Everybody is debating and arguing and worrying and thinking. That’s not leadership.

The simplest way to be a leader is to make a decision and do something, because most people don’t. They might do little things, but most people are waiting around for someone to either tell them what to do or for someone to do something so they can then follow them or see what happens.

Most people are so afraid of making a mistake, they’re afraid of doing the wrong thing, and so they don’t do anything at all. They take little super safe actions instead of trying something big.

Tom Peters is right; when you’re confused a lot of times we just want to stop. That’s okay for a short time, its okay to stop and try to learn and try to figure out what’s happening. That’s normal, but you can’t do it too long.

Sometimes you might learn more information and have more information to make a better decision, and that’s great. Sometimes it’s too confusing or too new, and you really don’t know what to do.

You’ve tried to learn, you’ve tried to figure it out, and you’re still not sure. At that point you’ve just got to take an action, just do something. Decide, make a decision.

Tim Ferriss talks about this too. Tim Ferriss wrote the book The Four Hour Work Week.

He’s also a successful business person, a successful leader, and a successful writer.

He talks about two types of mistakes. I wrote about this on my personal blog, HoboPoet.com. I wrote a little article about this but I want to talk about it more to you, my special VIPs.

Tim Ferriss talks about two types of mistakes; there are mistakes of action, and there are mistakes of inaction, or he calls them mistakes of sloth, mistakes of doing nothing.

What Tim Ferriss says is mistakes of sloth, mistakes of doing nothing, mistakes of inaction; they’re the worst ones, they’re the terrible ones. That’s what destroys your life, or your business, or your health, or whatever.

Mistakes of action, you do something and oh no, something bad happens, those you want to have. Those mistakes are fine. When you take an action and then something happens that you didn’t want to happen that’s okay, you learn and then you continue.

Mistakes of inaction, the mistake of not doing something when something needs to be done, that is horrible.

He gives the example, if you’re in a relationship and it’s not a very good relationship, not healthy or not happy, the other person isn’t happy, you can just sit and sit in that relationship for months, and then even years doing nothing, making no decision, doing nothing, taking no action.

That’s how relationships or even marriages can become just horrible, where the people almost hate each other. Finally when they get divorced many years later, or not, they really truly don’t like each other. They hate each other. They can’t talk to each other.

This happened with my own parents. My own parents can’t talk to each other now. They got divorced when I was 22 years old, I was already an adult. It was fine, it didn’t traumatize me, it didn’t really affect me emotionally strongly – I was sad – but with them, they waited too long.

They waited until they were so unhappy, and they didn’t communicate and they didn’t make good decisions, so now they can’t even talk to each other. It’s a terrible situation, it’s really bad. I’ve seen it in other relationships too.

It happens in business too. Something is not going right, something isn’t good, but people will just ignore the problem. No one wants to make a decision and maybe make a mistake and make it worse, and so people don’t do anything.

The business just gets worse and worse and this problem just starts growing and growing. It can really cause huge problems in a business.

Any organization is the same. What I’m saying is that if you want to be a leader you don’t need to know all the facts, you don’t need to be a big super expert. If you want to be a leader, different than most people, all you need to do is be decisive. Decisiveness is the number one trait of true leaders.

True leaders make decisions, even when they don’t have all the facts – especially when they don’t have all the facts. Anyone can make a decision when it’s super clear – if I do this I die, if I do this everything is great – that’s an easy decision.

Most people have trouble when the decision is not so clear. Of course we know in life often the decisions are not so clear, we don’t have enough information, we don’t know what’s going to happen.

Here’s why decisiveness works better; because if you do nothing, the situation doesn’t change, it just stays the same. If you do nothing, you learn nothing. If you’re just doing the same thing again and again or avoiding a decision, or doing little small things that are safe, you’re not learning. Things can just get worse very slowly, sometimes very quickly.

When you make a decision, when you decide and do something, then something is going to change. Because you made the decision something will change. It might get better, it might get worse; we don’t know, but something will change.

When you make a decision, you do something and then something happens, you learn.

You’re in a business and you try a new marketing technique – well if the sales go up, you learn something. You learn hey, this marketing technique is good. If the sales drop you also learn something – hey this does not very well.

You can get in there and you can make another quick decision to solve that problem.

That’s the thing, when you’re decisive you’re not stuck. If you make a decision and the result is not good it’s okay, you just make a new decision and try to correct that. You just keep making decisions and getting results and learning, and this gets very fast and that’s how you grow.

This is what I did with Effortless English. When I started Effortless English I didn’t know anything about business. Of course I read books, but still I was thinking and there were so many decisions and I didn’t know what to do, so I just decided to do something. I decided, and some of my decisions were good and they worked and hey that’s great, I learned something and continued to do those things.

Some of the decisions I made were not successful. I also learned something from those, and I continued. I didn’t stop, I didn’t cry because I made a mistake, no; I just learned and made more decisions. I was very, very decisive. I took a lot of action.

I have another friend who started a business, I’m not going to say his name but he started a business, and he had another problem – he could not be decisive. Every time he needed to make a decision he would think about it and think about it, he’d call me and talk to me about it – should I do this?

I would give my advice I’d say I think you should try this. He’d say yes, but if I try that something bad might happen. Maybe it won’t work maybe I should do something else. I would say okay fine, do the other thing – just try it and see what happens. He would say oh, but if I try the other choice then something else bad could happen.

In this way he would just always be thinking if I do this, something bad will happen. If I do another thing something bad will happen. He could never make decisions. His business slowly died.

It’s such a simple point, but this is the thing; make decisions. We all get stuck, we all get afraid, we all worry – oh I don’t know what to do – if you don’t know what to do, just do something. Make a decision, be decisive.

Make mistakes, but make mistakes of action not of inaction. The mistakes of inaction are the ones that will destroy you and your life, because they prevent you from learning.

When you don’t take action, when you don’t make decisions, you don’t learn.

When you’re decisive, when you just do something, just jump in and do anything – then you learn. Something happens, you learn. You decide again. This like all other skills is something you need to practice, and you get better and better at it. Now I’m very good at making decisions.

In the beginning I worried more. It’s the same when I was a teacher. In the beginning I didn’t know what I was doing, but I just tried stuff. I just got a textbook and started teaching with it. Then I realized oh, this textbook is terrible it doesn’t work, so I started reading and found another technique, and I just tried it.

Sometimes my technique was successful and my students loved it, and they learned, and everything was great. Sometimes it was terrible. Some of the techniques I tried in the past were horrible, my students hated them, they were bored, and I had a very uncomfortable class because I was trying something new and the students didn’t like it and it was a terrible class.

That’s okay, I learned by doing that. Remember going outside our comfort zone. The reason people avoid making decisions usually is because they want to be comfortable still. They want everything to stay comfortable so they don’t make big decisions.

Sometimes they don’t make small decisions.

All I want you to think about in terms of leadership this month is decide. Do something.

Think of some decisions you have been avoiding. We all have them. What are things in your life, your family life, your work life, in Effortless English, learning, studying – anything – think about it, what decisions have you avoided? What problem are you avoiding because you don’t know what to do?

I want you to think about that problem and just choose an action and do it. Make it a bold action, a strong action, do something bold, do something strong. If it’s a big disaster and mistake, oh well, you learned something. Make a new decision and solve that new mistake too.

Believe me, usually, you’ll make a good decision. In fact, usually just doing something will solve most problems. Everyone else is sitting around saying I don’t know what to do, you make a decision and you do something and it makes you different.

When you make decisions people respect you. This is why it’s important, in being a leader. This is how it makes you a leader. Since most people hesitate to make decisions, if you are decisive and you are consistently decisive, you make decisions and you do it again, when a situation comes you learn what you can, you decide and you take action. It works or it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter.

When you do that, people will begin to look to you. They will begin to ask you your opinion. They will want you to make the decision because they’re afraid to make the decision. They will look to you and they will follow your decision.

This is how you become a leader. I have become a leader in business. I can’t believe it in fact. It seems so strange to me because I’m an English teacher and a Bohemian a little bit, I like to travel, and a little more like an artist, a poet, a teacher or a philosopher and not a business person, and yet I have become a business leader. I have people in my life now who look to me and ask advice; A.J. what should I do?

My own father now asks me for business advice. All my life he was the business man working at IBM and I was the crazy guy traveling around and doing all this artistic stuff and writing.

Now because I’ve been so decisive with my own business, now he’s trying to learn how to make a business and he’s asking me for advice. I became a leader in business not by being perfect, but just by making decisions again and again, being very decisive.

By being decisive I’ve learned so much. That’s how my business grew. Other people in my life saw me making these strong decisions and learning and growing and succeeding eventually, so now people come to me and they ask me advice about business.

In my own life, with my friends and family, I am a business leader. I never thought I would be that. I certainly have become a leader in terms of teaching. This is very general all over the world now; I get emails and constantly people contacting my assistant about wanting advice, wanting help, about teaching or wanting me to train them to be a better teacher, or wanting me to come to their school and train all their teachers.

I’ve become this big international leader of English teaching. How did I do that? Was I born perfect? Was I born this incredible teacher? No, when I started teaching I was terrible. I did the same thing that everybody else did, but I made decisions to try new things.

When something didn’t work I made a decision, I didn’t just keep doing the same thing. I wasn’t stuck or paralyzed with inaction. Oh I don’t know what to do, everybody is using the same textbook and it’s not working very well, but everybody is doing it so I’ll just continue doing the same thing too.

That’s what most teachers do, that’s what most people do. All I did differently was, decide. I decided I’m going to try different things. This old method is not working, so I’m going to try new things.

I tried something new and it was successful or not, and I learned something. I tried something else, then I made another decision, and I just kept making decisions. I’m going to try this, now I’m going to try this – this was good, this was bad – I was just deciding, lots of decisions, lots and lots of action, lots and lots of trying new things.

By doing that I became a leader internationally in the field of teaching English as a foreign language. You can do this too. I don’t care if your skill level is low, I don’t care what your situation is or what field you’re in, whether it’s business or personal it doesn’t matter.

If you just keep being decisive, keep taking actions and of course learning from them, but don’t stop if you make a mistake and something bad happens. You don’t stop you just decide again – okay that didn’t work, I learned something let’s keep trying. Just keep taking action – action, action, action, decisions, decisions, decisions – very quickly.

In less than a year you will become a leader in your field, at least to your family, friends, and co-workers. In a few years you could become an international leader in your field simply by being decisive.

That’s what I want you to think about this month. I’ll talk about it more in the audio commentary, but this month your job is to make decisions quickly. Make fast decisions and take action immediately.

All right, good luck. I know you’re going to be a great leader because I know to be a great leader it’s actually very simple. You just make decisions, take action, and learn.

You repeat that as fast as possible. That’s the big secret. Just do it. I’ll see you again.