IRISH MUSINGS #4

I’ve made many dumb decisions in my life, and the only silver lining is that I've learned a great deal from my mistakes. One of the dumber things I do is enable Grammarly's auto-check function on everything I write, everywhere. It just wants to refine my language and make me sound more polished. It’s a lot like my mother-in-law as far as that goes. She spent 30 years as a teacher, and her eldest daughter brought home an Irish barbarian from Europe. It has been twenty years, and she still corrects how I say things. “The children are listening, Robert.” But I digress… or did I? The big idea in this post is about decision-making…. So Grammarly and my mother-in-law are both in my life correcting me because I decided that’s a good idea. Who knows where I’d be without my auto correctors? Hope this makes some sense… I am writing from my gut, and not taking the time to rewrite or edit these little vignettes.

SESSION THREE — THE ROPE

Accurate Decisions

The Third Golden Rule:

"In my experience, after a terrible decision, most people autopsy the decision-making process, rather than the decision-making environment."― Robert (Sherpa) Millar

PRINCIPLE — NAMING MY ENVIRONMENT

Session three finds two words that best describe the two most common subconscious environmental needs you activate when you have to make a decision using your fast-thinking subconscious leadership sequence.

 In one-on-one sessions, when the coach speaks, they are not just conveying information—they are activating a neurophysiological response. The video in Principles will activate that response; now, you need to reflect on how that response uniquely shows up in you.

Instances of instinctive leadership happen within a logical sequence. You set the goal, you assess the potential resources available to you, and then you make a decision based on the short list of choices produced by the assessment.

Like all instinctive leaders, you have your own unique list of things you need to be an Olympian decision-maker. Now, we need to identify two of those environmental conditions, choose two words that best describe them, validate them with lived experience, and then add them as the third of five snapshots of you as an instinctive leader.

"Every decision you make reflects your evaluation of who you are."

- Marianne Williamson

One of the oddities of living in a high-risk environment for too long is that it often creates a skewed perception of risk. I was no exception. I have always loved to climb things, and after I got sober, I found myself in the mountains and sea cliffs of Ireland, where we did free soloing, not because we were advanced rock climbers, but because we had never seen climbing gear. From Ireland, I graduated to the Alps. Climbing and hiking in the mountains should be done with care, the right equipment, and proper planning. We decided to hike and climb without any of these safety elements. Once with another Irishman, I found myself lost in the Swiss Alps. We had climbed for several hours in dense clouds and rough terrain, losing the path to the summit we were aiming for that day. After another hour of fruitless hiking, we were starting to get worried. Visibility was atrocious; climbing through clouds for that long had saturated even the Gore-Tex. Just as we were beginning to wonder how to extricate ourselves, the sun broke through, and out of the mist came this ancient farmer with a sheepdog. Between my limited German and his limited English, he helped reset our path, and eventually we made it to the summit and back to base camp with only sore feet and exhaustion.  The bizarre thing was that he was so high in the mountains, and then, when we said goodbye and started on the route he had pointed out, the strangeness increased. We had only taken a dozen steps, looked back to shout thanks, and he and the dog were gone! It was surreal, visibility was still good, we could see for miles, but they were gone! To this day, it remains one of the strangest things that has happened to me. Did an angel show up and help us? Was it an optical illusion or a dip in the terrain? Who knows, but I like to think that my ancestors sent a shepherd to rectify what could have been a terminally bad decision. Why the trip down memory lane to my wild younger years? It is all about the reason I was making one dumb decision after another. You see, without realizing it, I had developed a subconscious category for what environmental conditions I needed to make good decisions. Like my Biases, what those two conditions are isn’t relevant, so moving on. I obviously ran out of rope in the climbing metaphor. I made one bad decision after another due to the environment, as much as it was the trauma-induced risk-taking tendencies.

As you were developing a way to build this third level of the tower of wooden blocks, you stumbled upon a winning solution, which was affirmed by your Authority, who was helping you learn to lead. So, then you coded the things you noticed when you made those significant decisions. Hey presto! You created a subconscious category that ‘knows’ exactly what you need to make good decisions. The problem is that knowledge then became coded, and your subconscious couldn’t make good decisions without those conditions.

In the next post, we'll explore the fourth link in what we call our instinctive Leadership Kill Chain—how you instinctively act.

— Robert (Sherpa) Millar