Owning Our Choices Can Change Our Organizations
Embracing our freedom from the inside out
In his latest book, On Freedom, historian Timothy Snyder says, “Our problem is not the world; our problem is us. And so, we can solve it. We can be free, if we see what freedom is.” Snyder’s statement may sound simple, but the work of making it happen is often anything but. For me, the sort of deeply felt, inside-out freedom that Snyder is writing about took me the first 30 years of my life to figure out.
The subtitle of Peter Koestenbaum’s 2003 book The Philosophic Consultant reads: “Revolutionizing Organizations with Ideas.” What follows is about one of those ideas. It’s one way to access the sort of meaningful, grounded freedom that Timothy Snyder is writing about.
The idea I have in mind, best I can tell, is rarely taught in business schools. It is, nevertheless, incredibly important: all day, every day—counter to what most of us have been taught by our culture—we have the ability to make our own decisions. To embrace that, while yes, there are always outside pressures—fear of failure, concern over how our families might react, the weight of cultural norms we feel compelled to follow—at the end of the day, the decision to act or not is ours. Speaking for myself, I know it can be hard to remember. But the truth remains: the only one making my decisions … is me.
While the sort of shift that comes from all this inner work is quiet, it is far more significant than many people might imagine. I believe it’s a great example of what Catholic anarchist Ammon Hennacy said back in 1970:
We really can’t change the world. We really can’t change other people! The best we can do is to start a few thinking here and there. The best way to do this, if we are sincere, is to change ourselves! … [T]he only revolution worthwhile, is the one-man revolution within the heart. Each one could make this by himself and not need to wait on a majority.
Effectively owning our decisions is one of the best ways I know to begin to make the one-person revolution a reality. When I first took on this challenge in my early 30s, I was already considered “successful” by conventional social standards. Yet it was still a revolution in the sense Hennacy described—one that required no one else to change but me. The hard part was all on the inside.
In fact, the power of choice is on the list of 12 additional Natural Laws of Business (and life):
#23. Work powered by free choice is far more powerful.
If we want a thriving organization—if we want to live a genuinely rewarding life—we need to come clean with ourselves and take ownership of the many choices we make every day. Do we feel pressure to decide a certain way? Of course. Do we have to? My belief is clear: No. We don’t.
To be certain, I do understand that those who have less, have more pressure, fewer clear options, and potentially bigger consequences to the decisions they make. The point of this piece, though, is not about the breadth and depth of options that are available. Instead, it’s about the attitude, the energy, and the mindset that goes with making a decision of any sort. Even under pressure, even when there are no great options on the table, we are the ones making our decisions. As Edith Eva Eger—psychologist, Holocaust survivor, speaker, and author of The Choice—writes,
We cannot choose to have a life free of hurt. But we can choose to be free, to escape the past, no matter what befalls us, and to embrace the possible. I invite you to make the choice to be free.
You may be asking: Isn’t “free choice” already the everyday norm? After all, aren’t Americans already “free”? In theory, yes. But in practice, most of us—including me, for the first half of my life—have been trained to act as if we have no choice. We have to go to work. We have to go home. We can’t take the day off. We can’t say anything. We should go to this event. I’m not pointing fingers with any of those—I’ve said all of them many times myself. They are not, I learned the hard way, helpful in the least. While all of these pressures to conform and fit in are real—I’ve certainly felt them—the reality is that we still get to make the decision.
Understanding this reality and actually acting on it are not the same thing. Even after I realized it was an issue for me, it still took two or three years of hard inner work before I stopped behaving as if someone else was making me go to work, sit through meetings, make difficult calls, get up early, or stay up late. Gradually, though, I managed to successfully “change my mind.” Over time, I began to internalize and act on the truth that—whatever it was I was doing or not doing—I was the one deciding. Yes, there were always consequences for the choices I made, but the decision itself was still mine.
That shift—owning my decisions—changed my life.
I wrote a good bit about all this in Secret #32 in the book Managing Ourselves. I was reminded of it all, though, unexpectedly, the other afternoon. Author Paul Auster says, “Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them.” Here’s one that recently happened to me.
I was in a meeting with Ji Hye Kim, the widely acclaimed chef and managing partner of Miss Kim (and the newly opened vegetarian Little Kim right across the walkway). In a conversation where others began talking about how they had no choice in the situation at hand, Ji Hye responded with a strongly felt statement that spontaneously reaffirmed for me just how much personal power comes from owning one’s choices:
Owning a business is stressful. It’s every minute, everywhere with me. You don’t get to clock out. But that’s also the joy of it. Everywhere I go, everything I eat, everything I do, I see inspiration for my business.
You can see that as stress, or you can choose to see it as joy.
There are days that I don’t want to do it. But every day I make a choice to come in, step up, and do my best. There is power in making that conscious choice every day. I made a choice to open a business. And there is responsibility to that choice, and everything ends with me.
Ji Hye’s comments, shared with so much grounded passion, reminded me that learning to own our decisions isn’t just work that benefits us as individuals. Her heartfelt words made clear, once again, that it is also hugely powerful on an organizational level. When most of an organization owns its decisions—when people understand that, while there is always pressure, they themselves are, as Ji Hye says, making conscious choices—the energy of the entire business shifts for the better. As Peter Koestenbaum writes, it’s an idea that can “revolutionize an organization.”
The consequences of not making this shift are significant. Peter Koestenbaum gets right to the point. If we don’t own our decisions, he declares, “You are not really a leader.” He continues,
The fulcrum of leadership is freedom. Leadership begins with your unshakeable conviction—and feeling—that you are in charge of your life, that you are responsible for your actions, that you are accountable for the consequences of your deeds, intended or not. This shows in how you walk, talk, stand up to stress. … As you live you also choose. … The world responds to you. … This is how it feels to be free. That is the experience of freedom. It is exactly the same as the experience of responsibility. And accountability is simply the public version of it.
It’s hard to convey how much my life shifted when I began to regularly own my decisions in this way. My internal energy increased significantly, and I’m pretty sure my vibrational energy improved in the process as well. To Timothy Snyder’s point, I started to really feel free. Peter Koestenbaum illustrates this:
Talk like this, think like this, feel like this, have this attitude, exhibit this behavior, teach this, connect this with our business, be like this with your customers and you will be empowered—the world around you will welcome your impact! This is the power of freedom.
Are you struggling to make a decision that you can own outright? I’ve been there. Often it comes when we are unclear on our vision, mission, values, or beliefs, i.e., our philosophy. Other times, it’s a sign that we aren’t in touch with our inner voice—Peter Koestenbaum says that “the indecision is really waiting for the unconscious to speak.” When that happens to me, there are a number of ways that I know to get at it and make decisions that I’m able to more effectively own in grounded ways:
- Draft a vision.
- Do the “This I Believe” exercise that I laid out at the end of Secret #40 in The Power of Beliefs in Business: Start with the phrase “This I believe …” and write continuously for 10–15 minutes without overthinking, allowing thoughts to flow freely. It’s an effective technique for encouraging self-awareness and can reveal underlying beliefs that influence our decisions and behaviors.
- Talk to caring folks you can count on to share a good perspective, the kind of people that, in The Artist’s Way, author Julia Cameron calls “believing mirrors”: those who reflect back to you the best of what you’re capable of, affirming your potential while helping you see clearly.
- Reflect in ways that work for you—as I wrote about the pamphlet “Working Through Hard Times,” my morning journaling is a huge help.
- Tune into your intuition—or, as some people like to say, listen to what’s in your heart.
Like making cappuccino at the Coffee Company or rolling dough at the Bakehouse, learning to own our decisions is something that can be taught and learned. Many well-meaning people never even realize that they’re acting as if someone else is making their decisions for them. In fact, most people we hire probably have little awareness of the issue when they enter the organization. I certainly didn’t. Even at 30, five years into owning a business that was growing quite steadily and successfully, my conversations were peppered with those problematic phrases that I referenced above: “I have to.” “I should.” “I can’t.” We’ve been teaching the idea of free choice and the import of eliminating those phrases from our language regularly—in our internal two-hour Managing Ourselves class, in the two-day ZingTrain Managing Ourselves seminar, and in custom sessions like the one I recently led in Boston, where I taught Managing Ourselves to about 60 people. Boston-based restaurant consultant Sara Fetbroth—recently featured in a full-page Boston Globe article—says that learning to change her language and own her decisions were, by far, her biggest and most beneficial takeaways from ZingTrain’s teaching.
It is through this kind of training, and also through quiet cultural transmission, that we have created an organization in which owning one’s decisions is more the norm than not. It definitely makes a big difference. And it is, I’ve come to believe, one of the lasting benefits that anyone open to the learning that happens here will carry with them, whatever they do, for the rest of their lives. Without it, we lose out on much of what’s possible for us going forward. As 19th-century English anarchist Edward Carpenter—sometimes called “the English Tolstoy”—wrote so powerfully in his late 19th-century essay The Art of Life: “To pass through one’s mortal days … like a slave under continual compulsion from others, is not to live; it is only to exist.”
In an organizational context, it might be easy to dismiss the idea of truly owning our choices as too abstract or intangible to matter. But in my experience, it’s one of the most foundational shifts a person—or a business—can make. While it may seem small or subtle to an outside observer, its impact is profound. Peter Koestenbaum captures the power of this idea directly:
What has this got to do with business? Responsibility starts when we understand the consequences of making a free decision. When bringing free will to business, it translates into responsibility and accountability and therefore the three key ensuing themes are
- Increasing personal responsibility
- Holding people accountable, and
- Making it clear to people that there are consequences.
This is how discipline and dignity are introduced into business environments.
We do not create this discipline and dignity through force, but through the everyday exercise of free choice. In the model Peter Koestenbaum is putting forward—the framework in which I’ve tried to teach myself to function over the years—we freely opt into responsibility and accountability.
This way of working is, I’ll point out, the opposite of the typical authoritarian approach, as detailed by McCarthy-era attorney Roy Cohn. Part of the 1950s campaign to spread fear about communists around every corner, Cohn’s approach has been adapted by any number of authoritarian leaders today. While it may help people hold onto power in the short term, it cannot create positive outcomes in the long run. Rather than own their decisions—both internally and in terms of taking responsibility to the world around them—students of Cohn’s approach stick diligently to his advice to: “Never apologize or admit wrongdoing, ever,” and, “Always counter-attack, and always with greater force than you received.” You can see those two tactics in action in authoritarian settings—in families, companies, and countries—all over the world. If I’m not careful, I can slip into them as well. Clearly, though, they are not the way we want to work here.
Living Peter Koestenbaum’s principles about owning our decisions as he details, then, we would actually do just the opposite of Cohn’s approach. Rather than deflect, deny, and attack strategy, owning our decisions would mean:
- We acknowledge what went wrong and, when appropriate, offer a sincere apology.
- We get curious—working to understand more deeply and seeking common ground that helps everyone move forward together.
The benefit, in my experience, is enormous: improved self-image, increased energy, lower stress, less worrying, greater effectiveness, and better relationships. Doing that well can be uncomfortable, but it is infinitely more effective. Koestenbaum says,
The upside of freedom is that it makes you into a you. It is the very essence of what makes you real.… In your leadership story it is dwelling in your freedom and adorned with anxiety that makes you real.
…
Being in charge of who we are is the essence of being human. … To feel this, to live this, to experience its weight, and to communicate it readily—those are the inner sensations of the authentic leader
Cohn’s confrontational approach, by contrast, creates a kind of bullying inauthenticity. Leaders who adopt it aim to dominate, but the ecosystem around them can never thrive with the widespread health and vitality we aspire to—unless they begin to own their decisions rather than place blame. As Peter Koestenbaum says, “I have never met a successful executive who was not also totally sold on the idea of freedom, freedom inside and freedom to be used on the outside.” When it comes right down to it, he reminds us, “The responsibility is mine. The initiative is mine.”
I know that there are those, including big thinkers and scientists, who believe we do not, in fact, have free choice. I’m not here to argue. I have been working with the belief that I have free choice, and I have no question that it has improved the quality of my life significantly. I can smile now and go with what Peter Koestenbaum says:
The very heart of courage, the philosophical core, is our human freedom … It is your most precious possession. Freedom is the fact inside your heart. It gives you the benefit of being responsible for your own existence and accountable for your life. Free will cannot be explained scientifically—only philosophically, poetically, religiously or mythologically. Claiming your freedom is the ultimate secret for mastering your life. To discover your freedom inside your heart is an exuberant experience of both exhilaration and hope, and that freedom can never be extinguished.
If you’re looking for a more succinct—and smile-inducing—expression of the same idea, here’s one from Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer: “We have to believe in free will. We have no choice.”
All of this work around free choice is, of course, at the core of anarchist thinking. Anarchist author Harold E. French Jr. says, “Anyone can tell you how to live your life, but only you can live your life. … The act of choosing … is extremely important.” Martha Ackelsberg, historian and author of Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women, writes,
People learn how to be free only by exercising freedom: … Without the continued exercise of their faculties, there will be no free people … The external revolution and the internal revolution presuppose one another, and they must be simultaneous in order to be successful.
To be clear, this idea of free choice isn’t about reacting rebelliously or rejecting those around us just to prove a point. Rather, it’s about honoring the ecosystems we’re part of, thoughtfully weighing the issues, and arriving—as best we can—at decisions that are right for us while taking others’ needs seriously into account. That kind of care and consideration is central to anarchist thinking. As Ackelsberg explains,
Spanish anarchists were firmly rooted in the communalist-anarchist tradition. For them, freedom was fundamentally a social product: the fullest expression of individuality and of creativity can be achieved only in and through community. … I don’t exist without your existence, but my existence is also indispensable to yours.
This tension—trying to figure out what’s best for us while also honoring what’s right for those around us—is always present. We decide all day, in small and large ways, whether we will take the easier route by just going along, or when and if we will hold to our values and do what feels right to us—even if no one else agrees.
How does one put all that into practice? A lot of it for me came simply from changing my language. Over time, I successfully shifted out of all the old language I was so accustomed to into a more empowered way of speaking.
Rather than “I have to,” I started saying more affirmatively, “I’m going to.”
Rather than “I should,” which implies someone else is “making me,” I moved into “I choose to,” or “I will.”
Instead of “I can’t,” I began to say, “I’m not going to.”
These simple wording shifts, as I said, can seem small, but it’s attention to small details like this that often makes the biggest difference. As the Greek writer Constantine Cavafy, in his poem “Of Colored Glass,” writes, “I am much moved by a detail.” In fact, this focus on seemingly small details, like owning our decisions—as well as the work to train people in the organization to implement it—is very much what Carol Sanford is working to convey in her book Indirect Work. It’s work that most organizations ignore because it won’t immediately yield obvious results. But in the long run, it is exactly the sort of work that can open the organizational door to excellence. Of indirect work of this sort, Sanford writes,
It is about change inside each of us, in the ways we perceive and understand the world and our roles and responsibilities within it. … indirect work is inner work, and the most profound inner work that we can do is to transform our theory of knowledge.
Sanford writes about her mentor, Charlie Krone, teaching her to develop her mind and then to see a world that others don’t. That’s exactly what this is an example of.
This work around owning our decisions, I believe, becomes all the more important when democratic freedoms are at risk. We do not need to simply go with the flow. Peter Koestenbaum conveys the message:
Some people are more talented than others. Some are more educationally privileged than others. But we all have the capacity to be great. Greatness comes with recognizing that your potential is limited only by how you choose, how you use your freedom, how resolute you are, in short, by your attitude. And we are all free to choose our attitude.
…
Courage begins with the decision to face the ultimate truth about existence: the dirty little secret that we are free. It requires an understanding of free will at the archetypal level—an understanding that we are free to define who we are at every moment. We are not what society and randomness have made us; we are what we have chosen to be from the depth of our being. We are product of our will. We are self-made in the deepest sense.
…
People who achieve access to the deepest roots of their freedom can completely change.
Part of owning our decisions in this way is learning to say “no” to things that aren’t aligned with our values, to hold true to our vision, mission, and principles even in the face of adversity or the all-too-common pressure to conform. When we find the courage to turn away from paths that might be profitable but are untrue, we begin to feel at peace within ourselves. Sometimes it’s the awkward act of choosing what aligns with our values rather than what the mainstream says we should do—in other words, saying “no” to what others quietly go along with.
In an era of rising authoritarian activity, getting clear on where I will say “no” has been much on my mind. I met a man the other morning named Noel. He shared a bit of his story—one that’s, sadly, not all that unusual. While the finance world isn’t always like this, all too often, people’s work experiences echo what he told me:
I worked in finance, in one of those businesses that buys and sells businesses. I was good at it, but I hated it. It kills your soul. They don’t care about people. Just the profits. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I quit.
When we actively own our decisions, I believe we begin to feel at home, both in ourselves and in the world. As writer and translator Ilan Stavans (see last week’s piece) suggests,
Home is also where we resist, where we become ourselves, the way Native Americans, brushed aside by the European colonizers, maneuvered to survive by speaking their name to the wind from one generation to the next.
I particularly enjoy teaching the classics. I love the fact that as an immigrant, I get to introduce Americans (most of my students have been born in the United States) to the literary tradition that defines them. I approach these books as an outsider who has entered the banquet. I do so by choice.
Like Edith Eva Eger, Ji Hye Kim, Peter Koestenbaum, and all the other inspiring folks I’ve cited here, I choose choice. My decisions won’t always work out as I hope, but whether it’s attending a meeting, handling a hard dilemma, or responding to the rise of autocracy in our midst, the decisions remain mine to make. As Peter Koestenbaum writes,
Freedom is a reality within your heart. Know it, acknowledge it, claim it, use it.
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