Blog Talk About Career Ownership | Thinking Rich | Inner Experience

Mind Your Own Career: Your Guide to Right Working for Right Living can help you to explore important questions about how you, your work, your career and your life are integrated, and to understand, and even to change, the answers you find.

The guide lays a foundation with a basic philosophy and some practical tips for changing your answers to these questions, so your answers become more suitable for who you are, what you need and what you want – in your work, as well as in your larger life.

Managing The Impact Of Your Choices At Work

To make confident, timely and appropriate choices, learn to see options and to manage the impact of choices.

The Right Choices

Right choices hinge on your capacity to perceive and interpret possibilities in light of your capability for taking appropriate action to realize those possibilities.

You choose your work and your career every day. You choose your own direction, your own pace and your own destinations. You can make confident, timely and appropriate choices and you can manage the impact of your choices when you are fully engaged in the process.

You experience the movement from possibility to reality when you engage your attention to explore the possibilities, then engage your intention to explore the impacts, then engage your commitment to make your choice a reality and then, finally, engage your action to fulfill the experience.

Stop Making Decisions!

To decide means literally to “cut away”, so when you decide, you eliminate possibilities until only one remains. To choose means literally to “taste”, so when you choose, you explore one possibility while all others remain open to you.

Ask Yourself Four Simple Questions

The Four Questions Exercise can help you to explore possibilities and make choices in any situation:

• Focus on the situation and/or your intention
  
• Give your rational mind free reign
• Question 1: What are the facts?
  
• Face your fears
  
• Question 2: What is the worst that can happen?
  
• Let your intuition and fantasy play
  
• Question 3: What is the best that can happen?
  
• Deal with your emotions
  
• Question 4: How do you feel?

When answering the first question – What are the facts? – you are engaging your rational mind to perceive and interpret the situation. It is important to identify three kinds of facts:

1. Universal or objective facts are true for everyone and remain true whether or not anyone accepts them; you may deem a fact that is true for everyone involved in the situation at hand to be universally true.
   
   
2. Personal or subjective facts are true for you and may or may not be accepted by others involved in the situation; your personal facts may or may not be supported by evidence.
   
   
3. Situational or assumptive facts are true enough for the situation at hand; you may create your own situational facts and also accept them from others involved in the situation at hand.

When answering the second question – What is the worst that can happen? – you are identifying risks that the situation may not unfold as you intend. You can determine which risks may need your attention by assessing the probability that each risk may happen and the impact that the risk would have if it happens. Do what you can to lower the probability and/or the impact of risks according to the priority in the following table.

Manage risks to lower probability and impact
Low probability 5 High impact	Moderate probability 2 High impact	High Probability 1 High impact
Low probability 6 Moderate impact	Moderate probability 4 Moderate impact	High Probability 3 Moderate impact
Low probability 9 Low impact	Moderate probability 8 Low impact	High probability 7 Low impact

When answering the third question – What is the best that can happen? – you are identifying possible rewards that the situation promises. A good habit to adopt is to end the description of each reward with the phrase “or something better”. This practice fosters a state of mind where you are open to possibilities that you may not initially anticipate. You can determine which preferred rewards may need your attention by assessing the probability that each reward may happen and the impact that the reward would have if it happens. Do what you can to increase the probability and/or the impact of preferred rewards according to the priority in the following table.

Manage rewards to increase probability and impact
Low probability 5 High impact	Moderate probability 8 High impact	High Probability 9 High impact
Low probability 4 Moderate impact	Moderate probability 6 Moderate impact	High Probability 7 Moderate impact
Low probability 3 Low impact	Moderate probability 2 Low impact	High probability 1 Low impact

When answering the fourth and final question – How do you feel? – you are engaging your non-rational mind to perceive and interpret the situation. It is important to understand how your non-rational mind communicates with you. It may produce physical or emotional sensations in your body. It may spark images or phrases in your thoughts. Your feelings and thoughts at this point may be a validation or a condemnation of the facts and possibilities that you have articulated. Or, they may lead you to believe that there are alternative facts and possibilities to be explored.

Read more articles from Mind Your Own Career: Your Guide to Right Working for Right Living.