id="ulink_7e9bd68f-4bd7-57cf-ade8-74a782982268">YOUR CHOICES DETERMINE YOUR LIFE
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.” “Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”
– Jean‐Paul Sartre
A few years ago, we asked our 12 Week Year community to share with us their personal experiences with our execution system, and while many of the stories were moving, one especially stood out for us. It was the story of how Barbara Shorerock, a retired real estate agent from Alberta, Canada, decided to take ownership of the toughest challenge in her life. What follows is her story in her own words.
At the beginning of 2017, a friend told me about The 12 Week Year, and I borrowed the book from the library, and read it. After 22 years of running a real estate business, and 10 years of running my own company before that, The 12 Week Year made sense to me. I was used to structure in my life, and planning, and achieving.
But now I was retired. I was looking ahead at the next five years without a need to make sales or to accomplish things financially. That part of my life was set. I couldn't change it now. Now the question before me was, how was I going to operate going forward?
I read The 12 Week Year with that in mind. With aspirations for personal things – fitness and health, family, friends, and community – I thought, “I can make that happen.” My first 12 weeks were going to be really exciting!
That feeling changed quickly. By the end of February, I learned that I had cancer. By the end of March, at the end of the first 12 weeks, I knew that it was metastatic breast cancer, having already spread to lung and liver, and it was serious.
After the initial shock wore off, I realized that I still had choice about how I would fight my battle and live out the rest of my life, not knowing if that would be a few months, or if I'm fortunate, a number of years.
My new life was all about chemotherapy. Every week, it was up to the chemo clinic, get my chemo injections. Before I even had a chance to implement my “be a better friend” program, I had to call upon my friends and my daughter to drive me around every week. To feed me. To care for me.
After chemo, my choice was to get stronger.
I started up some of the things that I had left behind, such as volunteering for English as a Second Language, volunteering at the theater. I also started walking again, with a goal that by the end of the year I would be able to walk for 60 minutes. My first walk after all the antibiotics was to the end of the block and back.
Other things, like spending time with family, being a better friend, started up again.
It really helped with my life to think about what was in front of me, the choices I still had available to me to do the things that are important to me. The choice to not give into fear of loss, or a lack of time. I can't now, with my new reality, think about a year. But I can think about 12 weeks. I have that choice.
There were two questions that motivated me: “What if?” and “How might I?” Because I was looking forward. I looked at my one‐year vision and then put into effect what I can do in the next 12 weeks. That's easy.
It gives my days focus. When I open my day planner and look at a week at a glance and see what's there, I look at where the blank spaces are. There have been times in the last year where there were no blank spaces. Now, I actually have whole days where I can decide what to do with them. I have my goals, and I look at how I fit those in. It gives my days structure, and it gives me focus and purpose.
In spite of the discouraging diagnosis, Barbara never lost sight of the fact that she still had a choice about how to live her life. A little more than a year ago, Barbara's daughter contacted us to let us know that she had passed. When, like Barbara, we look at the choices that are available to us rather than the choices that are not, we retain the freedom to live a life of intentional purpose and fulfillment.
Coming at life from “choose to” rather than “have to” gives you the only control that you have in life. The quality of your choices determines the quality of your life. As Barbara bravely testifies, we are free to choose in all circumstances.
When my youngest (Emma) was 7 or 8, my wife, Judy, and I began confronting her with her freedom to choose for herself, and to consider the consequences of her choices. Early on, we would have to “coach” her through the process of identifying the consequences.
When Emma would ask to do something that we felt was not likely to turn out well, we would ask her, “Emma, if you do that, what do you think will happen?” This question was intended to help her learn to connect her choices with their likely consequences (natural or applied). Next, we would ask her, “Is there anything else you could do?” And then lastly, “What do you think will happen if you make that choice instead?”
In the end, even at 7, most of the time Emma would make the productive choice. Learning to make choices by weighing the short- and longer‐term consequences at a young age is a life skill that can change everything.
Regardless of how you've experienced it, accountability is not consequences, it's ownership. At the heart of accountability is free‐will choice. You always, always, always have choice. That doesn't mean you will always like the choices available to you, but you have choice.
Our definition of accountability as ownership first appeared in our book The 12 Week Year, and was perhaps an even more disruptive insight than our view that your year should be only 12 weeks long. Our insight, which has changed the lives of so many of our readers and clients, was that the power of true accountability lies entirely in our freedom of choice.
There have been others before us who have talked about accountability as choice and have hinted at this notion of accountability as ownership. Peter Koestenbaum and Peter Block, in their profound book Freedom and Accountability at Work: Applying Philosophic Insight to the Real World, establish the conflict between management and the individuals they lead when it comes to who is the author of accountability.
For us, what makes our take unique is that the insights that we have had regarding personal accountability have arisen directly out of the crucible of working with others so that they can tap into their capabilities in life. In helping our clients, we have found some basic tools and approaches that cut through the fog of what you control and what you don't control, creating immense freedom along the way.
Relationships have been saved. Businesses have been transformed. Careers have been resurrected, and the world has been changed by the working model of accountability that we have built in partnership with our clients. In short, accountability is a much more powerful tool than most people realize.
In the course of our work, we have fleshed out a working model of accountability that allows our clients to take ownership of their thinking and actions in such a way that they can accomplish things that they had stopped trying to do – believing that they were just not good enough, diligent enough, or worthy enough to accomplish before. We have helped people to see their degrees of freedom and then to act on them.
In spite of the common notions about accountability, when we ran a promotion for voluntary accountability groups recently, we had the program fill up faster than any other promotion before or since. It seems that many people instinctively know that there is life‐changing power in becoming more accountable, regardless of the negative connotations of the word. Accountability isn't an outside‐in process where others force you to be accountable – it is an inside
