The CHOOSE YOU approach to coaching and development is not about changing you but is about getting to know yourself and learning to love what you know because when that happens you are in control and have choices and can get on with choosing the you that you want to be.
I went to an evening with Toyah Wilcox a few weeks ago, a blend of conversation and music delivered acoustically, up close and personal with the help of two guitar players. She struck me as someone who very much lives her life through CHOOSE YOU. The audience of 80 or so were within touching distance of her and the intimacy of the setting was mirrored in the personal stories that she shared. With medical and physical setbacks early in life Toyah took the difference about her that they created and chose the path of rebel (great story about the alarm clocks under the stage when Margaret Thatcher came to visit her school!!), that led her in to a pink haired music career!!
We are all making choices every day. We have a choice about everything that we do, or at least how we respond to everything that happens to us. Toyah’s choice around her childhood disability was to be the rebel. She could just as easily have worked hard to minimise her difference and chosen to conform. Neither of these choices is right or wrong, but each will get a different outcome.
Most of the things we do are much more day to day and ordinary than choosing to become an 80s rock icon, and yet the reality is we are constantly choosing, but it can be hard to acknowledge that at times. Knowing that, whilst there will be consequences, we have a choice and that we are choosing our current situation can be a shock. It is a moment where we acknowledge there are options and, whilst we may not be ready to explore all of those, we can take responsibility for the one that we have choosen.
Toyah? She’s still choosing to do it her way.