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Meanderings from Jean's Desk....
Blog Archive 
May 1, 2013: Seeing Those Around Us
May 1, 2013: Scarcity or Abundance: Choose
April 15, 2013: Being Where You Are!
April 1, 2013: Leadership Is Being Vulnerable
March 15, 2013: Leadership and Shedding Skin
Feb 17, 2013: Leadership Isn't Always Romantic
Dec 15, 2012: The Space Between The Notes
Nov 1, 2012: The Ostrich Effect
Oct 15, 2012: Who Are You Being When You Are Doing Your Life?
Oct 1, 2012: Constructive Interaction
Video
2009 Kenosha Business of the Year:
LMI Packaging Solutions, Inc.
JUST CHOOSE
Sometimes we think we have no choice but really we are failing to choose. They are very different.
I often tell the story of how I came to run LMI Packaging. One day I was a bookkeeper, working two days a week, and the next I was running a $5 million company. Then I became a victim, believing I had had no choice in the matter. Though I would enjoy many wonderful experiences and the company would experience great success, as a victim, I wouldn’t really enjoy it. Every day was a race to figure out what I was supposed to do. There was no choice, just responsibility.
One day something changed. I was exhausted. The rules of business were grating on me. Fortunately I had good friends who had the guts to say to my face, when are you going to give up the victim act. When are you going to take responsibility for your happiness and make a choice? If you don’t like the rules of business and they are suffocating your free expression then make your own rules. You choose!
So I chose. I chose to keep my job but to begin doing it as an expression of who I am and not as an expression of who I thought others wanted me to be. And what a wonderful ride it has been. The challenges are still there but I am now energized and willingly come out of my comfort zone daily because I love to learn and grow and I choose to live this way.
There was another wonderful choice I made around this time. I chose my mother. I know that sounds unusual, but as daughters often do, I used to magnify the things that drove me crazy about my mom. I was resigned to never have the relationship that I wanted with her. Once again the universe provided an astute coach who challenged me to choose my mom exactly as she was and exactly as she wasn’t and from that place create the relationship that I wanted with her. So though I believed she was incapable of hearing me, I began to talk to her. I began to share the vulnerable pieces of my life with her. I began to share my passions with her. I didn’t expect her to hear any of it. I was wrong. She listened like I never knew her to listen. Maybe I had only shared boring stuff before. Maybe I had shared nothing. Whatever it was, it changed when I chose her exactly as she was and then took responsibility for being the person that I could be in my dream relationship with her.
Life is a shindig (a new word used today to describe our great company culture – thanks Rebecca) when we choose the circumstances and people in our lives exactly as they are and exactly as they are not and then choose to change what we can, ourselves.
Choose YOUR best life today!
