WHO ARE YOU VOTING FOR?

As we prepare for one of the biggest and most important elections in the history of our country, I want to share with you a passage from my book Hidden Talent: Uncovering What Really Makes a Champion a Champion. It focuses on what I believe is the most important vote I am responsible for casting in life, and the most important one you’re responsible for casting, too – on who it is we’ve elected to be each day. I want to challenge you today to stop and consider…who are you voting for?

“Every four years, when voters in our country go to the polls and cast their ballots, they are actively participating in one of the great acts of freedom we possess in the United States. It’s the power we’ve been given to choose. Every vote cast is a choice made, and at the end of the day it’s we, the people who decide who’ll lead us on the path we’ll take moving forward. If we don’t like the path that’s been chosen, then soon enough we’ll have the freedom to choose again, this time a new leader and a new path. The power to choose: it’s the greatest of individual freedoms we possess.

In many ways, each of us holds an individual election in life each day (and often many times each day) to determine which “us” will govern our lives. Will we elect the best version of ourselves, or settle for someone worse? Will we choose the champion or the loser? Unfortunately, human nature encourages us to waltz unwittingly into our personal voting booth each day, and casually and carelessly select the mediocre candidate. Our default, auto-pilot setting points us toward the path of least resistance. Toward the easy, comfortable, convenient choice. It pulls us toward mediocrity. It encourages us to be average.

Will we elect the best version of ourselves, or settle for someone worse? Will we choose the champion or the loser?

On the surface, it might appear that champions are wired differently than everyone else, that they’ve got some unique ability to master that mediocrity. In truth, though, champions feel that same pull we all do. Despite how they feel, however, champions simply choose better than everyone else. They choose intentionally. Mindfully. Exceptionally. By repeatedly making that winning choice – by casting an individual vote for excellence again and again – champions have trained themselves to be great.

It’s cliché to say, but it’s true: you were not born a winner or a loser; you were born a chooser. In the same way, champions were not born champions. They were built and developed and refined, one winning choice at a time, and the same is true for you. Certainly there are some circumstances in life that have existed outside your control, and some of them may have powerfully impacted the story of your life. But champions recognize that who they are is not the sum total of their circumstances. Who they are is the sum total of their decisions.

The collective power of our choices is a great example of the process at work. Being your best starts with a choice, a single vote you cast in this daily election cycle. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, will you step into the arena and be your champion self today? This one individual choice is all you can control. But choosing your best self this one time doesn’t make you a champion. It’s the collection of votes, that sum total of your choices, that determines not what you just did, but who you actually are. Champions are champions not because they’ve made a single winning choice, but because they’ve trained themselves to continually make winning choices. Each and every choice – made each and every day – continues to tally the vote count, and with it the proof of their identity as a winner.”