Your Life Is a Choice. Choose Wisely.
Not long ago, we celebrated my father-in-law’s 80th birthday in Boston. A successful businessman who is mostly retired, he is a vital, vibrant man who has chosen to live life entirely on his own terms. He plays tennis several times a week, square dances regularly, and participates fully in the lives of his children and grandchildren. He has a keen mind, a loving heart, and a positive attitude — and he is an inspiration to me and to everyone who knows him.
What strikes me most is not his accomplishments. It is his deliberate choice of focus.
The Leadership Resilience Connection
The ability to choose your focus, your attitude, and your direction — especially when circumstances invite distraction, negativity, or collapse — is a cornerstone of leadership resilience.
I have coached hundreds of leaders over three decades, and the pattern is consistent: the ones who sustain high performance under pressure are not the ones with the easiest circumstances. They are the ones who have learned to choose deliberately, even when everything around them is pulling toward reaction.
In contrast, I once met a woman who had chosen — entirely unconsciously — to be miserable. She focused on the negative, consistently. When I mentioned that my father had passed away a few years earlier, she declared vehemently that whatever I had experienced, hers was ten times worse. I was not aware it was a competition.
My heart went out to her. She was so attached to her drama that she could not see how completely her focus was shaping her reality.
What You Focus On, You Create More Of
This is not positive thinking for its own sake. It is neuroscience. Research on stress and performance consistently shows that leaders who default to threat-focused thinking — ruminating on what is wrong, what could go wrong, what has gone wrong — activate stress responses that impair decision-making, narrow perception, and accelerate burnout.
Leaders who practice deliberate focus — not denial, but conscious redirection — sustain clearer thinking, stronger relationships, and more sustainable performance over time.
We can all get caught up in our drama and our problems. But is that truly where you want to put your attention? Because what you focus on, you create more of.
I would rather create more clarity, confidence, and resilience. How about you?
Three Choices That Separate Resilient Leaders from Depleted Ones
After 30 years of coaching executives and senior leaders, I have observed that the leaders who sustain high performance over time make three deliberate choices that others do not:
They choose what they pay attention to. Not everything that demands your attention deserves it. Resilient leaders develop the discipline to distinguish between what is urgent and what is important — and to protect their focus accordingly. This is not avoidance. It is strategic attention management.
They choose how they interpret pressure. The same organizational challenge, the same difficult conversation, the same quarter of missed targets — two leaders can experience these identically and respond completely differently based on how they interpret what is happening. Leaders who frame pressure as information rather than threat make better decisions and recover faster.
They choose to invest in recovery. Sustained high performance is not about working harder. It is about building the habits of regulation, rest, and restoration that allow you to bring your full capacity to the work that matters most. This is the element most senior leaders sacrifice first — and the one that costs them most over time.
These three choices are not personality traits. They are learnable skills. They are exactly what leadership resilience coaching is designed to build.
The Choice in Front of You Right Now
“To win or lose,
To love or hate,
To try or quit,
To risk or withdraw,
To accelerate or hesitate,
To dream or stagnate,
To open or close,
To succeed or fail,
To live or die —
Every one of these starts with a CHOICE.”
— Snowden McFall
My father-in-law at 80 is not remarkable because of what he has accumulated. He is remarkable because of what he has chosen — consistently, deliberately, over a lifetime. He chose engagement over withdrawal. Vitality over decline. Presence over distraction.
Every leader faces that same set of choices, not once but daily. Under pressure, in difficulty, at the edge of depletion — the choice of focus is still available to you. It is, in fact, the one thing that is always available to you.
If you are a leader navigating a season of pressure, depletion, or lost direction, explore leadership resilience coaching or read more about preventing leadership burnout.
A new study from Biological Psychiatry shows that women burn fewer calories under stress and are more likely to reach for the wrong food when they are upset. For many people, that means indulging in sugary carbs, which elevates blood sugar, contributes to diabetes and makes you put on belly fat.
