The Power of Intelligent Choice: Seek to Know or to Understand

Dr. V. Brooks Dunbar has spent two decades mentoring and coaching young and professional women. Dr. Dunbar earned a doctorate in management with emphasis in organizational crisis leadership and decision making. She is a certified Academic Life Coach, and her coaching specialty includes student leadership development, managerial leadership, and mindfulness coaching. Dr. Dunbar is currently the Founder and Lead Coach at The Center for Confidence, LLC, which provides executive and leadership coaching and other niche coaching services to individuals and organizations. Find her at www.drvbrooksdunbar.com

Earlier this year, as I prepared to attend the local inauguration gala, I was amused by my choice to also attend the local Women’s March. I wondered if there was anyone else who was going to both.

When I mentioned the march to my 86-year-old grandmother-in-law, she asked, was it a march against Trump. No, I replied. It was a solidarity march to bring awareness to women’s issues.

She promptly replied, “Women have enough.”

Seeing her expression, poised to argue, I didn’t bother to tell her the march would be starting at the gravesite of suffragist Mary A Nolan. I had been excited to share my plans, and wanted to hear her own stories, but I immediately realized that I would hear none.

I explained that I was attending to bring awareness to the needs of girls transitioning out of foster care and for breast cancer awareness. Thinking back, I suppose I mentioned breast cancer because it was something that resonated with her. Breast cancer is something I deeply care about, but I also wanted to bring awareness to the problem of sex trafficking and modern-day slavery.

As expected, it made her think about what she had said.

In my upcoming book, DIVA DECISIONS, I talk about the power of everyday choice. At the core of this power is our choice to “think.” I knew my grandmother had not thought about what she just said, so I chose to offer a subtle reminder of the power of thought.

It was that power of everyday choice that led me to participate in my local inauguration event. My choice for the coming year is to bring back the practice of having conversations; not speaking for the sake of arguing, selling, or pushing out an agenda, but for the sake of exploration and understanding. That requires that I break through my comfort zone and start a conversation with people I previously would not.

DIVA DECISIONS challenges us to shift our conversations from a fixed mindset of knowing to an open mindset of understanding. As a life and leadership coach, I put forth the case that your mindset is the difference between living a full life and a reduced life in which you have only touched the surface of your potential.

I am taking three mantras with me into the next year: “When they go low, I go high”, “Deal me in”, and “Make America great.”

I designated Jan 20th as my personal day to engage in conversations that contribute to unification and efforts towards creating better understanding. My conversations centered around these mantras: “Go high” by attending an inauguration event, “Deal myself in” by putting myself into the room and into the conversation, and “Make America great” by reaching far beyond my comfort zone and comfortable home to seek out and engage others I’d like to better understand.

For the next four years, I want to make America great by having conversations with people I do not know. I want to increase my empathy for them and their stories.

As I think of my grandmother and extended family, much of their conversations are informed by artificial technology, not real people she can feel and touch. It is only reasonable then that the stories they hear and see are those that have been retold and resold many times over across many mediums. Her reaction “Women have enough” mimicked those artificial narratives. It is streaming live, in forceful, argumentative tones. It is what she now relies on to feel connected to something bigger.

My response reminded her of what was real, but I wasn’t there to remind her the following day. I was at the local inauguration starting a conversation with someone I didn’t yet know or understand.