Are Your Decisions Based on Hope or Fear?

Kelly Brough is the outgoing CEO and President of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce. While I don’t know her well, I’ve always been impressed by her candor, thoughtfulness and commitment to the local business community. She recently posted her 12 lessons learned from her 12 years running the state’s largest chamber. One of her lessons jumped out at me and inspired this week’s message.

Lesson #12: Make decisions based on hope – not fear.

We make so many decisions, both in our personal and professional lives, to avoid problems or minimize the downside. Instead, we should make those decisions with a focus on what’s possible. It’s more rewarding, and it inspires others to jump in and help. At the Chamber, I worked directly for 59 board members who made their decisions based on what was possible, focusing on the future they want to create. It was truly inspiring.

The definition of hope is the expectation or desire for a certain thing to happen, to trust and believe in the likelihood of possibilities. Hope on its own does not really do much, it must be accompanied by action and that is what I love about Kelly’s excerpt. She talks about making decisions based on hope.

When we act out of fear, we are often in self protect mode. We tend to be closed off and lean toward resentment and blame of our situation in order to protect our own ego. It is in these times that we need to go deeper and discover what we are really afraid of so we can be accountable for what is in front of us and what direction we want to go.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we should throw caution to the wind. I fully believes in contingency plans. I often stress the importance of keeping 3-6 months of operating expenses on hand, I always want to make sure my team is protected, and I can be slow to make decisions while overanalyzing what might happen. But there is a difference between doing due diligence and planning for every worst case scenario. When we fail to weigh enough of the upside or overestimate the downside in our thought process, we risk acting out of fear instead of hope because we aren’t willing to bet on ourselves. We site the fact that “we haven’t done it before” and we resolve to go with the “safe” choice and don’t take chances that potentially could lead us to greatness.

As I reflect on the past 18 months, I could not be more proud of my team for specifically making decisions based on hope. We’ve taken precautions, and at the same time refused to dwell on too many negative “what if’s?” We’ve had new team members join our team with the hope that it might be a better experience here at Footers than what they had before, hope that there really would be opportunities to grow. The team that weathered the storm chose hope that we would come out on the other side of the pandemic stronger and hope to be part of something even better than what we had before. As you continue to navigate the uncertain times ahead on your journey, I hope you’ll think of this post and base your decisions about how to move forward on hope, not fear.