Identifying Your Defining Moments

As you read this column, I am enjoying the beaches of Mexico with my wife Angela as we celebrate her special birthday. A wise man never reveals which birthday it is!

This week's column is about taking a closer look at your life and your business to identify what I call "defining moments". As a business leader have you ever wondered why you make the choices that you do? What are the hidden reasons for your behaviour, whether positive or negative?

I am not a psychologist but I have found it helpful in my life and business to take a long look backwards at the defining moments in my life and my business in order to better understand who I am today and why I love what I do.

To get personal, I have had several "defining" moments in my life that involved difficult choices. For instance, I chose to attend a private high school because they had the best basketball team in the province. My parents told me that they would share the tuition fee but that I needed to pay half. So, I obtained a Globe and Mail paper route with enough papers to pay the tuition. I wanted to make my route unique so I surveyed the customers and found that over half of them wanted their paper earlier than 6 am. So I delivered by 5:30 am and made awesome tips. Valuable customer service lessons.

I would say that that moment that my dad told me that I needed to pay the tuition was a "defining moment". I learned much from my dad, and still do, about much, including the value of hard work. He worked very hard and was an example by his actions. I knew from a young age that you needed to work hard to get anywhere in this life. Perhaps if my parents had just paid the entire tuition fee themselves, I would not have learned this valuable life lesson. I believe this lesson was the reason that I ultimately chose to obtain my Chartered Accountant designation - it involved an extraordinary amount of hard work but definitely had rewards. It has shaped who I am.

Shortly after that another "defining moment" for me was when the captain of the junior basketball team broke my wrist in the first tryout. He really didn't like me and he slammed the ball into my wrist as I went to take a shot. It definitely wasn't much fun at the time.

However, that ended up being a defining moment in my life. For that point forward I became very focused on what I wanted to achieve. It caused me to reevaluate my short life and really set priorities for the first time, both athletically and academically. I decided that I was going to become the best basketball player and student that I could be. Due to my wrist, I didn't make the basketball team that year. I was really disappointed but not discouraged.

However, I set a goal that I was not only going to make the team the next year and keep an A average but that I was going to be able to dunk the ball over his head that season. Despite my broken wrist, I went to every practice and game and watched very closely. Seven days a week I snuck out of my bedroom window after 9 pm, round my bike the 3 miles to the school, climbed up on the gym roof and climbed in through the weight room door that I had left open to practice what I watched them do in basketball practice and games. I did all of the drills and even worked on their new dunking machine, which involved working on your leg strength. I would often shut off the gym lights at midnight, pumped that I was going to make it. I worked really hard.

Yes, I was completely nuts. That summer I played basketball 8 hours a day and went to the best basketball camp that I could afford. I remember burning a hole in my new Canvas basketball shoes from the heat on the pavement. The next year, at the tryouts I can still remember the look on the coach's face when I dunked the ball over his star player. In the end, I was thrilled when I was chosen to be the captain of the senior basketball team over him. My marks also improved - so did my life.

Why is this very personal information valuable to you at all? Well, as I have looked back and analyzed my life, I have found a number of these defining moments that have shaped my life. It was the reason that I risked everything and moved my family to Kelowna to start a consulting practice from scratch. Although everything is great, it really was a wild and crazy decision.

Identifying and analyzing these defining moments has also helped me understand why I love new challenges and taking risks. Understanding my pattern of behaviour that is driven by these defining moments has helped me avoid making hasty, irrational business decisions just for the sake of "going for it". It is also one of the reasons that I have difficulty delegating - everything has always been up to me so having others help me is not a world that I really know that well.

So what are the "defining moments" in your life that have shaped who you are as an entrepreneur? Even if you didn’t make radical decisions like I have described, you will be surprised when you take the time to look at these moments closely, how much you can learn, how much better you will understand what drives you now.

I am not suggesting for one moment that you do this self-analysis and then go about denying who you are or who you have become. Rather, a better understanding of yourself and your decision making style can only help you make better, more informed decisions in the future.

Defining moments can definitely help you make better business decisions. For example, it can help you chose team members that compliment not duplicate you. If you are a predominant, unwieldy risk taker, you do need to balance your team by hiring a more conservative, reserved person. They may drive you bananas but only hiring clones of yourself can be a fatal business mistake.

Take the time now to review your "defining moments". Perhaps the time you take out of your busy life to do this could become its own "defining moment" for your life and your business.

Steve Burns, is the President and CEO of Burns Innovation Group Inc. and Steve Burns Inc. Chartered Accountant, which provide innovative consulting and accounting services to entrepreneurs. Steve can be reached at 763-4716 or via email at: steve@burnsinnovation.com or steve@steveburns.ca.

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