Hard Decisions are Hard

I made one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to today.

Really, the decision took weeks to make, but it was today we finalized the decision and took action.

This morning I taught about the OODA loop in my morning Leadership Live video. This decision cycle, created by Air Force Colonel John Boyd and used extensively in military combat operations stands for observe, orient, decide and act. It’s a useful tool in business decision making too.

But knowing how to use the OODA loop, or in fact knowing how to make good decisions in general, is not easy when it is not the decision we want to make. It’s even harder when it affects lots of people. Still, it is the job of the leader to make the decision that is right for the mission and the greatest number of people, even when that decision is really hard.

I chose to close my second school today. We have fought a good fight there for over a year now, and were getting closer to winning but realities created, or at least exasperated, by the Coronavirus shutdown have made that fight unsustainable. For all the reasons that my team and I really wanted that truth to be different, it is not.

Sometimes we need to slow down to go faster. Sometimes we have to make a strategic retreat. This is not the same as surrender, because we’re still in the fight. But sometimes in order to win the war, we have to lose a battle. Sometimes we have to strategically regroup.

This decision is hard. For me, the decision hurts my pride a little, and the thought of not serving my students there with our mission of empowering lives hurts me a lot.

But we have not surrendered. We have a great virtual dojo that we stood up in response to the Coronavirus closure and have been serving 125 students a week on that platform. It is my intent that we will continue to serve our Temple Terrace students via some combination of the virtual dojo and/or at the headquarters school after the quarantine ends.

I hope they will all allow us to do so and allow us to continue our quest to assist them in becoming KMMA Blackbelts one day!

 Life is 10% what happens and 90% how we react to what happens. This is true in every aspect of our personal and professional lives. So, in hard decisions too we have to do our best to make the best and move on towards our mission and goals in spite of obstacles and in spite of hard decisions.

What hard decisions are you facing today?