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The Paradox of Choice with Chief Choice Officer, Justin Hilton
Jenn DeWall:
Hi Everyone, It’s Jenn DeWall, and today on The Leadership Habit podcast, I sat down with Justin Hilton. Justin Everett Hilton is a triple degreed alumnus of Kent State University and began his professional career as an architectural designer in Cleveland. Mr. Hilton returned to KSU Kent State University, continuing his career as an award-winning architecture professor and coordinator, and then became the university’s first, youngest African-American Success Solutions Consultant, Senior Associate Vice President, and Senior Administrator for Community Outreach. He’s the first African-American male to ever attain a Master of Architecture degree from KSU and has studied and lived in seven European countries. Moreover, he’s a motivational speaker, philanthropist, artist, entrepreneur, and community servant, and Justin and I sat down to talk about the paradox of choice.
Jenn DeWall:
Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall, and in this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit podcast, I am so excited to be sitting down with Chief Choice Officer Justin Hilton from Ohio! Justin, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. It’s great to have you.
Justin Hilton:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I am thrilled
Jenn DeWall:
Us Too! Justin. We’re going to be talking all about what you have described as the paradox of choice, but before we jump into it, can you just go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience?
Meet Chief Choice Officer, Justin Everett Hilton
Justin Hilton:
Sure. I’m Justin Hilton. I’m born and raised in Akron, Ohio. And I’ve worked for Penn state university for over a quarter of a century. But I’ve also been a practicing architect. I’ve owned several businesses. Been a motivational speaker, lived all over the world. Life has been this tremendous amazing journey, and I’m just excited to be here and to be able to share little nuggets of wisdom that I’ve learned so far.
Jenn DeWall:
Oh my gosh, we are so excited to have you and Justin, and I were talking to our audience, Justin, you were able to do something really, really neat that I think a lot of people would just love to be in your shoes because you were able to interview Daymond John. Can we talk about that? Like, can we talk about that? Is that you got to connect with someone that is, you know, an aspiration in the business world. Can you tell us what that was like and maybe introduce Daymond to people that maybe aren’t familiar with The Shark Tank?
Justin Hilton:
Sure, absolutely. So this came about as a result of a board that I sit on, which is the Better Business Bureau of Akron, which serves six different counties. And they had been providing service to businesses and entrepreneurs for a hundred years. So we thought, Hey, let’s do this Centennial celebration, and who better to bring in than Daymond John. And so that’s how it all got started. COVID, of course, changed those plans and moved us into a situation where we had to do it virtually. And so when we made that decision, we said, okay, we don’t want to have like a keynote on a stage behind a podium doing their thing. What we want is more of a conversation. We kind of like you and I are having right now, Jenn. And let’s invite the world in to listen.
And so that’s what we did. I had the opportunity of doing a fireside chat with Daymond John, who is literally an African-American man who grew up in the worst parts of New York where statistically, he should have been either dead or incarcerated by age 18. And he wasn’t great at school. He was actually dyslexic, but he was never diagnosed. So he didn’t know it. So he struggled to think that he was intelligent or smart because of the traditional ways of determining that he struggled with. But I will say, and I asked him about this. He has a common-sense creative genius that you have. And so he was able to when he was struggling as a teenager he was able to stay away from the traditional trappings that lead you down the wrong path. And instead, he was able to take advantage of the new movement of that time, which was hip hop.
And he just, you know, part of hip hop was a brand and, and clothing and music. And he just noticed that there were clothes that were part of this hip hop, you know, at the time that wasn’t really intentionally created for African-Americans and certainly young African Americans. And so that’s what he decided to do was to go into fashion and to create a fashion look and a brand that was specific to young African-Americans in the hip hop industry. And he knew nothing about business. He never went to business school. He never went to college. Like none of that, this was OJT, on-the-job training, and he talks about how he failed so so many times, but because he was in the beginning, he was able to make horrible mistakes. But he shut the business down three times over about a 10-year span because he made mistakes that almost killed the business, but, you know, eventually, it’s become a global icon of about $1 billion, and now he’s, you know, on Shark Tank. And he’s just had an amazing life. He has over 41 companies that he’s invested in.
Choosing to Make Health a Priority
Justin Hilton:
And it’s just. He’s. He’s just a tremendous individual. Who’s never forgotten where he’s come from. He has a tremendous amount of business acumen. He connected with a whole bunch of people that we’re smarter than him, so they could mentor him and teach him the things that he didn’t know. And I’ll end with this one thing, which is, which is amazing. I have a tendency of asking people this question, if you could sum up your life’s purpose in three words or less, what would those words be? And I asked Damon John that, and of all the things I just shared with you, you wouldn’t think that his answer was his answer, but his answer was early detection. Isn’t that amazing? His answer was early detection. Come to find out. He was actually diagnosed with cancer. As a result of him following the advice of one of his mentors and getting an executive physical, which he knows is different from the typical physicals you get for various insurance and healthcare. And they found cancer early enough where they were able to treat it. And so he’s cancer-free now. And so he talks about, you can have all the money in the world, you can have all the, you know, you can have everything, but if you don’t have your health, you have nothing. And so he has really stood on this platform of encouraging people to do the mammograms, to do the colonoscopies, to do like, you know, do all of those early detection things, to make sure that you’re taking care of your number one asset, which is your health
Jenn DeWall:
A powerful lesson that I think honestly, leaders can forget about often we get so fixated on or caught up in the busywork, or just always, you know, having things to do. And we come last. I love that message because, again, we don’t. We don’t adhere to it very often. It’s it often takes the consequence for us to look that, look at that and, you know, make different choices, which is going to be our conversation today. But given John, what a great example of what it takes to be a leader, what a great example of persistent choices, and maybe this is a great opportunity to get into the paradox of choice. So you have come up with a concept called the paradox of choice, Justin. What does that mean?
The Paradox of Choice
Justin Hilton:
So that really is a way to talk about how absurd I think life is. Right? In that, we all exist, right? I mean, we’re all here. We’re all alive and yet not really by our own conscious choosing, right? So I never chose to be born. I never chose to be born to my parents. I never chose to be born an African-American. I didn’t choose to be born in America. You know, I didn’t choose to be like all of these things that make me what I am and who I am. I actually didn’t choose. Right. And yet I know that every day that I get up, I’m gonna make on average 35,000 conscious decisions today. Thirty-five thousand conscious decisions today are what I’m going to make. That’s the average number of decisions that people make every single day. So the paradox of it all is I didn’t choose to be here. And yet, I’m making 35,000 choices every single day that will determine the entirety of my life while I am here, which seems absurd. Right?
And so it seems like this crazy paradox, and this really hit home for me when I had my child, my daughter, who was a miracle. And so, just to extrapolate these numbers, 35,000 conscious decisions every day is 1.1 million per month, which is 12.7 million per year. So in the first year of my daughter’s life, I made 12.7 million choices. Her mother, my wife, made 12.7 million twice. That’s like 25 million choices that we made in the first year of my daughter’s life. By the time she’s 10, we will have made as a, as a, you know, mother and father, we will have made 250 million choices. And that’s just mom and dad. You add in their cousins, aunts, uncles, teachers, pastors, neighbors like when you think about it, by the time we’re ten years old, there have been hundreds of millions of choices that have affected who we are, what we value, what we think is good. What we think is bad, what we think is possible.
It determines our hopes, our fears, our challenges, our drinks. Like all of these things are pre-determined by millions of choices that are made by the context that we have unchosen-ly been born into. And by the time you’re 20 years old, the person that you literally are is not really a result of you choosing to be that person. It’s all of these hundreds of millions of choices that have been made in the context in which you’ve been speaking. And that hit me when I was 20 years old. And I lived in Italy, and I had never been outside of the continental United States of America. And here I am, an African-American man in Italy with a bunch of students from Penn State that I didn’t really know. And for the first time in my life, I had this moment of who on earth am I?
And, and how did I become this person? And that’s when it dawned on me that the person I was at age 20 was not the person that I chose to be. So I decided from that point on, I’m going to choose to be who I want to be. And that was easy for me to conceptualize because I was studying architecture overseas in Italy. And as an architectural designer, we make design decisions, right? We make decisions to design hospitals and hotels and houses and all these kinds of things. And then it hit me the greatest thing I could design. It isn’t a building typology. It’s actually my life. And that’s when I decided that I’m going to purpose these choices to become the best version of myself that I possibly could. And, and that’s kind of where this whole paradox of choice and becoming your own Chief Choice Officer started,
Jenn DeWall:
That’s a powerful example of just really showing you how much choice plays into our life, whether it was someone else’s choice and how that impacts us. I mean, I can’t even be thinking that we make, on average, like 12.7 million choices a year. It made me even when you’re first thinking, like how many choices have I made this morning so far? Whether it’s like, what I choose to drink or eat, or what time I choose to get up? Why is it so important to be aware of choice? Like, because I think that this is often the topic that I guess some people, maybe subconsciously, maybe consciously, don’t want to face their choices. Right. We like to think life happens to us, whereas choice is really showing us that it’s all your own intentionality. What, so what, what are you like, I guess, what challenges do you think people have from recognizing that they have a choice?
We Don’t Choose to Wake Up, But We Choose to Get Up
Justin Hilton:
So so your words that you actually chose to speak encapsulate the answer, right? The challenge is recognizing it. That’s the first thing, like awareness. Like recognizing that, okay, who I am and what I am right now might not actually be as a result of my own choice. Right? So recognizing that is significantly important. And then being aware of the fact that I have the power to change that if I choose to. Right? So one of the crazy things about all these choices is if we’re all making 35,000 conscious decisions every single day, they’re going to be different, right. Because we’re all different, but here’s what’s crazy. We all start with the exact same choice, right? We choose to get up. We don’t choose to wake up. We choose to get up. And from that initial choice that every single person makes, then all the choices that we make are different.
Justin Hilton:
Right. But we all start with the exact same choice to get up. And that’s another interesting paradox we don’t choose to wake up. We choose to get up. So that’s where I think it’s so important for us to understand that if, in fact, we wake up, that means that there’s value in our life. That means that there’s purpose in our life for us. Or else we wouldn’t have woken up. Okay. So the fact that we are awake means there’s value, there’s a purpose, there’s opportunity. Like, so, okay. Let’s make the same choice. Get up. Okay. Now from there, how do you navigate 35,000 conscious decisions a day? Like, how do you, how do you actually make sense of that? For me, it starts with the most important choice that you can make after getting up. And that is choosing your wants, needs, desires, dreams, and goals, right personal to you.
What Are Your Wants, Needs, Desires, Dreams and Goals?
Justin Hilton:
What are your wants, needs desires, dreams, and goals? And the reason that is so important is that it will become a gravitational force that will pull these 35,000 decisions you’re going to make. It will start to pull them in line so that you can actually start moving in the direction of your wants, needs, desires, dreams, and goals, right? They become like this GPS for your choices for that day. And the significance of that is when you are making those decisions in line with your dreams and goals, now you’re on an unrelenting path of success because I think success is not just the accomplishment of your dreams and goals. It’s the person you become along the process of pursuing your dreams and goals. And so that’s really what I think life is all about is this amazing process of us purposing our choices in alignment with our dreams and goals that allows us to become these amazing human beings that are able to share our lives with other people.
Jenn DeWall:
Yeah. That’s where fulfillment and happiness. We talked about this in our planning meeting. So you had mentioned that there are three important choices. And so the first important choice, if we’re thinking about our range, the first choice is to determine what our own wants, needs, desires, dreams, and goals are. So if you’re thinking about how I can even start to practice what Justin is saying, determine those things. So wants, needs, desires, dreams, goals, what is the second choice? Or excuse me. So it’s wants, needs, desires, dreams, and goals. Out of curiosity, what if you have a goal that you really want to accomplish? Let’s say it’s to be the CEO or let’s say, it’s even to get that promotion. What do you have to be aware of that could come up in your way, because you might choose the goal, but we all know that plenty of people set a new year’s resolution. And that doesn’t mean that they’re actually going to take action to do that. So what can you do to overcome even that initial resistance or to get yourself even more bought in and like, no, you, you chose this- now, go get it. Because I imagine that there are still some people that struggle with, like, yeah, I want that, but I’m not gonna really make a choice to go and get that.
Justin Hilton:
You’re right. So, so you’ve touched on a super important part of this conversation. Then, when you have the courage to write down your wants, needs, desires, and goals. And I use the term write down like I’m old school, right? Write down your dreams and goals— when you do that, and I encourage you to start with 10, but ultimately try and get to a hundred, right. Try and get to a hundred. When you do that, the first thing that you’re going to hear in your being is probably going to come from yourself, and it’s probably going to be negative. It’s probably going to be a. You can’t really have an Italian Villa and, you know, a place here. And like the first voice you’re going to hear is probably gonna be a negative voice. And that’s primarily because, again, as we mentioned, you have hundreds of millions of inputs, right?
And let’s be Frank. I mean, the world is not this utopian society. I mean, there are really difficult places that we live in. There are difficult relational issues between people, races, religion, et cetera. If you have optimism, then there are also people that have negative perspectives. All of that input is in you subconsciously somewhere. I often say that the term “rationalize” means to tell one’s self a rational lie. The easiest person to lie to is yourself. So when you start thinking about all these wants, needs, desires, dreams, and goals, like you’re going to get inputs to say, I don’t know if you can do that. I don’t think you can accomplish that. I want for you to think that you can do blah, blah, blah, and you’ll start rationalizing the possibilities of achieving those things away because that’s just part of human nature, right? So the most important thing you can do after having the courage to think about them and to write them down is, in my opinion, to find a mentor, right?
Find a Mentor
Justin Hilton:
Find your future self, which is all a mentor is, is your future self, and introduce yourself to that person and ask them to mentor you. Right? And if it’s not in a formal context, that’s fine. To develop relationships— I’ve said for years, relationships are the greatest currency in life, not money, but that’s the greatest currency in life through which all things flow. So once you write down your wants and desires, dreams, and goals, get a network of people that can support you. That can speak life into you. That can speak encouragement into you, that can give you information that you need to know. And by the way, that mentor doesn’t have to be an actual physical person, right? If you read a book that it took someone, so Daymond John. Daymond John just wrote a new book. And it was called Power Shift. So Daymond has taken like 40 years of wisdom and put it in a book.
So you can read that book, and Daymond John can be your mentor through the book, right? So mentorship is so key. It’s so important because you can get information on what’s coming down the road. You can get information on the things that you don’t know that you need to know in order to succeed and achieve. And, but, but that in-person mentoring is so important because what you need ultimately in order to become your best self and which you ultimately need to pursue your dreams and goals in a realistic way is belief. You have to believe in yourself. You have to believe that it’s possible. And the most important source of that belief is probably going to be other people who can speak belief into you because I really believe that ultimately, we don’t possess the amount of belief we need to attain our next level. We just don’t have it in and of ourselves. Right. We have to have other people along the journey with us that can speak into us and can speak that belief into us. So getting a mentor is the second most important step after choosing your wants, needs, desires, dreams, and goals.
Internal Vs External Validation
Jenn DeWall:
I love that! So second choice. And I, you know, I think I want to ask because I, I just want to have, you know, a fun fireside chat, because I do think that sometimes we’re, we’re not aware of the fact that we can internally validate. Like, I, I think that I was gonna ask you, why do you think it is? Like, one of my perspectives is that I think that people just we’re so conditioned to rely on like, kind of that validation, whether it’s cultural, rites of passage like I’m getting married. I went to college, whatever that might look like. Those become the natural things that we kind of use. And I would love that because those are kind of choices that sometimes they’re intentional for us. Sometimes they’re not someone could have made them before, but I feel like a lot of people, you know, I almost like to look at it as a balance.
Like we’ve been, we spend the majority of our lives up until adulthood relying on external validation. And that’s a great compass point. But then, when it comes down to those big scary goals, then you hear that self-doubt. And it’s saying. I don’t know, Jenn, who the heck do you think you are? So I love the idea of, yes, getting your squad, get your cheerleader there, get your bench. But also just thinking, how can you learn? I just want to plant a seed. Like how can you learn how to even tell yourself that you’re getting it right? That you’re going to figure it out, that you believe in yourself above everything else because sometimes the people aren’t going to be there. Or the words of support are going to be valuable, but you’ll need a little bit more. I’m curious about that. Like w if you have a point of view on internal versus external validation because there’s so much where I found myself in my twenties, just kind of thinking what is wrong with me, or what is this? Whereas if I changed my own perspective, it didn’t matter what some other people thought of me. And so why was I trying to appease them?
Justin Hilton:
So you’re exactly right. I liken it to a question. I ask people as it pertains to breathing, which one is more important, inhaling or exhaling, right? If you don’t do both at some equitable level, you’re going to be in trouble. Right? No, you’ll be passed out, looking for oxygen. Right. So they’re both necessary. Internal and external validation are both absolutely critical. And to your point, because we’re, we all are born dependent. Then we develop these habits of being dependent upon exterior validation. Right. But the most, the most powerful validation you can get is internal. Right? But that’s what. We’re not accustomed to habitually understanding how to create. So I did something very important when I was 20 years old. I wrote my own self-motivation message. It was my own mantra. It was my affirmation statement.
And I memorized it. And it is an internal compass for me. Right. So no one can tell me who I am because I’ve told myself who I am, and I believe it. Right? And so is one of the critical steps that I would advise people is to have their own internal validation statements, your own affirmation statement that affirms who you are, it affirms the value of who you are, and it affirms the value and contribution that you can make this life. There are different ways and different methodologies to creating that that are out there. You know, some start from a position as extreme as, Hey, write your obituary, right? Because an obituary, you know, beyond saying that, you know, you lived and died. It does. It does actually articulate what it was that you’ve achieved in life.
Like, you know, what the value of your life was. That dash your birthday and your death date, like your obituary, speaks to that dash. Right? And so you can do that. You can. You can. You can write that. Another exercise I like to tell people is, you know, we live in a society particularly here in America, where we’ll celebrate certain people within our society. Right. Entertainment as an example, right? You got the Golden Globes. You got the Oscars. You’ve got the Grammys. You’ve got, like. We have award shows all over the place. And I often ask people if you were to get a lifetime achievement award, right. What would that award be for? And what would your acceptance speech of that award sound like? Right. And, and I’ve done this with young kids, which is, and what they produce is amazing.
Right. And then I asked them, okay, well, why don’t you just do that then? Like, if this is the lifetime achievement award that you would love to have, then why not just live a life in that direction of achieving that? Like, let’s just do that then, you know? So so creating that sort of lifetime achievement perspective that can be content that you can use to sort of creating this narrative about the importance and significance of your own life. And I will say there’s been research on this in terms of cognition. What you feed yourself, you will believe- good or bad. Right or wrong, you’ll believe so when you create that narrative, and you start to internalize that thing every single day, every single day, it starts to become a believed reality in your being. And you start believing that and believe in that thing and believe in that thing.
And all of a sudden, it becomes the lenses through which you see life, and your life starts to begin to align with what it was that you’ve already spoken into existence. And that becomes this- once you get to that critical mass, nobody can tell you what you are and who you are and what your value is because you’ve already told yourself to the point where you believe it. And that is that that’s, that’s the wonderful place to be in life. Now that isn’t to say that, that when you dream even bigger dreams, that there’s fear that comes in and that there are challenges, you know, and because, you know, life isn’t perfect, life is going to send you hurricanes and tornadoes and things like that. And, and you’ll still need external people to help you and assist you and to encourage you and to motivate you and all those kinds of things. But man, that internal motivation, that is everything.
Jenn DeWall:
Yeah, absolutely. If we don’t believe it, how in the heck! I love that! Even in leadership, I think it’s an often, maybe under-realized thing that people can tell. They can tell whether you believe what you’re saying. They can tell, like, whether you believe in yourself. And you know, that’s not to judge yourself if you’re not showing up as competent as you want to be, but it is to be mindful of the fact that, you know, we can tell. And also just in the same way, if you’re not confident, it’s totally okay to say, you know what? I haven’t had this experience before. And so I’m still trying to figure out, you know, how to do this. I’m looking for learnings. I’m taking this. It’s okay to be vulnerable. And I know, so I, I just love the importance of understanding that it’s got to start with you and thank you so much for such a beautiful answer to, and that, that is one of the first choices that we get to have is to believe in ourselves.
Choose to Get More Information
Jenn DeWall:
Okay. So the three important choices. So we’ve got to start with choosing our needs, wants, desires, dreams, and goals that we have to choose that power team or mentor that’s going to be there. What is the third choice that we have to make an important choice?
Justin Hilton:
Yeah. So for me, that third choice is to acquire as much information as you can. Right? Because you know, knowledge is super important. And we live in a situation in our, our time right now, where we have probably more access to information than ever before in human history, these, these smartphones, which every, everybody seems to have a smartphone. I mean, it doesn’t matter if you’re, you know, the CEO of a tech company, or if you happen to be, you know, a kid like Daymond John, where you’re in, you know, an underprivileged, under-supported neighborhood, we all have smartphones. I mean, it’s crazy. And, and those smartphones give us access to, so, so, so, so much. And so the reason information is so important is because when we take in that information, and we process that, and we formulate beliefs, our actions are based on what it is that we believe.
That’s why it’s so important. You know, going back to what we just talked about, about belief, right? Because typically, our behavior is connected to our beliefs. If you believe something’s good, you’ll do it. If you believe something’s bad, you won’t do it. If you believe something, you know, so our behavior is connected to our beliefs, and our behavior over time creates habits. I mean, we’re essentially going to be victims in our life. We’re either going to be the victims of our good habits or the victims of our bad habits. But that’s what we determine our habits, right. Through our choices. Right? So once you get your positive habits set, the only thing you can become successful. If you have successful habits, that’s just the way it works. Right. But those habits are contingent upon the information that we allow into ourselves that we process that we formulate thoughts and beliefs on that we then behave on those behaviors, create habits and those habits put us in similar situations, but they can similar kinds of information.
So I like to use this analogy if you had a coffee cup. Right. And it was like two weeks. Yeah. And imagine if you, if you had coffee in there and you went on a two-week vacation, and you forgot to empty your coffee, right? So you come back home, what on earth do you think is going to be in that coffee cup? I mean, you know, it’s nasty, right. But what if I came home to visit you, right? I came to your house to visit you because you’re back in town and I wanted to see you. Because we’re best friends. We’re twins. I say, Hey, just come up. And I said, Hey, can I have, you know, you said, Hey, do you want anything to drink? And I said, yeah, can I, can I have a glass of water? And you realize that you didn’t set your dishwasher. The only cup that you have is that cup of coffee with two-week-old nastiness in it. And I asked you for a cup of water, right? How would you bring me a cup of water without pouring out what’s in that cup? Right. The great thing to think about, right? How on earth could you do that? Right.
Jenn DeWall:
I don’t know. I feel like I’d be like, can you drink out of my hand if you’re saying I can’t pour it out? I don’t want to feed you
Justin Hilton:
What do you do? You take it to the sink, turn on the faucet, and you get as much water coming out of that faucet as you possibly can. And you hold that cup underneath that faucet for as long as it takes the, for the clean water to go in and eventually for all that stuff to start to flow out, right? And it might not be 20 seconds. It might not be 20 minutes. It might not be 20 hours. You might have to stand under there for two weeks. You might have to stand on there for two months, for two years, whatever it takes. Eventually, if you have enough clean, positive flow coming in. Eventually the negative, nasty stuff will flow out. Eventually. Right? And that’s the power of positive information. If you can put yourself in a position where you’re getting positive information about your wants, needs, desires, dreams, and goals. Positive, positive, positive, positive, positive, eventually all the negative stuff, there won’t be room for it because it will be supplanted by the positive. And eventually, it’ll just blow out.
And what you’ll be left with is this unbelievably healthy, happy person who’s filled with positivity so that you can be of value to others. I like to say that I spend my time predominantly around three kinds of people. People who are where I want to be in life. Those are the mentors. We talked about that. And I believe in them, and they believe in me. Right? So so that’s key to have that mentorship relationship. And then I spend my time around people who are going in the same direction I’m going so that we can self-support. Nobody’s ever become successful on their own. It doesn’t happen. Right. And, and I don’t know that it could happen because ultimately success is about you becoming your best person and then positively affecting other people. So you have to have other people around you. So I spend my time around it. Do you know what I’m saying? Right.
Choose Positive Relationships
Jenn DeWall:
Cause I think that people, and I’m sorry to interrupt you. I really think that people, you know, we, we are sometimes raised with this belief, that independence is where it’s at, which completely negates the fact that we’re all just interdependent. Whether we want to realize it or not.
Justin Hilton:
And you know, it’s funny. I ask people all the time. I say, Hey, who’s the most important person in your life. Right. And I get, I mean, I get like, well my mother or my dad or my sister, or like, they always tell me someone else. I rarely ever get someone that says, well, me, I’m the most important person in my life. Right. It’s always someone else. So that automatically tells you that we somehow have been created to be predisposed to be concerned with other people, almost more than we’re predisposed to be concerned with ourselves. So again, it goes back to that dichotomy of it’s both/and— it’s not either/or. It’s both/and. So yes, we have to have other people, and other people have to have us. Right. So that’s why I spend my, my a third of my time around people who are trying to get where I’m at so that I can help them become their best version and help them get to their next step, which may be where I’m at so I can mentor them. So I spend my time around people where I’m trying to get to people who are going in the same direction I’m going, and people were trying to get where I’m currently at. So that I can help them, and it’s all about that positive information. It’s all about that positive relationship. It’s all about, Hey, what are your wants, desires, dreams, and goals? How can we make those things come to life? And how can you become an amazing person as a result of pursuing this?
Jenn DeWall:
Oh my gosh, I love this. Justin, every person is with your teacher and your student, because I think your final point is an important one is how we can serve? How can we help others recognize that someone is likely, you know, to offer a hand to us to help us? How can we continue to do that? Justin, this is pretty powerful. I mean, it’s, I love that. It might seem like a simple conversation on the surface. We’re talking about choice here, but you just brought up some really important things. Your life is here to be lived, and only you get to choose it whenever you decide to take responsibility for that. And what you had said, like your three important choices, choose your own, wants, needs, desires, dreams, goals. Find someone that’s going to help you get there, and then pursue them pursue. And I think it’s important. I love that you shared, too, our level of interdependence and surround yourself with the people that have been there, that are going there and that want to be there. I think that those aren’t really, you know, I think that that’s powerful too, because it shows that there’s a value in every single person we come into connection with. It doesn’t have to be a favorable thing, but you can still make it a lesson too. It doesn’t mean just your closing comments that you’d want to maybe share with our listeners today as we wrap up.
Be Your Own Chief Choice Officer
Justin Hilton:
So my closing comment would just be to encourage people to really take this concept of being their own Chief Choice Officer. Right. We understand that there are C-suites that, in certain contexts, we hold highly, right? Your CEOs, your CFOs, your COO’s, right, your Chief, Chief Executive Officers, Chief Financial Officers, Chief Operating Officers, you know, we’re creating different people and, and, and categories to fit in that C suite. But we understand that that C suite, I mean, they kind of run the world, right. You know, whether you’re the C-suite of an enormous corporation or whether you’re the C-suite of a local nonprofit that’s making an impact, you know w we understand that C-suite, but what has never existed within a C suite is the concept of a Chief Choice Officer. And I think that’s primarily because that position doesn’t need to exist inside of the context of a corporation or business. It needs to occur in the context of each of us individually. And when we’re able to get to the point where, as you mentioned, we’re able to have that awareness and understanding that I can choose today to be amazingly different. That’s when we take that chief choice officer from a title, and we make it part of our actual daily execution. So that’s, I would encourage people to do is to really take that Chief Choice Officer concept and implement it into their lives.
Jenn DeWall:
I love that maybe in closing everyone, I mean, they have to be thinking, what are you going to do differently based on what Justin just shared, what choices are you going to make today for yourself, for your dreams, goals for the life that you want to live? Justin, thank you so much for joining us on The Leadership Habit podcast. It has been a great conversation. I love this topic, and I think you just shared a very important message that hopefully is going to ignite some positive changes for our listeners. Thank you so much.
Justin Hilton:
Absolutely. Thank you for having me, and thank you for the platform. I mean, you are absolutely phenomenal. Your energy, your perspective, your impact mean all of it. It’s just. It’s just amazingly significant and needed and necessary. So thank you for doing everything you’re doing, and thank you for changing the world in the ways that you’re changing the world. I really do love and appreciate it.
How to Connect with Justin
Jenn DeWall:
Thank you, Justin.
Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of The Leadership Habit podcast with Justin Hilton. If you want to connect with him, you can head on over to LinkedIn there. You can ask them questions, get to know more about him, the work that he does in Ohio at Kent State University. And also take that conversation forward about the paradox of choice. If you know someone that might be struggling with stepping into the power of their choice, please share this podcast episode with them. And of course, if you liked this episode, don’t forget to leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service. Stick with us every single month. In addition to the podcast, Crestcom offers complimentary monthly webinars. In addition, we also offer the service to come into your organization and give your team a two-hour skills-building workshop.
