Hello,
Let me tell you about an incident. I remember sitting across from a CEO who had just lost his company’s largest contract. By most business measures, it looked like a failure. The board was upset. His team was anxious. Competitors were already framing it as a mistake. When I looked at him, I expected defensiveness or regret.
Instead, he was calm. He met my eyes and said, “I made the decision, and I’ll take responsibility for the revenue we lost. But if I had signed that deal knowing what they were asking us to conceal, I wouldn’t be at peace with myself today.”
That conversation stayed with me. It made me notice something many leaders do: we decide whether a choice was “right” only after we see how it turned out.
Yes, choices have consequences. Bad calls cost you. You lose money, time, and trust. People stop returning calls. Opportunities move on. But there’s another cost we don’t talk about enough. When your reasons aren’t clean, you don’t just lose an outcome. You lose peace. You start replaying the decision in your head. You feel uneasy even when things “work.
“Being fair shouldn’t be a strategy for future gains. It should be a way of life, irrespective of results. ”
Thinking clearly isn’t that hard. It gets hard when we obsess over results and over how things will look. Take that pressure off, and the question becomes simpler: Was I being honest? Was I fair? Was I trying to do the right thing?
There will be times when people will question you. They’ll point to the numbers and say you failed. But if you can look at yourself and know you acted with clean intent, that noise doesn’t shake you the same way. In the end, results become part of the past. What tends to linger is a simpler question: how aligned were your intentions with the actions you chose to take?
Talk To You Soon,
Brijesh
Brijesh Dalmia Leadership Company
