As many of you know, I checked an important item off my “Things To Do In 2010” list this summer. After a 21 year break, I decided to go back to studying the guitar and even located my old teacher.

About a week ago, we were working on some improvisational skills and my teacher pointed something out to me that really hit home.

In a very respectful way he told me that while my playing was good, there were certain things that I was continually “defaulting” to. And while those things were also good, they weren’t necessarily good every time, in every situation. We needed to get to work on expanding my repertoire of ideas.

And with some simple awareness, we began a new journey to expand Uncle Paul’s repertoire.

I couldn’t (and still can’t) let this lesson go because it made me think beyond the music into this Opus that we call life.

In other words, what do we default to in other areas of our life?

When someone offers constructive feedback, do we default to defensive? Do we yes them and smile while thinking “A Hole”?  Do we embrace and own the lesson?

The opposite of this is true too. Maybe we default to paying too much attention to the opinions of others.

When someone objects via phone, what is our default for “Not interested” “Already have a vendor” “No time” “Send info” etc? Do we have just one or do we have a repertoire of defaults?

What is our default presentation for our company? Just one or do we have a few versions that we adapt to different types of buyers?

What is our default voice mail?

Default intro email?

When things aren’t moving as quickly for us as they should, what is our default reaction?

Leadership: What is your default attitude towards your team when you miss a target? Do you blame, criticize, coach, support, threaten?

Do you default to an openness to new ideas from your team or do all the good ideas only come from senior leadership? Worse yet, do you default to an attitude that you only support your own ideas?

As An Organization: Do you default to an attitude of “We’ve always done it this way?”

When an unpleasant situation occurs is our default to rerun the event a million times internally without letting it go and moving on?

And the list can go on and on.

The point is simply:

Do we default to the same things or are we adding to our repertoire?

And just for the heck of it, when was the last time you questioned your “defaults”? Any idea how old that default is dude?

Today is all about a heightened awareness of your defaults and the guts to change it up!