Introduction
Some leadership books teach strategy. Others teach negotiation, communication, productivity or management. The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr Edith Eva Eger reaches somewhere deeper.
It asks a much more fundamental question:
When something happens that you cannot change, what choices remain available to you?
Eger was sixteen when she was sent to Auschwitz. Her parents were murdered shortly after the family’s arrival. Eger and her sister survived Auschwitz, forced labour and a death march, and she was eventually rescued by American soldiers in 1945. Decades later, after building a new life in the United States and becoming a clinical psychologist, she returned to Auschwitz as part of her own long journey towards healing.
The Choice is therefore simultaneously memoir, psychological exploration and an examination of human freedom.
For small-to-medium business owners and leaders, this is obviously not a business book. Nor should the difficulties of running a business ever be equated with Eger’s experience of the Holocaust.
Yet the psychological principles she explores have profound implications for leadership.
Business owners experience failure, betrayal, conflict, financial pressure, lost customers, failed acquisitions, damaged relationships, economic downturns, mistakes, regret and circumstances they cannot control. What often distinguishes leaders is not whether adversity reaches them, because eventually it reaches almost everyone.
The distinction is what they choose to do next.
This is where The Choice becomes extraordinarily relevant to leadership development, self-awareness, resilience and decision-making.
Its central lesson can be expressed simply:
Your past explains you. It does not have to imprison you.
And perhaps its most useful leadership question is not:
Why did this happen to me?
But:
Given that it has happened, what am I going to do now?
Table of Contents
- Who Was Edith Eger?
- What Is The Choice Really About?
- The Difference Between What Happens and What Happens Next
- The Invisible Prisons Leaders Build
- Self-Awareness: Your Past May Be Running Your Business
- Responsibility Is Not the Same as Blame
- The Leadership Danger of Victimhood
- Fear Can Quietly Become a Management System
- Forgiveness Does Not Mean Approval
- Adversity Can Develop Leadership Judgement
- What The Choice Teaches About Business Failure
- Choice, Emotional Intelligence and Leadership
- Where SME Leaders Should Exercise Caution
- The CHOICE Leadership Framework
- Practical Recommendations
- Key Takeaways
- FAQs
- Conclusion
- Call to Action
Who Was Edith Eger? (Leadership Development Perth)
Edith Eva Eger’s authority does not come from developing an attractive management theory.
It comes from lived experience combined with decades of clinical practice.
After surviving the Holocaust, Eger emigrated to the United States, eventually becoming a psychologist. Her work involved people experiencing trauma, grief, fear and other profound psychological difficulties. The Choice interweaves her personal history with stories drawn from that clinical work.
Importantly, survival did not mean that Eger simply walked away from Auschwitz psychologically untouched.
She describes decades of flashbacks and survivor guilt. Her eventual return to Auschwitz became part of confronting what she had carried internally for years.
That makes the book considerably more sophisticated than the simplistic message:
Think positively and everything will be fine.
That is not Eger’s argument.
Pain is real.
Loss is real.
Trauma is real.
Some things cannot be undone.
Her argument is that what happened and what we subsequently do with what happened are not necessarily the same thing.
That distinction is extraordinarily important in leadership.
What Is The Choice Really About? (Executive Leadership Perth)
At first glance, The Choice appears to be about survival.
At a deeper level, it is about freedom.
Not necessarily political or physical freedom, but psychological freedom.
The freedom to examine the stories we tell ourselves.
The freedom to confront rather than continually avoid.
The freedom to stop defining ourselves entirely by what happened to us.
The freedom to choose our response.
The freedom to accept reality without surrendering agency.
The book’s official description captures this combination of memoir and psychological practice, describing how Eger examines the mental prisons people can construct and the possibility of finding freedom from them.
For business owners, there is an uncomfortable parallel.
Businesses can become imprisoned by their histories too.
“We’ve always done it this way.”
“We tried that before.”
“Our industry is different.”
“My employees won’t change.”
“Customers only care about price.”
“The economy is the problem.”
“Nobody understands how difficult this business is.”
Some of these statements may contain truth.
But they can also become excuses that remove choice.
A leader who believes there is nothing they can do eventually stops looking for what they can do.
That is when circumstances begin controlling strategy.
The Difference Between What Happens and What Happens Next (Business Advisor Perth)
One of the most powerful implications of Eger’s thinking is the separation between event and response.
We cannot control everything that happens.
A competitor may enter your market.
Your largest customer may leave.
A trusted employee may resign.
A supplier may fail.
Interest rates may rise.
Technology may disrupt your industry.
A transaction may collapse.
A strategic decision may prove wrong.
You may simply make a terrible mistake.
Good strategic planning reduces exposure to avoidable risks, but it can never eliminate uncertainty.
Leadership therefore requires two different capabilities:
Prevention, reducing the probability and consequences of adverse events.
Response, deciding intelligently what to do once the event has occurred.
Weak leaders sometimes spend enormous energy wishing reality were different.
Strong leaders acknowledge reality and then ask:
What choices remain available to us?
That question changes the conversation.
Instead of:
“Why has this happened?”
ask:
“What does this mean?”
Instead of:
“Whose fault is this?”
ask:
“What needs to happen now?”
Instead of:
“We can’t change it.”
ask:
“What can we change?”
That is agency.
And agency is one of leadership’s most valuable resources.
The Invisible Prisons Leaders Build (Leadership Development Perth)
One of The Choice’s deepest ideas is that imprisonment is not always physical.
Human beings can remain trapped by memories, guilt, fear, anger, shame and beliefs long after the original circumstances have disappeared. Eger’s clinical stories reinforce this theme throughout the book.
Business leaders create psychological prisons too.
A founder who was once betrayed may stop trusting executives.
A leader humiliated by a failed expansion may become excessively risk-averse.
Someone who nearly lost a business may accumulate cash far beyond reasonable requirements because they never again want to feel financially vulnerable.
An owner who built a company through personal control may struggle to delegate even after the organisation has outgrown that leadership model.
A CEO criticised publicly may become defensive whenever anyone subsequently challenges them.
The original event ends.
The behavioural response continues.
This is one reason understanding emotional intelligence and self-awareness is so important.
Sometimes the greatest constraint on a business is not capital, competition or capability.
It is an unresolved belief inside the person leading it.
Self-Awareness: Your Past May Be Running Your Business (Leadership Development Perth)
Eger’s work repeatedly demonstrates that people carry their past into the present.
Business leaders do the same.
Every leader develops internal narratives:
“I must always be in control.”
“I cannot show weakness.”
“I have to know the answer.”
“I can’t trust people.”
“Conflict must be avoided.”
“If I’m not working harder than everyone else, I’m failing.”
“I built this company, therefore I know it better than anyone.”
These beliefs may once have served a purpose.
But circumstances change.
A behaviour that helped an entrepreneur survive the first three years can become precisely the behaviour preventing the organisation from succeeding in years ten to twenty.
This is particularly relevant when considering leadership styles.
Effective leadership requires adaptation.
The founder who needed to control almost everything when employing three people cannot sustainably operate the same way with 100 employees.
The question therefore becomes:
Am I responding to today’s reality, or am I responding to yesterday’s experience?
That is a powerful question for every SME owner.
Responsibility Is Not the Same as Blame (Business Improvement Perth)
This is one of the most commercially useful distinctions we can draw from The Choice.
Responsibility does not necessarily mean:
I caused this.
It can mean:
I accept responsibility for deciding what happens next.
Suppose your largest customer unexpectedly terminates its contract.
You may not be responsible for the customer’s decision.
But you are responsible for your response.
Do you cut costs?
Diversify revenue?
Strengthen the sales pipeline?
Review customer concentration?
Reassess the value proposition?
Change the operating model?
Communicate openly with employees?
Learn why the customer left?
The same applies to poor business performance.
A useful business performance improvement process cannot change yesterday’s numbers.
It can change tomorrow’s.
That distinction prevents accountability from degenerating into blame.
Blame looks backwards for someone to punish.
Responsibility looks forward for something to improve.
High-performing organisations need the second far more than the first.
The Leadership Danger of Victimhood (Leadership Development Perth)
This aspect of Eger’s philosophy requires careful treatment.
Acknowledging agency should never mean denying injustice, trauma, discrimination, abuse or circumstances genuinely outside someone’s control.
But prolonged identification with powerlessness can become another form of imprisonment.
In business this often appears as externalisation:
The economy.
The government.
The banks.
The employees.
The competitors.
The customers.
The suppliers.
The exchange rate.
The previous management team.
Sometimes these factors really are responsible for serious problems.
But the strategic question remains:
What can we do about it?
An SME leader who continuously externalises responsibility gradually destroys organisational agency.
Employees learn that poor results are always someone else’s fault.
Accountability disappears.
Innovation declines.
Excuses multiply.
The organisation becomes reactive.
This is why the principle behind stopping a business from running on instinct matters.
Facts must be confronted.
Reality must be accepted.
Then choices must be made.
Fear Can Quietly Become a Management System (Executive Leadership Perth)
Fear is not always obvious.
Sometimes it disguises itself as prudence.
Sometimes as control.
Sometimes as perfectionism.
Sometimes as aggression.
Sometimes as procrastination.
Sometimes as micromanagement.
A leader who fears losing control may refuse delegation.
A leader afraid of failure may avoid innovation.
A leader afraid of conflict may tolerate poor performance.
A leader afraid of appearing ignorant may stop asking questions.
A leader afraid of losing good employees may refuse to hold them accountable.
A leader afraid of criticism may surround themselves with people who agree with them.
This is where Eger’s philosophy connects powerfully with great leadership and humility.
Leadership courage is not absence of fear.
It is the capacity to recognise fear without automatically allowing fear to make the decision.
Forgiveness Does Not Mean Approval (Leadership Development Perth)
Forgiveness is central to Eger’s story, including her eventual confrontation with her own survivor guilt. Her return to Auschwitz was an important part of that journey.
This is another concept business leaders can misunderstand.
Forgiveness does not necessarily mean reconciliation.
It does not require continuing a commercial relationship.
It does not mean tolerating dishonesty.
It does not mean abandoning accountability.
And it certainly does not mean pretending something harmful did not happen.
Its practical leadership value is different.
Holding onto anger indefinitely allows a past event to continue consuming present attention.
A business partner may have betrayed you.
A senior executive may have disappointed you.
An acquisition may have gone terribly wrong.
A customer may have behaved appallingly.
Learn the lesson.
Strengthen the controls.
Change the agreement.
End the relationship if necessary.
But do not allow one bad experience to determine every future relationship.
The cost of refusing to let go may ultimately exceed the cost of the original event.
Adversity Can Develop Leadership Judgement (Leadership Development Perth)
Experience alone does not necessarily create wisdom.
Reflected-upon experience can.
This distinction is important.
A leader can experience the same problem ten times and learn nothing.
Another can experience it once, examine it deeply and fundamentally improve their judgement.
This connects directly with the concept explored in why scar tissue can become a leadership advantage.
Failure can teach you:
what warning signs you ignored,
which assumptions were wrong,
who you should have listened to,
where governance failed,
which risks were underestimated,
what capabilities were missing,
and how you behave under pressure.
But failure only becomes useful if learning occurs.
Otherwise scar tissue simply becomes scar tissue.
The leadership objective is therefore not to avoid every difficult experience.
It is to ensure difficult experiences improve future judgement.
What The Choice Teaches About Business Failure (Business Improvement Perth)
Business failure can become deeply personal.
For founders especially, the distinction between “my business failed” and “I am a failure” can disappear.
That distinction matters enormously.
One describes an outcome.
The other defines an identity.
The same occurs after poor decisions:
“I made a bad acquisition” becomes “I’m terrible at business.”
“I hired the wrong person” becomes “I can’t judge people.”
“We lost money” becomes “I must never take another risk.”
This is how past events begin constraining future possibilities.
A more constructive process is:
What happened?
Why did it happen?
What part did I play?
What assumptions proved wrong?
What can I learn?
What must change?
What will I do differently next time?
This mindset is especially important when confronting the early warning signs of business decline.
Denial preserves yesterday.
Learning creates tomorrow.
Choice, Emotional Intelligence and Leadership (Leadership Development Perth)
One of the strongest leadership applications of The Choice lies in the small space between emotion and action.
Something happens.
You experience an emotional reaction.
Then you respond.
The more self-aware the leader, the greater the possibility of making the response deliberate rather than automatic.
This is particularly important for SME owners because power magnifies behaviour.
An employee may become angry and affect three colleagues.
An owner becomes angry and can affect the entire organisation.
That is why emotionally immature leadership can quietly damage otherwise good businesses.
The leader who can recognise:
“I am angry.”
“I feel threatened.”
“My ego has been challenged.”
“I am afraid.”
“I am becoming defensive.”
has created an opportunity.
They can now choose.
Emotion provides information. It does not have to provide instruction.
That is emotional intelligence in practice.
Where SME Leaders Should Exercise Caution (Leadership Development Perth)
The Choice is enormously powerful, but applying it to business requires judgement.
Choice is not unlimited
Some circumstances genuinely constrain people.
Financial resources, market structures, regulation, illness, discrimination and contractual obligations can dramatically reduce available options.
Leadership agency should not become naïve optimism.
Resilience can become an excuse for bad systems
Businesses should not celebrate employees repeatedly surviving preventable crises.
If everyone constantly needs resilience because the organisation is chaotic, the answer may not be more resilience.
The answer may be better management.
Responsibility must not become self-blame
Taking responsibility for your response does not mean accepting blame for every event.
Forgiveness does not eliminate consequences
Trust can be rebuilt, but sometimes it should not be.
Governance, accountability and consequences still matter.
Not every setback contains a hidden gift
This is perhaps the most important caution.
We should resist turning suffering into a management cliché.
Some events are simply devastating.
The useful question is not:
“Why is this secretly good for me?”
It is:
“Given that this is real, what choices remain available to me?”
That is a much more credible interpretation of Eger’s philosophy.
A Practical CHOICE Framework for SME Owners & Leaders (Business Advisor Perth)
Eger’s ideas can be translated into a simple leadership framework.
C — Confront Reality
Do not deny what has happened.
Separate facts from emotion, assumptions and narrative.
Ask:
What is objectively true right now?
H — Hear Your Internal Story
Identify what you are telling yourself.
“This will destroy us.”
“I’ve failed.”
“Nobody can be trusted.”
“We’ll never recover.”
Ask:
Is this a fact, or my interpretation of the fact?
O — Own What You Can Control
Separate the uncontrollable from the controllable.
You may not control the event.
You control many elements of the response.
Ask:
What remains within my influence?
I — Identify the Lesson
Examine the event without defensiveness.
What warning signs were missed?
What assumptions failed?
What capability was absent?
What should change?
C — Choose the Response
Do not merely react.
Consider alternatives.
Assess consequences.
Seek independent perspectives where useful.
Then decide deliberately.
E — Execute and Evolve
Choice without action changes nothing.
Implement the decision, measure the result and adapt.
The objective is not simply recovery.
It is to emerge with better judgement, stronger systems and greater capability than existed before.
Practical Recommendations for SME Owners & Leaders (Leadership Development Perth)
After reading The Choice, SME owners and leaders could usefully ask themselves:
- What past event still influences how I lead today?
- Which fears are influencing decisions I currently describe as “commercial judgement”?
- Where am I blaming circumstances instead of examining my available choices?
- What mistake have I still not properly learned from?
- Am I carrying anger from an old relationship into new relationships?
- Where has experience made me wiser, and where has it merely made me more defensive?
- What uncomfortable reality am I currently avoiding?
- What is outside my control, and what remains within it?
- Which behaviour served me historically but now limits the organisation?
- If I stopped asking “Why did this happen?” and instead asked “What do I do now?”, what would change?
These questions are deceptively simple.
Answered honestly, they can expose significant leadership constraints.
Key Takeaways (Leadership Development Perth)
1. We cannot control everything that happens to us. Leadership therefore requires the ability to respond intelligently to uncertainty and adversity.
2. Acceptance is not surrender. Accepting reality is often the first step towards changing what can still be changed.
3. Your past can influence you without controlling you. Leaders need sufficient self-awareness to recognise when old experiences are shaping present decisions.
4. Responsibility and blame are different. You may not have caused the situation, but you still have responsibility for your response.
5. Fear often disguises itself. Micromanagement, procrastination, aggression, perfectionism and excessive caution can all be manifestations of fear.
6. Adversity does not automatically create wisdom. Experience becomes valuable when it is examined, understood and converted into better judgement.
7. Forgiveness does not eliminate accountability. You can release anger while still enforcing boundaries and consequences.
8. Emotional intelligence expands choice. The more accurately leaders understand their emotional reactions, the less likely those reactions are to control behaviour.
9. Resilience is not a substitute for good management. Preventable organisational dysfunction should be fixed rather than continually endured.
10. The most powerful question is often not “Why me?” but “What now?”
FAQs About The Choice by Edith Eger (Leadership Development Perth)
What is The Choice by Edith Eger about?
The Choice combines Eger’s experience of surviving Auschwitz with her later work as a clinical psychologist. It explores trauma, fear, responsibility, forgiveness, self-acceptance, healing and psychological freedom.
Is The Choice a business or leadership book?
No. It is primarily a memoir and psychological exploration. However, its insights into self-awareness, choice, adversity, fear and responsibility have substantial relevance to leadership.
What is the central message of The Choice?
One of its central ideas is that people cannot always choose their circumstances, but may retain meaningful agency over how they respond to those circumstances.
How does The Choice relate to leadership?
Leadership constantly involves decisions under uncertainty. Eger’s emphasis on self-awareness, responsibility and response provides a valuable framework for understanding how leaders behave when circumstances become difficult.
What can business owners learn from The Choice?
Perhaps the greatest lesson is to distinguish what is outside their control from what remains within their control, then direct attention and resources towards the latter.
Does Edith Eger argue that suffering should simply be forgotten?
No. Her story itself demonstrates the opposite. Healing involved confronting and processing the past rather than pretending it had not occurred.
What does the book teach about forgiveness?
Eger presents forgiveness as connected to freedom and healing rather than approval of wrongdoing. Her own journey towards self-forgiveness is particularly important to the book.
How can SME leaders apply Eger’s philosophy after failure?
They can separate the event from their identity, examine their contribution honestly, identify lessons, determine what remains controllable and make deliberate choices about what happens next.
What is the relationship between The Choice and emotional intelligence?
Both emphasise awareness of internal reactions. Leaders who recognise fear, anger, defensiveness and other triggers are better positioned to choose their response rather than react automatically.
Is resilience the main lesson of The Choice?
Resilience is important, but describing the book simply as a lesson in resilience understates it. Its deeper themes include agency, freedom, responsibility, forgiveness, identity and the relationship between past experience and present choice.
Is The Choice similar to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning?
There are clear philosophical parallels around human agency amid extreme suffering. Eger also knew Frankl, and her book combines her Holocaust experience with decades of subsequent clinical practice.
Can adversity make someone a better leader?
Potentially, but not automatically. Adversity becomes developmentally useful when leaders reflect upon it, learn from it and change their future behaviour.
What is the greatest risk in applying The Choice to business?
Trivialising Eger’s Holocaust experience or implying that every difficulty can simply be overcome through attitude. Business adversity and Eger’s experience are not comparable. The transferable principle is the importance of recognising whatever meaningful choices remain.
Is The Choice worth reading for SME owners and leaders?
Yes, particularly for leaders interested in resilience, emotional intelligence, self-awareness and personal leadership. It offers something many conventional leadership books do not, a profound examination of the internal forces influencing human behaviour.
Conclusion: The Past Is Permanent, Your Response Is Not (Leadership Development Perth)
The Choice is not a conventional leadership manual.
That may be precisely why leaders should read it.
Business literature naturally concentrates on things leaders should do: develop strategy, improve execution, build teams, manage capital, innovate, measure performance and create competitive advantage.
Eger forces us to examine something underneath all of these:
the person making those decisions.
What are they afraid of?
What are they carrying?
What are they avoiding?
What story are they telling themselves?
What have they learned?
What have they still not confronted?
And what are they choosing?
Eger’s extraordinary life demonstrates that freedom is not merely the absence of difficult circumstances. Her story and subsequent clinical work explore the possibility of freedom from the internal prisons created by fear, guilt, grief and unresolved experience.
For an SME owner, the scale and nature of adversity are entirely different, but the leadership principle remains valuable.
Your biggest customer leaves.
The strategy fails.
A partnership ends.
You make a poor decision.
A trusted employee disappoints you.
Growth stalls.
The economy changes.
You cannot go backwards and make the event disappear.
But you can examine it.
You can learn.
You can change.
You can ask for help.
You can rebuild.
You can choose what happens next.
The past may explain where you are.
It does not necessarily determine where you go.
And perhaps that is the enduring leadership lesson of The Choice.
Call to Action
Leadership development is not simply about acquiring more management techniques. Sometimes it requires confronting the beliefs, behaviours, experiences and assumptions influencing the way you lead.
An experienced external perspective can help SME owners step outside the immediate pressures of the business, challenge established thinking and make more deliberate choices about leadership, strategy and the future.
If that is a conversation worth having, you can contact Doug Verley to discuss your business and leadership challenges.
