People are watching you. Even taking behavior cues from you. Be careful how you act.
If you’re fallen off the wagon, look at your actions. What haven’t you been doing lately that you used to? How has your routine changed? What’s changed for you? Why? Really analyze your behavior, even when it is hard. Especially when it is hard. How serious are you about getting back to where you were? What’s pulled you away? Routines can change. Things can throw us off our game. Life happens. While these unwelcome things come into our lives, it is only up to us to beat them, to overcome them, to work them out. It isn’t on anybody else. We make it happen.
But we don’t need to make it happen alone. We seek help. Leaders seek help when they feel overwhelmed or they can’t figure it out on their own. Do not think you’re alone, suffering. You are not alone. There are plenty of other people who are going through or have gone through what you’re going through right now. Tough times happen to everyone. Question is, how are you going to deal with it? What’ s next? How are you going to deal? The best stories are those where the hero overcomes the odds stacked against him. You’re writing your own hero’s story right now. Where do you see yourself coming out of it? You can do this.
The struggles we go through are instrumental toward building our character, largely shaping who we will become. How we act during our struggles is also important because it sets the example for others to follow (or not). We really should not hate the struggle because it forges us. It either steels us from future struggles or it can consume us for awhile if we let it. Choice is ours. Will we let it beat us? Or, will we forge a new, stronger identity despite it? Who will you become?
What do most people do when they get undesirable outcomes, something they don’t want? They complain. They whine. They bitch and moan to anyone who will listen. Instead of looking at their actions, of what they actually did to get that thing, they complain. Undesired outcomes happens when we mess up. Or, we neglected something for too long. Jim Rohn always advised us to clean up our neglect. What have you been neglecting in your life because it’s too difficult for you to deal with right now? Maybe it’s your health. Maybe it’s that tough relationship with your teenager. Maybe it is finally moving on from that job you haven’t liked in years and have been phoning it in for a long time. There’s lots of areas where you may have some neglect. Do what you can to clean it up and improve it. You will feel so much better about it by taking positive action. Think: what can I do to make this better? how do I improve this now?
Typically, it is never too late to make a difference, especially in relationships. Seek them out. People are often surprised in a good way when someone else seeks them out for relationship healing. If something went wrong in the past, people are usually open to new beginnings or a fresh start. No one really wants to hang onto old emotional baggage. Forgive yourself. And if you are still hanging onto woe-is-me, look-at-what-they-did feelings, forgive them. This forgiveness isn’t for them. It is for you to let it go. People make mistakes, often with no direct intention of harming you. It wasn’t personal — it just happened to be you. It turns out the boat was empty after all when it crashed into yours. Can you blame an empty boat?
Years are often lost when we hang onto and harbor negative feelings about others. These negative feelings fester and even seethe inside of us when we think about them. Few things are as counterproductive as these emotions and the baggage they heap onto us. Wouldn’t life be so much better if you let these go, and just got rid of them entirely? Imagine how freeing that could be! It’d be like losing 50 pounds instantly. Your mind would free up for far more productive, creative, positive thinking. In fact, it would enhance everything in your life. Everything would get better. Everything would get better because you chose to forgive and to let it go. It is like a physical and psychological release.
What’s pernicious about hanging onto to these negative feelings and counterproductive emotions about others is they become a part of our identity. We become the wronged person. We become the victim. We identify ourselves as someone who was done-over by someone else. Worse, because it is a part of our identity, we tell just about anyone who will listen. Well, that’s not a great thing to identify yourself, nor introduce yourself, as to someone new. Is it? Do people really want to be the victim that bad? It’s not much of a story, nor is it much of an identity. A far better story, and a far improved identity, is to be the one who overcomes that adversity, that negativity, that difficulty, and got better. Someone who chose to let it go and improve. Someone who picks a higher identity as the type of person who doesn’t hang onto baggage, who lets things go in favor of positive contributions and actions that make a difference. This is a far better story to tell others. And it sets the example for others to follow whenever life throws them a similar curveball. How do you choose to respond? How you choose to respond is a part of your identity.
People are watching you. They may even take their behavior cues from you and what you do. What example are you setting for them? Would you want them to do what you did? Would you want them to respond in the way that you did? Would you want them to hold onto old emotional baggage and tell everyone they’re the victim? Or, would you want them to forge a new identity, forgive themselves and others, let go of unproductive emotional nonsense, and blaze a new path toward something positive, productive and helpful for others?
