He who overcomes others has force; he who
overcomes himself is strong.
-- Lao Tzu
Want to speed up your ability to reach your dreams
and live the A+ Life? Understand that you
always have control over one thing, even when
you feel you have no control. You can control
how you react to a particular situation.
Understand, also, that this one step – adjusting how
you react to your circumstances - is the hardest
skill for most people.
Controlling your reactions means not only
controlling anger or sadness, but choosing how you
decide to see a particular situation. If someone
hurts you, you have the ability to
choose how you react to that situation. You can
decide to be angry or sad; you can decide to
take the situation personally, or you can realize
that it
may have had nothing to do with you. You can use
the event as a learning experience.
No more excuses.
No more excuses are allowed. You can no longer hold
onto the belief that you were just born with a hot
temper or a sensitive nature. No more claiming that
someone pushed your buttons. When you are hit with
a negative situation, you have a choice. You can
decide to see the situation in a negative light or
you can decide to learn from the situation.
I spent a few years in an abusive relationship.
After managing to get out of it and start to rebuild
my self-confidence, I was very angry. I was angry
at my partner for treating me the way he did. I was
angry at myself for allowing it. I was angry at the
“system” for providing so little support. I spent a
lot of time being angry. Some of it may have been
necessary in order to accept the loss of the
relationship and the fact that my dream of a life
with this particular man was not going to work out.
Anger is one of the stages of mourning, after all.
But to move on, I had to get past the anger. The
easiest way for me to accomplish this was to see the
value in the experience.
Value? In an abusive relationship? Yes. I learned
an enormous amount about my own reserves of inner
strength. I have a poster on my wall with a
quotation from Camus, “In the midst of winter, I
finally learned that there was in me an invincible
summer.” I found my invincible summer through that
experience. This experience also makes it possible
for me to empathize with people I meet who are in
similar situations.
Find a lesson.
Two weeks before I was due to provide my first
open-to-the-public seminar, I was coming from the
mailbox up the sidewalk to my front door. I was
leafing through the mail and was not watching where
I was going. My foot slipped off the sidewalk and
my ankle turned sharply, causing me to fall to the
pavement. There I was, sprawled out on the front
porch. The first thought that went through my head
was, “Did anyone see me?” The second thought as I
tried to move was, “If no one saw me, how long will
I be here?” I had a difficult time getting up on my
ankle. I had wrenched my right shoulder and
couldn’t use my right arm to push up. I was a mess.
I managed to get to my feet, get in the house,
hobble to the couch, sit down and start to cry. I
sobbed. My thoughts consisted of “I have no one.
My parents are gone. I don’t have a husband or a
boyfriend. My son is 900 miles away. I don’t even
have any friends.” That’s when I stopped myself
because I knew the last statement was a lie. I had
tons of friends, many of whom would drop what they
were doing and come take care of me if I were to
call them. I realized that although I was in a
great deal of pain, I still had the ability to
decide how to react to the situation. I could sit
there feeling sorry for myself or I could figure out
what lesson I was supposed to learn from the
experience. (I realized that one message could be
that I needed to stop multi-tasking.)
When you realize you have a choice in how you react,
you suddenly give yourself the power to make the
best of any situation. You also have to give up some
of the excuses that have held you back. Get ready,
because then the brakes start to come off.
What excuses have held you back? Can you find a new
way to look at those events? Whoosh! Feel the speed?
