Three Feet from Gold

I recently had the opportunity to listen to great coach Lou Holtz speak for about an hour. He is a simple man who lived his life with many challenges and the situations where he chose to excel are the ones he came out the most ahead. I took away from him that you will always have frustrations and obstacles in your life, you can't avoid them. You will always have ups and downs. It is your attitude and what you do in those situations that makes or breaks you, not the situation itself. Do you let it bring you down and stay down, or do you find the reasons to pop right back up and try again. You may lose a ton of times but you get back up and become a winner. You can excel in life when not a single person believes in you, you can't excel if you don't believe in yourself. I am currently reading this book that expands upon the ever popular Think and Grow Rich written by Napoleon Hill many years ago. It continues the teaching and principals and connects them to current days. Napoleon Hill once said " Live your life to the fullest, you may be three feet from gold." Half-way through this book there is a little blurb that says Sometimes you have to step back and look at your situation from a different angle to find a different solution. I think this can also apply to looking at your situation from a different angle to find the positive in the situation or the lesson that maybe you will learn to help you in the future, to turn it around. I have the opportunity to work with a lot of different people and situations in my day to day work that I sometimes wonder why certain people are brought into my life and why I have to waste time on others. I began to realize that by turning the situation into something positive I am able to allow the frustrating parts of my job fall far behind the reasons why I love my job. When you focus on what you love, what you are gaining and what makes you happy (even if they seem smaller than the obstacles or frustrations) it seems as if you are calmer, you have less stress and you actually can enjoy what you are doing. The frustrations, obstacles and doubts that I have sometimes overpower the reasons I do love and enjoy my job, it is then that the discouragement happens and I stop believing in how good I am at it, how much I care about others and why I chose to do it in the first place. These are all situations in which I choose to steer my negative energy into my work rather than boost up the positive energy. For a short period of time the complaining we do may make us feel better and when we can complain to someone else regarding our situation and get the empathy we are looking for it makes it better we think. If we can just spend more time focusing on what we are doing and why we are doing it we will see the end in mind. If we focus on what we don't like about something we are just wasting more time getting to that dream or goal that we have for ourselves, our family and our future. Remember life is a journey, you will have ups and downs, you will have obstacles and set backs, don't focus on them, learn from them, control your attitude toward everything, love one another, help people and always be true to yourself and others.