As I sit here and write this, I can reflect on some great events in my life. The birth of my children, getting married, building a business that made me a millionaire and improved the lives of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people and having a career that is rewarding in every way. At the same time, a very wealthy man who seems intent on my financial destruction has filed multiple lawsuits against me personally, which cost me that business, contributed to my wife divorcing me and I'm going through the IRS audit from hell.
Guess what? Life right now is perfect. Perfect is different than preferred. That doesn't mean life is fair. It means life is a mixture of good and bad for everyone.
Imagine you are floating above your city at about 15,000 feet, just looking down at your community. What do you see? What is happening? It's kind of hard to see, but you do see that the community is alive with people and movement. To get a better look, float down to about 3,000. Now you can see cars, houses and buildings. What you are seeing is life.
As you look down on that community, someone is being born, some people are laughing, some are dying, some are crying, some are making love, some are being abused, some are studying, some are sleeping while others are engaged in the full spectrum of activities. You are seeing life and while you are looking at life, you know that from birth to death, at any given moment, people in your community are experiencing the full range of good and bad. That is life. Each day you hear the siren of an ambulance screaming by tells you someone is having a worse day than you.
That is a macro view that can be drilled down to a micro view of your own life, or mine. Our lives are a mixture of good, bad and everything in between. It's what we choose to focus on that determines our outcome.
The most successful people are able to turn the negative events in their lives into lessons that will accelerate their recovery and success. One major difference in how successful people and how people who struggle view the past is in what they attach to a past event. Successful people will either strip the emotion from a negative event and only take forward the lessons learned or they will use the emotion and pain of the event to propel them forward.
Sometimes you will hear a successful person in an interview being asked about a bad event or action in their past. Often, they disassociate so much from the event that they describe in the third person as in, "Even Michael Jordan has some lessons to learn..."
People who struggle tend to hold on to the negative events of the past. Instead of disassociating from what happened they associate with it. One of the key realizations I made after getting blasted with lawsuits and a sad divorce is to not let those events define me.
Quite easily I could have thrown in the towel, opened a karate school and literally retreated back in time. But, I spent years to develop the programming, thought patterns and strategies I'm discussing in this article. There was no way I could allow myself to bail. Having a positive attitude is easy when things are going well. The better you get at creating a positive outlook and approach to life the better things go, even when they don't go so well.
When you are able to reframe your world into alife is perfectperspective, you begin to see the lessons life offers you more clearly. You develop a curiosity about what is going on around and to you. Through these lawsuits, many friends have asked me how I handle it so well. My answer is that it's been a fascinating process to lose my business, my marriage and much of my savings. It's taught me a lot about myself and how others respond to you when you are in a situation like this. The situation continues as I write this article. In fact, the situation is the inspiration behind my writings. I would not have been inspired to write this nor anchored the lessons it teaches so deeply had I not been going through this stress.
There is no doubt also that the success of my rebuilding process is a direct result of the lessons I teach. They worked for me and they will work for you. Resilient optimism is not about being happy, go lucky in the face of negative events. It's the ability to create your own "light at the end of the tunnel."
