Life — It’s all about perspective.
As I sit here, thinking about the power adapter for my laptop that I left at work, I can’t help but feel a number of emotions coming over me. They aren’t emotions of anger, self deprecation or even annoyance. Rather, they are feelings of freedom, resilience and gratitude. These are emotions that I am still coming to terms with and so whenever I feel them, I really try to focus on why those emotions are coming up for me. What am I doing? What am I thinking? Some might ask how it is that I’ve never been able to connect with such seemingly basic emotions as freedom and gratitude, and to tell you the truth, i’m not even sure I know the answer to that question. What I do know, is that in these moments of reflection that I truly get clarity. I get clear on the difference that I am making in my own life and the lives of those around me.
A forgotten power adapter isn’t something to write home about, but the fact of the matter is, this lost time is going to have an effect on my workload for the next few days. The reflection comes in that I get to shift my mindset, to get clear on what kind of an effect will take place. I get to be clear that my perspective creates my experience. I make a choice, I can either allow myself to give into those feelings of inadequacy, failure and “nothing ever changes” or I can allow myself to understand that forgetting my power adapter is not the end of the world, a mistake was made and move on to what else I can be doing with this time.
What I found is that I was able to get past a major excuse that I’ve had about starting this book, that “I didn’t have time”. Now, as I sit here with a cup of my favorite hazelnut coffee hacking away on my iPhone, I feel incredibly energized. My thumbs can’t move fast enough.
So where did this change in mindset come from? To answer that question, we rewind to to December 2015, if I had forgotten something after reminding myself 100x, I would have been wreck. I would have given you a thousand reasons why this wasn’t my fault, how this was my fault and i’m a failure, how I shouldn’t have talked to my boss as I was packing up for the day, how rushing to get gas before picking up my daughter got me frazzled or even how it was her fault for having cheerleading practice so far from everything else in our lives I couldn’t just run home to grab an extra. I would have been incredibly angry, not only with myself but with everyone who came in contact with me that day. It would have completely ruined anything that I had planned and consumed me to the point of some form of self-sabotage. What I didn’t know then, was that in any situation, you have a choice, your perspective creates your experience, and for myself, more often than not, it was negative.
On a cold, Wednesday night in December 2015, I traveled to downtown Columbus and sat in a large room with about 150 strangers. As I sat there, stoic and pissed off, I thought, “What the hell am I doing here? Who are all these people? This better be worth it.” Little did I know, that the next 5 days, a seminar that I was “forced” to go to by my boss (a person who will play an integral part in my story) would start me on a journey that changed my life forever…
