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Choose This Day…

February 27, 2010 in Choices, Development, Leadership with 210 CommentsChoose+This+Day...2010-02-27+20%3A58%3A41Perry+Holley

I just started reading the new book from Zig Ziglar, Emabrace the Struggle. I have always been a Zig Ziglar fan. My dad gave me some Zig tapes when I was young and I have always enjoyed his communication style and his message. If you have never heard him speak you should sample one of his lessons on YouTube.

What captured my attention and caused me too buy the book was a short video that his company released. I thought it would be his normal motivational “buy my book and learn about this” type of video. What it was instead was the story of the accident and resulting head injury that the 80 year old Ziglar had been through. In short, he took a fall down a staircase in his home and had a severe head injury from hitting a marble door frame at the bottom. The book is a result of his experience and resulting recovery. Although he is not the same as he was before he is now living out all the lessons he has been teaching me over the years; the lessons on attitude; the lessons on motivation; the lessons on leadership; the lessons on disciplines. The list goes on and on.

The greatest lesson that Zig is teaching now is a lesson we all need to learn. That lesson is that it is not what happens to you in life that matters. It is how you handle or respond to what happens to you in life that matters. The subtitle to the book is, “Living Life on Lifes Terms”. So many times I want it on my terms and when I don’t get it on my terms I develop a bad attitude or withdraw from those around me in some way. He revealed in the book that the progress he has been able to make so far is because he has chosen to have a good attitude EVERY day. He has chosen to be thankful for what he has and not what he lost. He has chosen to look forward and not back. He has chosen to be positive about the future and not pessimistic or negative. I think this picture pretty much says it all. When he was hurting most and trying to learn to walk and talk again he made a face for the camera. Priceless!

As we start a new week I wonder how many of us need to remember to embrace the struggle and choose to have a positive attitude. How many of us need to remember to be thankful for what we have and not what we have lost or have never had. Choose this day how you will walk. Inspire others with your positive outlook and upbeat demeanor. Choose this day!

Choosing Relationship Over Circumstance

February 20, 2010 in Choices, Growth with 172 CommentsChoosing+Relationship+Over+Circumstance2010-02-20+20%3A53%3A59Perry+Holley

My basement flooded again. This is not that unusual if you consider all the rain we have had over the past three weeks. The first two weeks went by with not so much as a drop seeping in even though there was over 15 inches of rain. But today, boom! The water decided that it was tired of waiting outside and it all came rushing in. At first it was coming in the corner of the storage room, but it soon found its way through the walls into every part of the basement living space. And I guess I should tell you now that this has happened before – twice. Each time it was some freak thing like no grass in the back yard to hold back the flow or five inches of rainfall in one hour that did us in. This was a bit unfortunate. Instead of looking at all the possible problems I settled for the most obvious problem and solved that. Finding the obvious kept us from looking for a deeper problem. Now there’s a life lesson for you: Never assume the obvious problem is the only problem; there is usually something else lurking in the shadows that will come back to get you when you think you are in the clear.

By now you are thinking to yourself, “What does this have to do with making good choices or choosing the right path?” It has a lot to do with it when I tell you what I observed during this mini-crisis in my home.

I have heard it said that it is not what happens to you that matters, it is how you react to what happens to you that matters. It is my experience that when disasters like this rock our family there are two ways we can respond; one, get upset and start blaming someone else for what is happening, or two, work together to do everything possible to minimize the destruction. Because this had happened before there was quite a good chance that option one would rear its head and make an appearance. But that is not what happened. I am here to tell you that everyone got up and got started doing whatever they could to stop the flow of water into our house. My daughter said it looked like someone kicked an ant hill. There were people running everywhere. Some were vacuuming up water, some were placing and replacing towels in the floor and some were moving furniture out of harm’s way. It was a great thing to watch and experience. There were tensions and frustrations of course, but everyone chose to make the best of a bad situation and not the let the circumstance determine our attitude. Each of us chose our attitude and let the circumstance do its own thing.

In the end we may not have saved the basement, but that evening around our house we did not need to work to save any relationships. In fact, we were having a good laugh at the way we all looked during the worst of the flooding. Best disaster dress – mom in her new rain boots and a baseball cap. Her first time to use her new boots and it was inside the house.

Do you allow circumstances to determine your attitude or response, or do you choose your response based on value of the people enduring the circumstances with you? Choose wisely!

FlashForward: Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda

February 10, 2010 in Choices with 150 Comments2010-02-10+20%3A47%3A16Perry+Holley

I am not much into TV when it comes to the “new shows coming this Fall!!”. I get more into home shows with projects that some guy on HGTV has convinced me that even an idiot like me can do it. The new series that run week after week make me nervous not knowing how much of my time are they going to consume? However, I saw the intro for a new TV show that captured my “choices not chance” ears.

The new show is called “FlashForward”. The premise of the show is that everyone on Earth goes unconscious at the exact same time for the exact same length of time, 2 minutes and 17 seconds, or something like that. The gotcha is that during the 2:17 they were all given a glimpse of their life six months from the time of the blackout. Some of them saw good things, some of them saw troubling things, and some of them saw nothing. There is lots of drama (and will continue to be for months to come I am sure) around what they each saw and how they will deal with it.

What really capture my attention as the idea began to unfold was how the characters were dealing with this piece of information. For those with a positive view of the future there was energy and excitement and a renewed passion for life. For those with a negative view there was hurt, anger and sadness. They were taking what they saw as a done deal. They saw it as what will happen, not what could happen.

Personally, this is what I want my daily walk through life to be like. I want to take a “flashforward” look at where I want to end up and then make the choices and decisions today that will get me there, minus the whole unconscious thing of course. If I determine that the future state is not looking right to me then I want to have the discipline and the wisdom to make a course change in my life. One of the characters in the TV show said, “we can use what we saw to stop what we saw”. That is true for each of us.

Have you taken a “flashforward” look at what your next six months to a year look like. Take some time today to look at the direction you are traveling and see if you like where your path ends up. More importantly, set a course today for what you choose the destination to be and be prepared to make small corrections along the way.

Twins Except For the Choices They Made

January 25, 2010 in Choices with 90 CommentsTwins+Except+For+the+Choices+They+Made2010-01-25+22%3A53%3A00Perry+Holley

An interesting story on ABC News tonight told of studies being done on sets of identical twins who were identical at birth, but different now. The story looked at the choices that each twin made through the years and how that choice affected their physical appearance. The first set of twins they looked at had made different choices when it came to smoking. The one who chose to smoke was incredibly obvious. In another case they looked at how stress affected the twin that had gone through a divorce compared with the one that stayed married. In another set of twin sisters one was a self proclaimed sun worshiper, while the other had a policy of staying out of the sun and using sun block when in the sun. Again the difference was very obvious. What really captured my attention was the statement by the one that had skin damage and looked 10 years older than her twin. She said, ” I knew that too much sun was not good and I was determined I was going to have a good time.” Well, there you have it. She made the choice and now she is dealing with the consequences.

I wonder if you had asked her many years ago how she saw herself looking in 20 to 25 years would she have declared, “I want to be old and leathery looking”. I am guessing not, yet she took the course, she made the choices of someone that was heading exactly for that destination.

I wonder how many of us have that same “I want to have fun” mentality because tomorrow seems so far away and the consequences seem so small today. This story was a great reminder to me about making wise decisions about my physical, mental and spiritual self so that I can reap the positive consequences in the months and years to come.