“The tragic or the humorous is a matter of perspective.”
~Arnold Bessier
Dragging myself away from the drama unfolding in Joplin, MO (1 hour from my house), I sit here feeling like a spoiled brat.
For 24 hours, I’ve dealt with issues surrounding the launch of my new coaching program SWITCH90, wondering why things aren’t happening the way I envisioned. Last night, my shopping cart went down 45 minutes before the introductory teleseminar. Further technical difficulties kept interrupting me throughout the call, which I allowed to take me off focus and I went to bed wondering if anyone got anything from the time invested.
This morning I started the day answering questions from people who were interested and deciding or those who had purchased but wanted more details. Somewhere mid-morning, I caught myself wondering if I should even be rolling out a program where I’m so heavily invested in so many people’s lives. “Do people really want to achieve this level of breakthrough?” I whined to myself.
Fortunately, I have people in my life that catch me in those moments and talk truth into me… also known as, calling me on my crap!
I also serve a God that has a strange way of steering me back to the very things that I teach when I seem to have forgotten them. Tonight He used my 6-year-old daughter and her ability to focus on the empty half of the glass. I’ll spare you the details and cut to the part where I’m being the brilliant father and giving her a stern talking to about being grateful.
“Sweetheart…you’re going to have to learn how to appreciate things as they are. It’s okay, even healthy, to want things to be better, but if we can’t be grateful in what we have now…what makes us think we’ll be any better off with more? There is always something to be grateful for and we have the privilege….to live…..our lives….in gratitude at all times…..”
I felt like I shifted into slow-motion while fighting to complete the sentence. “…we have the privilege to live our lives in gratitude at all times.” God showed me my own hypocrisy in the innocence of my daughter. It isn’t about what goes wrong, but instead it’s about what goes right. If we are always wanting to improve without appreciating “what is”… we set ourselves up for continual failure and dissatisfaction with life. Nothing is ever good enough!
So my precious little Release Party for SWITCH90 didn’t go as planned… big hairy deal! It still went better than 90% of my peers in the industry are experiencing right now. I still have a base of 1,000′s of friends that enjoy what I write and talk about and even seem to benefit from my stuff. There are fewer people who will make the time and emotional investment to participate in a program like SWITCH90… but that’s how I designed it, so what’s the problem? The problem is that I fell into being ungrateful.
To reinforce my lesson and send me in here to confess and show you that issues don’t go away for anyone…even the gurus…I walk into our family room just as a dad is being interviewed on the news. He’s lost his son in the tornado in Joplin and they still haven’t found him. Through his uncontrollable tears, he still expressed gratitude that his wife and daughter were safe.
I don’t have any problems. I’d give every scrap of my business away right now and start over if it would bring that father and son together.
Even that is easy to say, because I know that it won’t, but saying it reminds me that hardship and adversity are matters of perspective. I learned some of that when our family escaped with our lives when our home burned, but I ran out the door with my son in my arms. I don’t have any problems.
What I do have is some embarrassment, a heavy dose of reality, and an opportunity to witness to you about our obligation to be grateful. We should plan and improve, there’s an obligation to be our best too. But as important as our quest to maximize our potential is to recognize the brilliance at our feet.
I’m grateful for you.
PJ
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