When you truly have someone beat and have the opportunity to make a public example out of someone, you have a choice.
You can choose to carry out your actions and forever make an enemy or…
You can choose to make a friend.
That’s the power of forgiveness.
Before the Coronavirus, it’s easy to talk ourselves into being too busy.
“I am too busy to _________ (read, sleep, exercise, eat better, play with my kids…).”
And now during Coronavirus?
“I am still too busy to _________ (read, sleep, exercise, eat better, play with my kids…).”
We can always find time for excuses.
Time is not the issue here.
Priorities.
GI Joe was famous for saying, “Knowing is half the battle.”
Except this isn’t true.
We know we need to eat more fruits and vegetables. We know that social distancing works against Coronavirus. We know that eight hours of sleep carry huge benefits.
And yet…
We misbehave. All the time, in fact. We stretch and justify. Knowing is not enough to change behavior.
Knowing may be the first step but our willpower is simply not enough to follow through. What we need is to do is focus on building the correct system.
Is the idea that when we are successful, we point to internal forces that got us there. We are likely to give ourselves credit for making the right moves.
When we fail though, we are more likely to blame external forces. “The dog ate my homework.”
That’s because our narrative works overtime to protect us from ourselves. We don’t want to be wrong, we don’t want blame, we don’t want to be judged. Everything is okay.
But not everything is always going to be okay.
Often, we make mistakes. We don’t need to blame the weather for running late when we should have left the house earlier (which really means we should have just gone to bed earlier the night before). And when things are working in our favor, if we are actually being objective, we can point to an area where we have received advantage.
Understanding advantage is an important step in developing humility.
Never too high. Never too low.
All highly resilient people have is this ability to say this phrase:
“The story I’m telling myself is…”
When we can take adversity and turn it into a learning experience, our quality of life improves.
It doesn’t change the fact that you were just diagnosed with a debilitating disease, or if your partner dumped you, or if your cat ran away.
What changes is what we believe, how we feel about the situation.
We can’t control all the elements and circumstance but we can choose how to respond to them.
If we tell stories without hope then we become more desperate.
Running a four-hour marathon takes practice.
Depending on where you are at physically, it isn’t unreasonable to start training six months (or even more) prior to a race.
Race day is but a small moment. Think about it, you’ll disproportionally spend four hours running the race and over 500 training for it.
This means that most goals we set, our time is spent not running the actual race but in preparation for it.
As a result, we get too caught in this mindset that we have to emphasize more training.
Let’s be clear though, training is an easy place to hide. Sure, we want our doctor that is preparing to do open heart surgery to have finished med school. And at some point, you have to show up for surgery.
Some of us desperately want things back to the way they used to be.
And perhaps, in some ways, with some time, they will.
But for many, it may seem the time to retreat and wait for things to go back to “normal.”
There is an alternative. When one door closes (and we know COVID-19 has done plenty of door slamming), another door opens.
Today is as good as any to write that book, to learn a new skill, and yes, maybe even take a risk to start a business.
The world is abundant with choice and opportunity. COVID-19 didn’t change that, it only revealed it. If you’re feeling stuck it might be because the choices you have made up to this point were sensible.
Be different this time around.
The less time we have, the more desperate we become.
The more desperate we become, the worst our decision making is.
Inversely…
The better the decisions we make, the less desperate we are.
The less desperate we are, the more time we have.
We are inundated with information. Constantly hit with the next urgent thing. All news today is “breaking” (Is there really any other kind?). Making things worst, we can’t stop checking our phones every five minutes to see if the world has ended.
And now, we’re are seeing how difficult it is to just work and go to school from home.
It’s difficult to stop moving. It’s not something this generation is used to. The ironic part is if we were able to keep everyone 6 feet apart from each other for two weeks the virus would die.
Perhaps the answer is we got to learn to slow down.
Slowing down to respond (rather than react) to the tidal wave that was coming could have saved lives. Slowing down the economic engine versus a full-on stop would have saved trillions.
There’s an old African proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We have to slow down if we are to go together. We can’t keep leaving people behind in the name of economic prosperity.
It turns out, the neighborhood you were raised in is one of the key factors in determining upward mobility.
And if you happen to live in one of those neighborhoods that are less than ideal, it is likely that 30 years from now, you will be in the exact same socioeconomic sector as you are today.
That is really depressing.
To think, especially for our youth today, trade-in decades of time and service just to be right back where you started.
Here’s the thing, if you were taught what someone else was taught, raised to believe in certain things, you probably act differently from how you act now. Poverty isn’t a character flaw but a system error. One that lacks equal opportunity and favors those who win the genetic lottery.
Josh Allred's Blog 