On any given day, but a LOT on most Monday mornings, you can look in your social media feeds and see quite the variety of posts about motivation. I’m guilty. I supply some of them. I also look through them and this morning I happened to notice just how many of them focus on outlook. When something that wasn’t part of your original plan happens, do you view it as an obstacle? Or an opportunity?
There seems to be the general belief (and I adhere to this outlook) that pessimists… negative minded folks tend to view every setback, every unexpected change of plan, every “failure” as an obstacle. They view it as something that is stopping them from reaching their ultimate goal. Interestingly, sometimes they are still going to reach their goal and it’s obvious that they will, but it’s not going to be within their originally projected time limit so they view the delay as failure. You know, if you’re in a race with someone and you reach the finish line behind them, then you failed to win that particular race, but you didn’t fail in completing it. You still finished the race; someone else just finished it faster. That’s a specific competition and you can’t really view life from the same perspective.
Optimists, on the other hand, those positive minded folks, tend to view almost everything as a challenge; an opportunity; a learning experience. When they don’t accomplish a specific goal within a desired time frame, they look for the lesson that could be learned on how to improve performance and make their goal within the time limit on their next attempt. For sure and certain, they don’t give up and believe that they are failures and always will be at that particular endeavor.
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The remainder of this essay can be found in the book “Farther Down The Road”
Farther Down the Road – Where does your life’s road lead?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CTJ1B2QR