Return To Honor

These are either the “best of times” or the “worst of times,” as Charles Dickens wrote in his Tale of Two Cities, depending upon how you choose to look at them…”choose” being the operative word. It’s all a matter of choice, really, even if you’re broke and facing a foreclosure, in how you deal with that dilemma. What will ultimately come of it depends entirely on how you choose to handle it.

If you have a bad attitude about what’s going on these days, you’re going to have some pretty bad times ahead…even if the economy should happen to turn around and real estate values go back up again. Your health and sense of well-being also will likely be affected negatively, and the worse you feel about any of that, the worse it will get.

If, on the other hand, you look for something good and decent in everything that happens…even the “bad” things…they will improve. Pollyanna was right…and now is the ideal opportunity to put her philosophy to the test. I have, and I can assure you that I’m well-qualified by now to tell you that it’s true.

A man I know fairly well runs a series of very large entrepreneurial training forums, and at one point he portrays in a very convincing way the nature of what he refers to as “fearstorms.” He uses film clips from “Jurassic Park” and a couple other very convincing movies to demonstrate how even the most seemingly menacing situations are just mental and emotional anticipation of things not always real. We make them real by fearing and resisting them. That’s not to say that what’s going on the world right now isn’t real, but rather it emphasizes the importance of taking charge of our lives and finding better, more effective ways of dealing with both real and imagined threats to our well-being.

WE get to choose how we feel about it…and our history books, movies, books and many personal stories of overcoming adversity in the world confirm over and over that we can not only get through difficult times, we can grow stronger in the process.

Find ways to feel better, love more, laugh a bit and trust yourself to make it through any challenge, and to do so with courage, honesty and integrity, and no matter what the difficulty may be that you face, you can and will get through it. Hate it, twist around it, deny it or manipulate people to help you get around it, and times will get harder for you. Accept it, deal with it, be honest about it and find ways to be kind and loving with those around you, and the best of times will surely be upon you…no matter what dark clouds may be out there.

They’re only fearstorms.

Don Kirchner
http://ReturnToHonor

I recently saw a trailer for a new movie, “The Visitor.” I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’m certainly going to because the tag line hooked me: You can live your whole life and never know who you are…until you’ve seen the world through others’ eyes.

The trailer went on to show a man bored with his life who, by chance, is exposed to the lives of people less fortunate than him. In a few short minutes, I was swept up into his new outlook as he began to reach out to others and use his professional skills and insights to make life a little better and more meaningful for them.

Have you looked at the world through others’ eyes? I have…and now I can hardly do anything but that. I was born into a fairly respectable family…a career Army officer and mother who raised us as morally as anyone in the Midwest, where we were all from. But he bailed out early in my life for reasons known only to his soul, and I was left to make crucial decisions way too early for that busy little mind of mine to handle. As a result, what should have been a pretty decent future became for a while a series of jail and prison cells.

I was forced to discover that life was very different for a whole lot of people outside of my protected military upbringing. Those people had lived through outrageous challenges that most people can only imagine through graphic portrayals of prison life in movies, books and television programs.

What I experienced, once I got over the initial fears and posturing that goes on between ethnic groups and different cultures, was a common human thread…men who were struggling with the same fears, angers and remorse…albeit often hidden…that I was.

Once I began to use my education and communication skills to help them better understand their behavior and how to change their attitudes and their outlook, I discovered a whole world of men who could overcome anything…and many who actually wanted to. They just didn’t know how…nor had anyone on the outside willing to help them make the lasting changes needed. More often than you might believe, I had hardened criminals with tattoos and scars all over their bodies in tears as they told me stories of their childhoods and how much they wanted to be respected and cared about by society.

Whether you’re dealing with prisoners or former prisoners, or people who are merely prisoners of their own minds and negative attitudes, the willingness on your part to see the world through their eyes can and will make the biggest difference in bringing about deep and lasting changes in the way we live our lives and build toward a more meaningful future. If you will pause from time to time and be willing to see the world through others’ eyes, your world will change for the better…guaranteed.

Don Kirchner

http://ReturnToHonor.org

It’s hard to know what’s right and what’s wrong these days. So much is coming out in the news and on the Internet that seems so convincing that either all is lost or all is saved, depending on how you choose to view things. Either way, Ph.D.’s and stalwart economists and political analysts are obviously so confused and conflicted that anyone onboard this “ship” of ours has got to be terrified as to who’s at the helm and what sort of charts are they using to navigate us through the storms ahead.

Having been through some storms of my own that on a personal level make what lies ahead of us not so scary to me, I’m here to say that it’s all part of the journey we’ve all known secretly or otherwise was bound to come. “Life runs in cycles,” a very wise old mentor of mine used to say. “If we would just step back a bit and look at the patterns, we could predict the future pretty accurately.” He was 94 when he passed away with his Daytimer still in hand, and he’d run businesses as big as any that are now in various stages of bankruptcy and collapse. He’d seen it all, through World Wars, recessions and the “Great Depression,” and he said with a smile, “It’s all just an exercise in consciousness…and sometimes it’s better just to ride the horse the direction it’s running.”

Yes, there’s trouble ahead…and some people are going to get hit hard. But it doesn’t have to be all that hard. What my old friend was saying, in essence, was that once you’re moving, stay with it and enjoy the ride as best you can. How you get to the other end is a matter of your choice of attitude. Fight it and resist it, and you only make it harder on yourself. Fight it and resist it to the extreme, and you’ll most likely not ever see what’s on the other end.

At several points in my own ride through life, I’ve been at what appeared to me to be a dead end, but I always managed to take a deep breath and plunge ahead, only to find sensibility and mysteries unveiled. Recently, at one of the worst times in my life, I chose to keep a truly positive (as opposed to faking it) attitude, and the most apparently unlikely person to have any resources with which to help me showed up…and became one of my biggest supporters and newest “best friend.” That’s actually happened to varying degrees many times along the way, and I can tell you unequivocally that it’s worth every trial and every sorrow.

Show up for others in your life, no matter what, and don’t give in to the doomsayers and “analysts,” and your ride will prove memorable…even enjoyable––regardless of what it might look like right now. If enough of us do that, those storms will blow over with a whole lot less damage and destruction, and like the end of the movie, “Titantic,” we’ll all raise our goblets in toast to the ride of our lives.

Don Kirchner

ReturnToHonor.org