How to Navigate Bad Times

Allowing Failure

I watched Dave Ramsey's Town Hall for Hope, which was an excellent program filled with very down-to-earth and practical reasoning and talk.

Such practical thinking such as:

1. We are all responsible for ourselves, IOW, having someone else "take care of you" is not being responsible.
2. Fear eats hope and everything else.
3. Today's economy is not the Great Depression.  Check out these statistics.
4. If you do something stupid, you will more than likely suffer the consequences of it.
5. Do business with people not numbers or entities
6. Your work and businesses are in business to serve the customer not bilk the customer.
7. Capitalism works but there has to be morality injected into it.

And lots of other stuff that was presented much better than anything I could do.  Check out the site.  Lots of valuable information there.

My favorite is that Dave Ramsey has met a lot of good-hearted people who have wanted nothing other than to ease and solve the pain of others.  As Dave says, we need to love people so much that we allow them to fail. 

Failing is learning and it's learning at its very best and learning forever. 

This is the same rule we are taught as parents.  We love our children, and the last thing we want is for them to suffer or have a hard time of things.  But without these struggles, our children never learn.  If your child never tripped, he/she would never learn about cracks in the sidewalk, or what causes trips and how to avoid them and move on down the road to learn other important life lessons.

We all know people who have been rescued all their lives, and are they are a burden on the rest of us. 

Our lives are the same. The more we are rescued from experiencing the results of our mistakes and the rewards of our smart decisions, the more we learn.  If we are "rescued" from these, we never learn, and make the same mistakes not only to repeat them continuously, but may never know how to stop them much less that they can.  This is a life doomed to failure with the participant never knowing why.  Almost like hell on Earth. 

At the same time, looking at failure from a completely different point of view - one of a learning opportunity, affords us the chance to not only learn from our failure, but to approach it from a positive view.  This allows us to be in a much better and more effective state of mind to work through to a solution. 

Not only do we come out of these experiences learning, but approaching failure from the point of view that it is a learning experience, puts us in a state of mind that does not foster bitterness, anger, jealousy and resentment that can poison future relationships or endeavors. 

For me, this is the paramount reason that God entreaties us to give up revenge and Christ encourages forgiveness.  We humans are not meant to be burdened with these emotions as they eat and decay any positive and good feelings we may have.  This alone, is a compelling reason to give up these resulting negative and decaying thoughts in the midst of failure.  The next most compelling reasons to avoid these negative thoughts during times of failure is that it is almost impossible to see your way out of bad times without hope. And hope comes from positive and good thoughts.

Good thoughts then bring good feelings.  Good feelings then allow you to work through and correct or start again after your failure - they also give you the energy to work and keep going.

What faith offers is hope and hope is the beginning of blossoming in hard times.

The Epistle of Hebrews

Been studying this lately and the whole book is a letter written to the Hebrews about sticking with their faith.

This was written to a group of Christians who had undergone difficult times, came together, survived them, but had more difficult times ahead of them.  The author (sometimes attributed to Paul, but probably more to Barnabas, an associate and travel companion of Paul's, is most likely the author), encourages, exhorts and enumerates some guidelines for keeping together.  The readers of Hebrews were threatened not to worship and practice their religion and were most likely buckling under that pressure - so more persecution was on the horizon. 

The epistle is an encouragement to faith in various venues....enumeration of the "hall of fame" of prophets and people in the past who sacrificed; a list of things to be wary of;  a list of things to strive for; and don't loose your focus and/or give up.

It's this last point that is of particular interest, although this whole book is worth reading if you think your focus is wavering;  whether that be from lack of focus, chipping away of your resolve, laziness, overwhelming feelings of un-accomplishment/failures or feelings of unworthiness.  This book just about covers everything in 13 chapters.  I recommend reading through it with The Message (remember, I'm very liturgical, and this version seems to hit more at the meaning rather than some of the Bibles in the vernacular).  Also, it's worth it if you are wanting a more in-depth study, to check out Greek Bible Study site that is marvelously interactive.  You do have to sign up, but it is free and well worth it.

I'm not going to focus on all that (never fear - I won't bore you that badly!), but just on Chapter 12, which deals mostly with never giving up.

More than any other facet of the keeping-your-focus aspect of this process, never giving up is probably the most important, and the hardest.  "The Madding Crowd" can be a very powerful seducement from your focus and therefore your goals.  It's always there, and it always rears its ugly head.  It is constantly a battle to deal with.  For more on this, see the additional section below the bulk of this post.

So many great successes have succeeded strictly because they did not give up:  Winston Churchill, Sam Walton, Colonel Sanders and Patrick Dennis, who said he shopped his book, Auntie Mame, to all publishers starting alphabetically and accepted by Vanguard Press - as he says, you can see how many refusals I had!  There are a plethora of examples in my local industry (I live in the Energy Belt), where the boom and bust of the energy industry is commonplace, where 10 years ago, certain entrepreneurs purchased abnormally large quantities of oil and/or gas reserve rights, only to be scoffed at and pronounced the most idiotic, negligent and especially stupid throwing away of valuable funds that could have ever occurred in the history of entrepreneur-hood!!!!  Today, they are all very successful and sit on multi-billion dollar companies that are thriving and growing and "blossoming" in this tough economic climate.

The point is that not only are you not alone.  If you feel that your struggle is on and on and that you shouldn't/can't/ought not to go on - flush that thought down the toilet now!  This is a very common occurrence in this process.  You might be drawn off the fear a little by the comfort of knowing that many people have traveled this same road, and it is worth your time and effort to search out and draw from their experiences.  Some of them are already gone, but have written down their struggles, some may be close at hand, and all you need to is reach out to them to ask how they traversed their path and what was the tough part and how they got through it to give you ideas and a new look for your own struggle.

The other point to take away from this philosophy of "never giving up" is that it is always the person who remains standing that succeeds - not necessarily because she/he is still standing but because this person always got back up again and kept trying;  kept working toward her/his goals; kept going.  If you keep your attitude to the point where you have the emotional/spiritual wherewithal to continually get up from discouragement after discouragement, you will succeed.  I not only promise this, but I guarantee it.

Here's how.  Because standing up from failure time and time again not only teaches you how to not err again (hopefully you are learning that lesson - if not, try Hebrews 10:26), but also that learning makes your chances of failure less every time.  So that finally one of those times you stand up again, you do succeed. 

Now this is just part of the process.  This isn't the whole process, and please don't get discouraged.  That's not the message I wish to convey here.  What I want to do is inspire you to stay with the path you have chosen as your path.  In addition to your affirmations, meditations, prayers and visualizations, staying on course is a valuable and important technique in your tool box toward realizing your dreams and goals

If you remember nothing else from Hebrews, and there's a lot to draw on, remember to never give up.  And remember too, that you don't have to be brilliant to do this - just perseverant!

A few of my favorite things....

We all have our blocks and mean reds that we've collected through the years for one reason or another that may and/or can prevent us from reaching our goals.   And there are many resources out there that we can avail ourselves of that will produce amazing results, depending upon how much we take advantage of these resources. 

I liken this to the cafeteria line:  we can go through and pick out a nice lean meat, a couple of veggie side dishes, a salad, a glass of water or tea or we can go through and pick out a serving of buttered mash potatoes, a vanilla shake, and a piece of pie. Guess which one will last longer and not only give us greater strength, but lengthen our lives?  Duh!

Same is true of the resources and opportunities that are out there for us.  My particular issues are: fear and that I'm not allowed or encouraged to enjoy the fruits of my labor, sort of like the old Howard Jones song.

I looked upon the occasion of my recent financial struggle as an opportunity to not only improve the old issues, but to work my way through them to the other side of them so much so that it would convince me totally that I had conquered these old demons.

Two songs from Broadway that really reached out to me were:

• My favorite things from the Sound of Music
• I Whistle a Happy Tune from the King and I

Both of these songs are about positive visualization - that's it!  But what's so fun about them is that they both say what we are thinking - that we're afraid or just want a good feeling so we think about our favorite thing or whistle our favorite happy song, and poof, all of a sudden that fear and trepidation is gone.

Now why is it when we translate this to some more grand, that all of a sudden our mind kicks into non-belief.  It's OK to positively visualize our way into thinking about our favorite things, but it's not probable to think that this method will work with earning more money or loosing weight or bettering our love life? 

This sort of reasoning is beyond me.  If it's true for one, why not the other?

Well, it is true for both.  The truth is that it does work.  The simple and easy technique of thinking about our favorite things to get us into a better mood, can work just as well with more effort toward accomplishing greater goals and fulfilling greater dreams.

These songs show the power and empowerment of being able to think positive and good-feeling thoughts to bring about good feelings that will help us get our mind in the right mood to not only withstand bad things, but to also step up and accomplish greater things.

The stamina that is required here is not easy.  The higher and grander your dreams, the more stamina, energy, belief and resourcefulness is required. 

That's why it might be better to start with something simple and easy.  You need to see for a fact that the power of the law of attraction can really work.

If all you want to do is get up tomorrow morning and have a bed under your body, that doesn't require much stamina (or time for that matter). 

If on the other hand you want to not only have a bed, but a mansion to live in, that will require more time, stamina, resourcefulness and it will also require more time.  It will be possible, but it will require more of everything.

This isn't to say that I want you to re-evaluate your dreams and "grade them down" so as to meet something that you "think" will be probable.  That's not what this is about at all.

This is clearly meant to say to you:  If you're dreams are big, be prepared to spend some serious commitment and energy toward them.

In search of those magnificent accomplishments, I think of Winston Churchill who was defeated as PM before WWII for being a war mongerer when warning about the rise of the German Third Reich.  When he was voted back in as PM, he led England through its worst hours with such grace, elegance, stamina, perseverance that it is filled with enough quotes, anecdotes and stories to really give us a great wealth of comfort.  And of course England did persevere through those horrid times, and some of the greatest art, stories and literature came out of that era - that's what surviving those hard times does.

"Bigger the dream, the more God gets to shine" (Anonymous)

"Never, never, never, never give up." (Winston Churchill)