It's the struggles that will make you strong

Wouldn’t it be lovely if you got everything you wanted out of this life? Wouldn’t it be grand if you got everything and had no problems? Wouldn’t it be wonderful?

No! It wouldn’t.

Just imagine you had so much money you’d never have to work again. What would you do? How many holidays could you go on one after the other until you got sick of living out of a suitcase?

If you had a massive house and plenty of land, would you want the aggravation of cleaning it all the time, and keeping the grounds in a fit state? No? Then you’d need staff. Then you’d have the problem of sorting them out all the time. On top of that, privacy would go out of the window and you’d have cleaners inside, getting in your way, you’d be interrupted by people asking questions about what you want doing.

And if you’ve got plenty of money, you’d need professionals to help you make the most of it and accountants to help sort your finances, unless you want to spend your time doing that.

Here’s the truth – even if you had it all, you’d still have problems. Just different ones.

No-one has a simple ride. Check out the celebrities who are followed around by paparazzi everywhere they go. Do you reckon they get sick of that?

How about all these rich sportsmen, whose homes get robbed when the criminals know that they’re not going to be at home?

Or the superstars who, when out in their lovely cars, get car-jacked? I remember the two footballers who were attacked by a gang who wanted to steal the car. I remember Michael McIntyre the comedian, getting held-up and having his expensive watch stolen from his wrist.

Yes, they get problems. Like I said, just different ones.

I suppose here’s the point I’m trying to make.

We all have problems, we all have losses. That’s just part of life.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to swap my problems and losses for anyone else’s. I’m not ready for any of theirs. I can barely sort out my own.

And that’s the thing I suppose. The losses and problems (or as I prefer to call them, situations) usually are either things we can fix fairly easily, or they’re ones that can stretch us and take us out of our comfort zones.

And I’ve found that at those times in my life, it’s the overcoming of the situations and losses that gave me the greatest satisfaction.

Years ago, a mentor of mine, Bill O’Brien said something that has always stayed with me.

“Iron doesn’t become steel until it’s been through the fire, and it’s the struggles that will make you strong.” How true is that?

When things are going along swimmingly, it’s lovely, but I’ve never learned anything of use to me in those times. Don’t get me wrong, it's lovely when it happens, but even when things going just fine, it can become a bit boring. Not that I’ve ever had too long a burst of success to get too bored.

I find that any success I’ve ever had has brought along with it, it’s own set of problems that have needed to be solved.

Don’t take what I'm saying the wrong way. I’m not putting forward the idea that we shouldn’t want the best we can get. I’m always looking to move on.

What I’m saying is that we should look at all our problems in a different way. Like you, I cuss and I moan when things go wrong and I personally have had many things that have been drastic enough to feel sorry for myself over.

Indeed, there’s been a few times when I’ve had a pity party with myself and laid the blame on others. And at the time, it has been down to others.

On one occasion, I did that for over five years, blaming someone else for my situation. And that may have been correct when it happened. But after a few days, I needed to grow up and take charge of the situation.

Because in playing the victim for all that time, I thought I was fighting my way forward, but I wasn’t. I was absolving my own responsibility for my future and doing nothing about it.

I remember, to this day when that lightbulb moment happened, when I realised I was acting like a child. It was then that I perceived that whilst my situation had been caused by someone else, my thinking had been holding me back, eating away at me, sucking the life out of me.

I recall thinking that I was sick and tired of it. Sick of blaming the person every day (especially since the person I was moaning about, probably slept well every night). The only people I was hurting was me and my family.

From that day on, I lifted my chin from the ground got going again, and started to face my challenges head-on, sorting them one by one.

My self-esteem went up each time I had a little win, and that held me in good stead for the next problem.

And those problems kept on coming. And one by one, as they were conquered, another one would come, each stretching me a little more.

But I’m here to tell you that those problems, challenges and losses are what have helped me grow. They’ve made me a stronger, more well-rounded, and a more capable man than I was.

It’s the challenges in life that you overcome that make it interesting.

Yes, I’d like to have plenty of money. Yes, I’d like to drive a better car. Yes, I’d like to live in a nicer home. And yes, I’d like to have more holidays.

And all of them would bring their challenges along the way. Some I’d win, some I’d lose. Because that's how life goes.

I want to leave you with a little story.

******

I was sitting at a bar in Bill's Gamblin' Hall in Las Vegas being plied with free tequila by a chirpy barmaid in return for losing inordinate amounts of money on a poker machine set into the bar top.

Free drink as long as your gambling is the deal. It's a deal I like because I always feel that one day, maybe this day, I'll luck out on the machine, will win money and end up toasted for free.

A fella sits down next to me. If a crumpled pack of Marlboro could talk, he'd have talked like this guy. A voice carved out of black oak, tar and Jack.

"Hey. You winnin'?" he says, as he pulls on a cigarette through squinting eyes. He's about 50 with a face that hadn't just been lived in it had been rented out to a meth lab before being repossessed and demolished to make way for a 12-lane highway.

"I guess I'm about even, when you take into account the drinks," I said, the stock reply of any Vegas gambler who is obviously losing money but in denial.

He laughed a short rasping laugh: "Yeah I hear ya. Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you, my friend."

He wasn't wrong, though I seemed to be all too regularly a light snack for the bears in this town.

 "I'd just like to sit down one day and have a machine that didn't hate me," I said, the tequila almost leaking out of my eyes by now.

 "Yeah, I hear ya, just once maybe."

  "....twice or three times would be better," I added as another twenty bit the dust.

 He stopped his game, lit another smoke and leaned back in his seat and looked at me.

"That is where you are wrong, my friend. The reason you're here, the real reason we're all here is because we lose, not because we win."

What was this guy, some sort of guru high plains drifter?

"You reckon? I don't get much fun out of losing."

"Course you don't. But if you won all the time that'd be no fun either. It's the losing that makes the winning so damn glorious, my friend. 

"It's all about the losing. I'm telling you, no-one would play a game they knew they couldn't lose. There's no life in that. And that's why we're here, me and you, just to make sure we're still alive...to try and feel something."

 As he spoke, the freakin' machine dropped a full house into my lap and with it the best part of three hundred dollars. I was back to where I'd been an hour ago, just like that.

 "See, how good would that have felt without that losing streak? Not nearly as sweet. I'm telling you, my friend, life is nothing without losing."

 

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What YouSay When You Talk To Your Self...

Over the years, I’m pretty much convinced that I’ve been my own worst enemy. And I’d go as far as to say that the same applies to you.

And here’s why I think this is the case. Have you ever found yourself thinking any of the following; “ I can’t do that.” “I wish I could talk to people like ......... does? I’m rubbish at that.” “I’m useless.” “I’m fat.” “I’m no good at...” “I can’t.” The list is ongoing and endless.

The one I’ve been most guilty of is comparing myself to others. I’ve got a brother-in-law who can walk into a room and be talking to a stranger as though they’ve been friends for years. I’ve never been comfortable doing that. If I’m in a room full of people I don’t know, I’m always hovering around the edges.

When I was a teenager, my cousin was taller, more confident and better looking than me. I used to watch the girls flock around him and it made me feel like I was third grade. Can you relate to that?

It took me years to recognize that the reason I felt inferior to others was that I spent all my time telling myself that I was. I’d watch others and compare myself, and pretty much all of the time it was unfavourably.

It was also unfairly. We don’t know what other people’s situations are. On the outside, they may appear to be confident and have it all under control but what I’ve found is that they’re not perfect, and they have their own insecurities too. I think we all go through that, especially when we’re young.

It was in the 1990s that someone told me about a book called ‘What To Say When You Talk To Yourself.’

I thought that it was a silly title. After all, we don’t go around talking to ourselves all day, do we? People would look at us and think we were mad! But the truth is we do. Just not out loud.

When I was told about this book, I was sceptical. The reason being, I’d not long lost my business, and at the time, myself and my wife we eating beans on toast regularly so that we could feed our kids properly. We were doing everything to keep our heads out of the water, whilst at the same time I was beating myself up in my thoughts all day, even though, I didn’t realise I was doing it. I remember thinking, how was talking to myself going to improve things?

Outwardly, I was trying to move on, trying to rebuild our lives and yet I couldn’t see that actually, I was a fighter, striving to improve. All I could see was a loser, trying to pretend he wasn’t.

I read the book but didn’t take a lot of it on board on the first reading. 30 years later, I’ve probably read the book 10 – 15 times, each time accepting a little bit more, that the content in the book made sense and that by changing what I said to myself in my thoughts, I could improve.

It’s one of life’s mysteries as to how we believe it when we think negatively of ourselves and say that “we wouldn’t be able to...,” and yet we can’t believe ourselves when we tell ourselves, “we can.”

It took me into my well 50s to start to like myself and accept me for who I am. I eventually stopped telling myself what I couldn’t do because when I looked back over the years, I amazed myself at what I had done.

I realised that even though I’d been skint a few times, had lost a business and had to sell everything I had around me to not become a bankrupt, even though I beat myself up every day for years and thought of myself as a victim in the years that followed, and while all this was going on, I’d joined a hospital radio station and within 18 months was Chairman of the station and found myself mixing with the top people at the hospital in question.

Also, having taken my eldest son to watch a football match at our local football club, within 3 years, I’d joined the supporter’s club, become a committee member and then Chairman and also was invited onto the Board of Directors having guided the Supporter’s Club to raise the most money they’d ever raised, up until that time, in their history. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t do it all, many people contributed, but I did the majority of the planning and organising.

And at the same time as all this was going on, I was trying to build a new business at the same time.

I didn’t realise I had qualities that I didn’t know I’d possessed because I’d never had cause to use them before. And they weren’t apparent to me until another of the director’s who was a multi-millionaire company owner made me aware of them one day.

None of us knows the qualities and capabilities we have until we’ve used them without realising. I’ve not achieved anything close to many of my friends but that doesn’t matter. I’m travelling on my own road. I’m not in competition with them. I am in competition though, with myself. I’m aiming to be a better me than I was a year ago, a week ago, yesterday.

My greatest quality is that I’m open to learning. I made a pact with myself that I would never give up trying to be a better me.

My point of all this isn’t to boast that I’m someone special because I’m not.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I’m average. I’m better than that. I didn’t at one time think so but I do now. Why? Because a man who became a mentor to me once said, “Average is the top of the bottom, the bottom of the top, the cream of the crap!” Outspoken I know, but it rang a bell with me for some reason – at the time I felt like I was at the bottom and I didn’t want to be there anymore.

We’re all born with no skills, no attitudes, no negativity. We all start in the same place. If we all start in the same place, who’s to say where you can end up?

I love to see successful people. They do different things but they all have some similar qualities. I try to learn from them. I’m sure that we can improve ourselves just a tiny bit at a time. I try to pick up little tips from them and use them to get a tiny bit better than I was. And then find another.

And I sincerely believe if we can change our thinking, change the way we talk to ourselves about ourselves, then with effort and persistence, we can all get better. We can all be prouder of ourselves. And that’s an admirable position to be in.

It’s not about wealth, it’s not about fame because in the end they don’t matter.

In my opinion, the only person whose opinion of you matters is the person you face in the mirror each day. It doesn’t matter if your family and friends admire you if you don’t like yourself.

It’s taken me until now to realise that I actually like myself and who I am. I like my ethics, I like that I’m still striving to be better. I like that I’m still trying new things. I’m not where I want to be yet. I doubt I’ll ever get there.

I now like the person in my mirror. He’s been through a lot over the years. And he’s got to the point where when he talks to himself, he’s stopped telling himself how useless he is and now realises he’s actually way better than he used to think. And he knows that there’s still more to come.

A lot of the things I’ve learned along the way came from reading ‘What To Say When You Talk To Yourself’. I understood its principles a little more each time I read it. I’ve picked up something different each reading, something that has helped me realise I’m better than I spent years thinking I was. I’ve read that book so many times, it’s falling to pieces.

I’m aware that I’m improving. And I’m convinced that if I can do that, anyone else can as well. You’ll be in a fight with yourself and some of the time you’ll lose but there is a turning point.

I remember mine succinctly. And when you reach it and draw the line in the sand and tell yourself that you’re not going back over it, you’re on your way.

You will stumble, you will take the wrong path occasionally, but when the will is strong enough, the facts no longer matter. When you’re ready and make that decision, you’ve already won. You’ve just got to keep going.

In conclusion, what you say to yourself matters more than you realise. It’s not the only thing you’ll need to change along the way and it won’t be easy. But it’s worth it.

My hope is that it doesn’t take you as long as it’s taken me.

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