Keep moving forward

I have a pretty great life.  I have a job that I love.  I get to work with over 40 amazing people every day at The Redpoll Centre.  I have a family that loves me and challenging paintings and exciting contracts that keeps me busy in my free time.  But like everyone else, I have things that pop up in my life that take the wind out of my sails and test my resolve.  A negative comment, an unhappy child, an unsuccessful audition or project, and I still feel it in my gut as I did when I was 30 years younger. The difference is that at 48 years of age, I have learned a few things about resilience and recovery.

The seeds of my success are sown in soil rich with failure.

I've failed often and have had my fair share of set-backs and unexpected deviations from the path.  These are a few of the coping and overcoming mechanisms that have served me well.

KEEP MOVING FORWARD - this is a rather new idea for me, but it is the one that has served me the best in recent weeks and months.  Keep doing what you're doing, I think to myself, and metaphorically put one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward.  I'm hyper aware that inertia does not work for me.

FROM GRIEF TO GRATITUDE - the best tool to get me out of a funk is to find reasons to be grateful and ways of expressing and sharing it.  There are so many people in our lives that can use a kind and encouraging word RIGHT NOW.  Scan your Facebook feed, take a look around your home or workplace; I guarantee that you have something positive to share with someone that will make a huge difference to that person, and will help you change the energy in your day.

REFRAMING THE NEGATIVE - Wray Betts runs a series of radio stations in the Westlock area.  About 25 years ago, he was managing the station that I worked at in Stettler.  I was going through the most challenging period of my personal life at the time, and he planted this idea in me of taking the negative things in my life and reframing them into something positive.  Of course, when I look at all the things that kicked me on my ass (with apologies for the language), every single one had a positive element to it and led to something important, and often, life changing.  Listen to the most recent edition of IMPACT to hear the remarkable story of Michael Mankowski, and how something that seemed negative brought him and his partners to the position of being able to make the movie of their dreams.

GOOD THINGS AUDIT - we may get a thousand positive comments about something or one failure among dozens of successes, but human nature is such that we focus all of our energies on the one bad thing.  Sound familiar?  Don't worry, we all do this, whether we're able to admit it or not.  If you find yourself obsessing about one negative thing, take 30 minutes to execute a good things audit.  Grab a sheet of paper and start writing down all the positive things about your life that pop into your mind.  You won't forget about that one negative thing, but its impact will certainly be diffused.

Keep moving forward, keep doing what you're doing, find reasons to be grateful, and focus on the good things. You'll make it through the storm.