Daily Gratitude: “We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.”

What is defeat anyway?

One definition we don’t often see is “to be frustrated or thwarted”. Yes it can also mean to fail but I think fail is so concrete. Do we ever really fail? I don’t think so. I think we learn lots from what are perceived as failures. Therefore, how can we fail if we learn? But we certainly can be frustrated.

I also believe we mess ourselves up by thinking of winning and losing, failing or succeeding. Nothing is ever that black or white. We, ourselves, have imposed the idea of what winning is. I have never been first to cross the finish line in any race, especially the one that means the most to me, Vol State. But I have only “failed” once and that was the first year when I didn’t meet the cutoff times and got pulled. So, just because I didn’t cross the finish line first, does that mean I was defeated? No, it just means I didn’t cross the finish line first.

I think that’s what this quote is trying to tell us. It’s all a matter of interpretation and perspective. Technically I’ve encountered defeat in all of my races, every single one. But I’ve never been defeated because I didn’t use the defeat as either a measure of my success or as a determination of my worth. I just accepted the defeats and decided what I wanted to and needed to do for the next time.

I don’t like the phrase “don’t give up” either because there are always circumstances where it is important to give up. So we need to get away from all the allegedly motivational words and find full sentences that mean something to us individually. We’re way too quick to just hop on the bandwagon of someone else’s creation. I prefer personalization. And I prefer to personalize my defeats so that I don’t feel defeated!

Keep learning and applying what you learned. You may apply it to some other endeavor but knowledge doesn’t do a lot of good if you don’t use it somewhere.

Daily Gratitude: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

I see people resist this all the time. They will continue to bang their head against the wall, trying in vain to change something. When one thing doesn’t work, they try another. They do this over and over again.

Why? You’d think their heads would hurt from all that banging. But you know what? It’s less painful than realizing you have to change and then trying to figure out how to change.

The universe will continue to put up these walls until you recognize there are no doors or windows and you accept that it’s time to go find a mirror. The answer will lie within that mirror.

Stop fighting and ask for guidance as to what you need to change and how. Whenever you ask for that guidance and are sincere, it will be presented to you. It’s worth it. I’ve been there.

Daily Gratitude: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

Have you ever had the experience of being around one or more people and you’re talking about something you’ve all seen? Pretty soon, though, you start to wonder if you’d been someplace different besides there’s no way you saw what they saw.

It’s like that in everyday life too. People interpret what they see based on their past experience and their emotional state. And that most likely is different than your background.

This matters for two reasons. The first is that it will help you at least understand why someone may respond to something differently than you do.

It will also help you take some time to figure out what you are actually seeing compared to what you are looking at. This might help you gain different perspectives on what’s going on around you.

Another fun thing to do is to see what you think of something today compared to what you thought last week or year. You may not be able to do this now but try to test it from today forward. Make notes. Just see if your mood perhaps might influence what you are seeing.