Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy

Welcome to Day 51 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.

This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom.

Suck it Up and Deal With It

Thank you for joining us for our 7 day a week, 7 minutes of wisdom podcast. Each day I will provide you with bite size nuggets of wisdom that if consumed and applied will become a part of the very fabric of who you are.  As with any significant changes in life, these changes will take time, but the changes that result from this wisdom will start to take root and grow into a large and solid tree. This is Day 51 of our Trek, and today we are going to look at how to deal with those issues of life that are thrust on us, especially when we have little or no control over them.

We are recording our podcast from our studio at The Big House in Marietta, Ohio. Being able to work from our newly renovated office on the 2nd floor is a real blessing.  The new large windows provide a nice view to work from.

After spending the last nine days focusing on how changing your thinking can dramatically change your life, today we are going to put this newly learned information into practice.  So, let’s break camp and head out on the trail.

As we are hiking along with our new knowledge gained from our twelve waypoints, our plan is to make use of this knowledge on our 20 mile Trek today. The first part of the trail is going rather smoothly, and we are making great progress. We find a nice clearing and break for lunch before heading out again.

Suddenly, we see dark, ominous-looking clouds on the horizon in the direction that we are heading. But, we must move on towards our destination anyway.  As we continue on, the wind picks up and starts to blow dust and twigs at us. We don’t like the looks of what we are heading into, but we press forward.

Soon the rains starts – small drops at first, then larger, and then sheets of rain start plummeting at us.  Before long, it becomes much more difficult to keep solid footing, but we continue forward. As we head down into a ravine, we hear and then see a rush of water from a flash flood about 100 yards in front of us.  It completely obliterates the trail that we are supposed to take.

Now what do we do? We don’t want to go back, as that does not lead to our destination, but now we can’t go forward. At this time, we don’t have a safe trail in front of us. It is time to panic, to give up, and to wish we had never headed out today. None of those options will help, and so it is with life sometimes.

When we run into these unforeseen events, we must put into practice all of the thinking skills that we just learned last week.

I have lived enough years to realize that the crises, for many, are certainly inflated due to past unwise choices that have been made.  Some people like to live in continual drama because it gives them a certain sense of purpose, attention, or accomplishment by having something to combat.  I see this in personal and business interactions frequently.

Regardless if the crises are self-imposed or completely out of your control, how you deal with the issue is your choice.  The tools that we gain each day on Wisdom-Trek will help to navigate life when it becomes treacherous as in our story today.

None of us are immune to crises, whether it is health-related, financial, relational or otherwise. Some crises can be inflamed by our own decisions in each of these areas, but others may be completely out of our control.

On a personal/business level, we have recently experienced two such storms.  Due to the lack of sales for one of our clients, they were not able to retain our services on a monthly basis.  Within a month of that,