03 Jan Happiness is choice (JOHN C. MAXWELL)
I am amazed at the large number of adults who fail to take responsibility for their attitudes. If they’re grumpy and someone asks why, they’ll say, “I got up on the wrong side of the bed.” When failure begins to plague their lives, they’ll say, “I was born on the wrong side of the tracks.” When life begins to flatten out and others in the family are still climbing, they’ll say, “Well, I was in the wrong birth order in my family.” When their marriages fail, they believe they married the wrong person. When someone else gets a promotion they wanted, it’s because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Do you notice something? They are blaming everyone else for their problems. The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That’s the day we truly grow up. An advisor to President Lincoln suggested a certain candidate for the Lincoln cabinet. But Lincoln refused, saying, “I don’t like the man’s face.” “But, sir, he can’t be responsible for his face,” insisted the advisor. “Every man over forty is responsible for his face,” replied Lincoln, and the subject was dropped.
No matter what you think about your attitude, it shows on your face! The other day I saw a bumper sticker that read, “Misery is an option.”
We cannot choose how many years we will live, but we can choose how much life those years will have.
We cannot control the beauty of our face, but we can control the expression on it.
We cannot control life’s difficult moments, but we can choose to make life less difficult.
We cannot control the negative atmosphere of the world, but we can control the atmosphere of our minds.
Too often, we try to choose to control things we cannot.
Too seldom, we choose to control what we can . . . our attitude.
Hugh Downs says that a happy person is not a person with a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes. Too many people believe that happiness is a condition. When things are going great, they’re happy. When things are going bad, they’re sad. Some people have what I call “destination disease.” They think that happiness can be found in a position or a place. Others have what I call “someone sickness.” They think happiness results from knowing or being with a particular person.
I am impressed with the philosophy of the following statement: “God chooses what we go through. We choose how we go through it.” It describes Viktor Frankl’s attitude as he was terribly mistreated in a Nazi concentration camp. His words to his persecutors have been an inspiration to millions of people. He said, “The one thing you cannot take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”
Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, understood the importance of choosing a right attitude even in wrong situations. She was never known to hold a grudge against anyone. One time a friend recalled to her a cruel thing that had happened to her some years previously, but Clara seemed not to remember the incident. “Don’t you remember the wrong that was done to you?” the friend asked. “No,” Clara answered calmly. “I distinctly remember forgetting that.”
Many times people who have suffered adverse situations in their lives become bitter and angry. Over time, their lives will be negative and hardened toward others. The tendency for them is to point back to a difficult time and say, “That incident ruined my life.” What they do not realize is that the incident called for an attitude decision—a response. Their wrong attitude choice, not the condition, ruined their lives.
C. S. Lewis said, “Every time you make a choice you are turning the control part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, you are slowly turning this control thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish one.
Developing the Leader Within You & Developing the Leaders Around You
John C. Maxwell
