Learn to Respond Differently
Hey team. All right, so here we are. I recently saw another quote and it got me to think. I just got back off vacation and I saw this quote while I was on vacation. It made me think of a number of things, so I thought I’d share with you some of my thoughts. I hope it helps you too.
It says, “The same lesson will appear in different forms until you learn to respond differently.” The same lesson. Have you ever had those moments where you’re in déjà vu—that moment where you’re thinking, “This isn’t the same person, but this is the same kind of situation I had three years ago or two years ago or whatever it is”?
You quit that job. Or you broke up with that boyfriend or girlfriend. You went on in life for a while, and then you started dating somebody else or took another job or whatever it was. You find yourself back in that same, similar-feeling situation. I think there are situations that test us and want us to grow, and we will continue to take the test until we pass it—until we respond differently—instead of continuing to do the same thing.
If you always run from a situation, even a job, you’ll eventually realize the grass isn’t always greener somewhere else. It’s not always true because usually the thing that kills the grass is us. We step onto it and bring into it the dynamic that creates part of our problem, because the problem usually rests in how we handle things.
Life is difficult. Anybody that tells you life is easy is probably trying to sell you something—and for $39.95, you can get a set of knives with it. Life is difficult. It punches you in the gut. It’s tough. How we deal with life, what we do in the process, and the choices we make help us through it.
Doing hard things is hard. Quitting while it’s easy only makes it harder and harder, because you eliminate choices in your life. I remember talking to a young man one time who had quit eight or nine security jobs. He came here looking to work for us, and I asked him why he quit those other jobs. He listed a whole bunch of reasons—my boss was horrible, they didn’t understand me, they didn’t give me time off—and I said, “Well, you’re not going to want to work here, because the bosses are going to be difficult, we might not give you time off…” and I listed the same things he had already dealt with.
Life is hard. You’re not always going to get your way. I tell David this all the time. He gets upset and says he’s frustrated, and I appreciate that he knows his emotions, but yelling, screaming, hitting, or getting angry isn’t going to help him accomplish what he’s trying to get. The consequences will only be worse.
When David or Jonathan was about three, they would throw their legs out, fall on their butt, and say, “If you don’t get me candy, I’ll never eat candy again.” I’d tell them, “I think you really need to think about that for a second, because I’m not sure this is going to work out the way you think it will.” Threatening to never do the thing you want because you can’t have it right now doesn’t accomplish anything.
Unfortunately, in my life I’ve run into 35-, 45-, 55-, even 75-year-old men and women who have found themselves still being Jonathan or David because they never learned. Life will always continue to be difficult until you learn how to handle it. You will run into the same test and the same situation over and over for a hundred years until you learn to deal with it differently.
So, embrace those things. Learn to grow and handle things differently. Don’t just throw your feet out and scream and yell. Don’t hit, don’t get angry. And don’t quit. Don’t walk away from the relationship, from the husband, from the wife, from the kids, from the job. Every time we make those mistakes, the consequences are deeper and more painful—yet we still have to take the same test somewhere down the road.
All right, guys. God bless you. Have a wonderful week. I’m excited about fall coming up, mostly because the kids are going back to school. Keep being valuable. Nothing less will do. I’ll see you next week.
