Once you replace
negative thoughts with positive ones, you'll start having positive results.
Jerry was the kind of guy you love to hate. He was
always in a good mood and always had something positive to say. When someone
would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, “If I were any better, I would
be twins!”
He was a unique manager because he had several
waiters who had followed him around from restaurant to restaurant. The reason
the waiters followed Jerry was because of his attitude. He was a natural
motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Jerry was there telling the
employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.
Seeing this style really made me curious, so one
day I went up to Jerry and asked him, “I don’t get it! You can’t be a positive
person of all the time. How do you do it?” Jerry replied, “Each morning I wake
up and say to myself, Jerry, you have two choices today. You can choose to be
in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood.’ I choose to be in a good
mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or I can
choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of
life. I choose the positive side of life.”
“Yeah, right, it’s not that easy,” I protested.
“Yes it is,” Jerry said. “Life is all about
choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose
how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You
choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line : It’s your choice how
you live life.”
I reflected on what Jerry said. Soon thereafter, I
left the reataurant industry to start my own business. We lost touch, but often
thought about him when I made a choice about life instead of reacting to it.
Several years later, I heard that Jerry did something you are never supposed to
do in a restaurant business: he left the back door open one morning and was
held up at gunpoint by three armed robbers. While trying to open the safe, his
hand, shaking nervousness, slipped off the combination. The robbers panicked
andshot him. Luckily, Jerry was found relatively quickly and rushed to the
local trauma center. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care,
Jerry was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his
body. I saw Jerry about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he
was, he replied, “If I were any better, I’d be twins. Wanna see my scars?”
I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what
had gone through his mind as the robbery took place. “The first thing that went
through my mind was that I should have locked the back door,” Jerry replied. “Then,
as I lay on the floor, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to
live, or I could choose to die. I chose to live.”
“Weren’t you scared? Did you lose consciousness?”
I asked. Jerry continued, “The paramedics were great. They kept telling me I
was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the emergency room and I
saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really
scared. In their eyes, I read, ‘He’s a dead man.’ I knew I needed to take
action.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Well, there was a big, burly nurse shouting
questions at me,” said Jerry. “She asked if I was allergic to anything. ‘Yes,’
I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply…
I took a deep breath and yelled, ‘Bullets!’ Over their laughter, I told them, ‘Iam
choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead.”
Jerry lived thanks to the skill of his doctors,
but also because of his amazing attitude. I learned from him that every day we
have the choice to live fully. Attitude, after all, is everything.
Courtesy : Baltazar-Schwartz