Finding Inspiration And Happiness During Difficult Change - From A Little Wet Dog Named Jet

While in college in New Orleans, I lived with my best friend, Microphone Burnett, in a cellar apartment. One nighttime before drifting off to sleep, I heard the rainfall outside coming down in sheets. I felt very happy to be in a dry and comfy bed.

My adjacent witting ideas were of my bed shaking. Upon gap my eyes, I saw Microphone standing at the ft of my bed and heard his voice, "Bill, aftermath up, aftermath up!"

"Okay — what's going on?" I groggily replied. Microphone then said the most confusing thing to me, "Can I acquire on the bed with you?" I was fully awake now.

I knew Microphone like my brother, so I knew he wasn't suddenly attracted to me in a manner I was unaware of before now. Even so, I had to delve deeper. "Why?" I asked. He said, "Why? Put your manus over the side of the bed!"

I rolled over and my manus plunged into cold water. It had rained twelve ins nightlong and we had a ft and a one-half of H2O in our apartment. Mike's bed consisted of a mattress on the floor, so he had been flooded out of his warm cocoon. Soaking wet, he knew my bed included a framework and was off the floor, high and dry. Microphone is no dummy. He wanted a piece of it.

Understanding the situation, I welcomed Microphone onto my "raft"…BIG mistake. With our concerted weights totaling 500 pounds, the sagging bed soon became a immense sponge. Moments later, I was as soaked as the large wet rat that had just climbed on.

Still dark outside with no electricity, there was nil to make but put there...cussing under our breath, waiting for the sun to come up up. I say we hoped daytime would cast some visible visible light on what to make next.

At dawn's first light, everything in sight was under water. Suddenly, Microphone and I remembered our dogs, Max and Jet! We hadn't heard a cheep from either one. Immediately our concern for them became intense and frantic.

Jet was a Labrador retriever puppy and Max was a ninety-pound mutt. Since Jet was still being house-trained, he spent nighttimes in the wash room; he's the first 1 we went after. Upon gap the wash room door, there he was with his eyes and olfactory organ barely above water. He had a wide-eyed expression of panic, which changed to contiguous alleviation once he saw Mike's outstretched arms.

Now it was clip to happen Max. There was no sight or sound of him anywhere. We searched to no help and became very worried about how we would happen him. Relief came when I stuck my caput in the last topographic point Max could be, the bathroom.

There he was, hunkered down in the lone remaining dry topographic point in the full apartment, the bathtub. The H2O had risen to within an inch from the top of the tub. As Max switched glimpses between the H2O and me, he had the same incredulous look I'm sure Iodine did when Microphone first requested some space on my bed.

Before leaving to happen refuge, we lifted Max and Jet onto a reinforced ping-pong table. After pulling the presence door closed, I looked through the window to do certain they were still okay, just in clip to see Jet autumn into the water.

When we opened the door to deliver him, we realized Jet hadn't fallen off the table. A duck steerer had floated out of a closet. Jet didn't cognize how to swim, but he also had never seen a duck before…and instinctively, he wanted it. So, he had jumped off the tabular array and was swimming like a title-holder toward his heart's desire!

Years later, Microphone and I still happen great wit in our memories of "the nighttime when the H2O came."

Our experience throws powerful penetrations for success in leading change, conquering adversity, rising above challenges, and determination felicity and inspiration. When harmful and changing flood-waters rise up in your life, you have got three choices:

Choice #1: You can be like Microphone and happen a friend to affect in your

misery.

Choice #2: You can be like Max and retreat to higher ground, silently

wishing and hoping your challenge travels away.

Choice #3: You can be like Jet; you can larn how to swim and

focus on and prosecute something that brands your bosom sing

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes: There IS Life Outside the Comfort Zone

"Unless you change how you are, you will always have got what you've got". – Jim Rohn, The Great Challenge of Life.

Two of the best conferences I've ever attended shook me right out of my comfortableness zone.

You cognize how it is when you go to a conference; you usually hang around with the people you know, or the 1s who look the most like you. You usually sit down in the same portion of the room, even in the same chair if you can pull off it.

Conference #1 - We are the Conference

Right off the chiropteran we were out of our seats, rotating to a new treatment grouping every 15 minutes, until an hr had passed and we'd already interacted with every single individual attending the conference.

Initially there was a nervous energy in the air, eventually turning to exhilaration as everyone kept meeting new people and making personal connections.

It changed our idea process, opened our acquisition and deeply enriched our conference experience. The energy degree went through the roof. Everyone rated it as one of the best parts of the conference.

What these conference organisers understood is that the best acquisition we make at a conference usually come ups out of our interactions with other participants. Not only in discussing what we've heard from the "experts", but our ain thoughts and opinions. Our heads are stretched farther and farther by the different positions and points of view we hear.

Conference #2 - Get up and Dance!

These conference organisers also got us out of our seating every morning, but they did it with cheerful music and by inviting us to dance. It was energizing, invigorating and a whole batch of fun!

By the 3rd twenty-four hours of the conference, what seemed like an unusual and slightly daunting activity became banal and comfortable. And that's after lone 3 days!

Kind of brands you wonder, doesn't it? What other alterations could you acquire used to just as quickly?

When I'm leading workshops, I make my best to agitate delegates out of their comfortableness zone as well. I make this by sneaking into the room before the 2nd twenty-four hours starts, and shift around the topographic point cards.

From an abutting room, I watched as one participant switched her topographic point card back. She felt comfy in that seat, and just wasn't willing to stretch.

An organisation I used to work for asked me to turn to their low staff morale. People were suffering and there was a batch of fighting and conflict. I accepted the challenge and soon establish myself in a room with 20 angry people.

I asked them what was wrong, and spent the adjacent 45-minutes authorship their ailments down on impudent chart pages, that eventually filled the walls of the room.

As I started to turn to the issues and make suggestions, all of a sudden the choler was directed at me. One participated came right out and said, "Who do you believe you are? How dare you seek to change things around here!"

They were miserable. But they were comfortable. They were more than comfy in their wretchedness than they were willing to change and hazard uncomfortableness in order to better their situation.

When you're open up to change, you're cook for new and better things to come up into your life. You can begin little and pattern little changes. Construct the seeds of alteration by altering your modus operandis and environments:

Change the order of your morning clip routine.

Take a different path to work.

Shave at a different time of day.

Take a new social class at the gym.

Read a new magazine.

Read non-fiction instead of fiction.

Try a new restaurant.

Cook with a new combination of spices.

Choose person you admire and make something they've done.

Say, "Yes!" to something you would normally state "no" to.

Remember lining up to lodge your wage check at the bank? If person hadn't been unfastened to change we wouldn't have got the convenience of standard atmosphere machines today.

What new and better things could acquire used to if you stepped outside of your comfortableness zone?

(c) Ted Shawn Shepheard, 2007.