No … I promise you I haven’t lost my mind, nor am I encouraging you to “shape shift” into an inanimate object.

One thing each of us can be assured of in life is that we’ll all experience a roller coaster of events and emotions that accompany those events.  People we love will die, people we work with will be dishonest and take credit for the things we do, and companies who we absolutely knew were going to buy from us … won’t.  You can be assured that in business you’ll experience just as much good as you will bad.

Wow … how uplifting huh?

Well, it doesn’t have to be a downer as long as you accept these facts as truth and prepare yourself for the reprocussions.

If you haven’t already, you might be quickly starting to understand what the title of this article is all about.

If not … let me explain.

If you have a thermometer hanging outside your kitchen window or out on your deck you probably use it to gage fairly quickly on how you should dress before you leave for the day.  That thermometer rises and falls based on the environment in which it resides.

Is that much different than most of us?  I don’t think so.

How many times have you told your kids or your wife to talk to you about something later, after you’ve had your first cup of coffee?

or

How about the last time you had a bad day at work and ended up snapping at your wife when you got home and said something like, “I’ve had a bad day, can’t you just cut me some slack?”

When this happens are you really being any different than a thermostat?  Not really.

You are allowing your environment to affect your mood and the way you behave toward others.  If you’ve already accepted the fact that your life is going to deal you an ever changing set of good and bad circumstances, and you are going to allow yourself to constantly be affected by your surrounding environment … how are you ever going to make any positive progress?

Plus if you do, how long lasting will that positive movement be when you have a negative event lurking right around the corner?

Now let’s take a second and look at the thermostat you have within your house.

That piece of equipment allows you to set the temperature and the internal mechanisms regulate the environment within your surroundings to make sure the temperature is exactly what you want it to be.

The human brain is very powerful and has the ability to be much stronger than a thermostat.  Each of us has the ability to regulate our emotions no matter what our surrounding environment deals us.  We ALL have the ability to look at these, so called, negative events that occur in our lives and learn from them so we can ultimately create a much more positive situation than we had before the event.

If you want to be successful you need to get to the point where you realize …

It doesn’t matter what happens to you in life, it matters how you react to those things that happen to you.

I know it is much easier said than done, but I would encourage you to make today a new day, and from this point forward, focus on controlling your emotions and the way you percieve the events that occur in your life.

Be more like a thermostat where your internal mechanisms (your brain) regulates your emotions and keeps you on a steady course.  Don’t be like the thermostat outside that rises and falls based on its environment.  That is exhausting and will lead you to a life of frustration and failure.

In the words of the character from the Adam Sandler movie “The Waterboy” … YOU CAN DO IT!  🙂