The Worst…Brings out our Best !

Watching TV for me consists of flipping through the channels trying to find something positive and inspiring to watch.  The History channel, the Learning channel and the National Geographic channel seem to be where I end up most.   Last week while surfing the channels I ended up coming across a commercial from a company called West Bend.  The West Bend I knew growing up made small kitchen appliances and certainly wasn’t in the business of creating inspirational commercials that not only sold their products but left you with a strong message.   This particular West Bend is an insurance company and their commercials center around being your best when you are faced with the worst.  I think it is a brilliant ad campaign and to follow it up with their tag line, “West Bend” “The Silver Lining Company” is even cooler.

Terry Lyles, America’s Stress Doctor and Human Performance Engineer, likes to say “Expect the best but prepare for the worst” . There are the practical applications of this thinking that we can apply to our everyday experience that helps us better cope with what ever we are facing and then there is the deeper and lasting application that can change your life.

I like to think that I have spent most of my 51 years life looking for the good in everything, that certainly was the case for the first 47 when I enjoyed incredible success and happiness in just about everything that I took on.  But over the last few years when my guard was down, I let the opinions of others influence my thinking.  When I was faced with what anyone else would consider a major issue, I no longer tackled it myself, I tried to tackle it by committee, unfortunately the committee wasn’t on the same page with me.  While I was saw the cup as half full, those that surrounding me always saw that cup as half empty and worried about all the bad stuff they expected to happen.  I had done a poor job of inspiring the troops and bringing them to the level that had always served me well.   All of sudden my knowing every situation would work out was outweighed by an army that expected it not to work out and worked hard and ultimately convinced me that in their opinion I was  not in their words a “realist”.  Funny thing though, for 47 years, my definition of being a “realist” worked pretty well for me, I made incredible amounts of money, bought my dream home, improved my dream home with more funds than I purchased it with, travelled all over the world, gave my kids everything and experience they could want and it was all easy because I knew I could create anything I wanted.  For 47 years, everything flowed to me like magic,  friends would tell me that everything I touched turned to gold and that I always landed on my feet when ever there was a down turn and you know what they were right.  Those first 47 years were incredible but it wasn’t the best I could do because I wasn’t as disciplined in regards to managing my thoughts as I needed to be.  I let the outside world seep in to my head, I let well-meaning friends and associates try to bring me back down to earth and they certainly did.

So after 47 years of living an incredibly fulfilling life, the wheels came off because I did not manage my thoughts efficiently or did they come off because the Universe needed to find a way to tell me to “kick it up a notch”  to really bring out the best that I could be.  The past 3 years were pretty horrible by anyone’s standards, losing my home of 25 years, losing many loved ones to cancer and other diseases and losing everything I had created materially during those first 47 years.   I needed the Worst, to shake me up so I could bring out the Best !  and baby you ain’t seen nothing yet !

Truly bringing out your best requires massive action and when it comes to managing your thoughts and getting your head in the right place it calls for massive infusions of “The Right Stuff”.  In my case,  the first thing I did was to quit listening to talk radio and news on TV while removing myself from the political discussion of the day.  Once you do that you realize that the least intelligent life forms on the face of the earth are our politicians and elected officials and it doesn’t matter which party they are in, they are all small thinkers focused on advancing a personal agenda.  The next thing I did was to fill my car and Ipod full of the most positive and enlightening audio material I could find.  And finally, I keep a personal written journal and a video journal to record my thoughts and to remind me of the reality I am going to create.  The next 51 years will be hundreds of times more incredible than my last 51 years.  The Universe has so much to offer and you can find it anywhere.

Let me leave you with a little story from last night while having a conversation with my son.  Another part of my massive action plan is that I have taken on additional positions ( I won’t call them jobs because I don’t see them as such)  that pretty much fill up 20 to 22 hours of each 24 hour day, 7 days  week.  One of those positions happens to be as a night manager at convenience/gas station.  I took the position because I truly wanted the opportunity to interact with people and see if I could make a difference in the lives of people who visit that store when I am there.  I didn’t even care what the position paid, I am not even sure I asked.  I think the person who hired me wasn’t sure what to think as he told me I was way over qualified for the position and I told him that was a good thing that I wasn’t even considering this a job.  I think he thought I was nuts, but he hired me anyway.  Back to the conversation with son who couldn’t believe his dad was going to work at a gas station.  He told he could get me a job working at the place he does unloading trucks and stocking shelves overnight for twice the money.  He also told me that how much you make is much more important than whether you enjoy what you are doing…really ?  The wisdom of a 22 year old ! and an illustration of how one person’s reality is totally different from someone else’s.  The bottom line is I look at everything I do as an adventure, as new experience, as something that may take places I have never been before.  Life is all about experiences and finding new and interesting experiences is most of the fun.  I wonder how much more people would enjoy life if they looked at every single thing they do as adventure that may take them well beyond what most people would think.     Whatever you do, let “The Worst..Bring out the Best” and soon you will understand that the worst is what gave you the best.

Credit Checks, Background Checks….and not necessarily the rest of the story

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“Must be able to pass background check”  This phrase appears in almost every help wanted ad there is today.  Companies have gone crazy over doing complete background checks on job candidates and the companies doing the checking and investigating are making a lot of money in the process but do these background checks really tell the whole story or just give the employer a snapshot in time ?.   I am not exactly sure when all of these exhaustive background checks started, but I do know after personally hiring hundreds if not thousands of people in my 25 plus years of owning and managing companies that I really never learned much about any of the people I hired until they worked for me.   References never really accurately assessed whether a candidate would be a good employee, the only thing that ever worked for me were long interviews and a deep look into the soul of the person I was interviewing through direct eye contact.  I guess I hired on gut feel to be honest, but for the most part my gut feel served me well.   I had my first experience with a background check today as part of applying for a position and it made it very clear to me how damaging these reports can be without telling the whole story about someone.

This happens to be my story and while the message I want to deliver is how you can overcome any obstacle, some obstacles that are appearing for people today are not only unfair but unjust.  In my case, I feel like I have come to a place in my life where I can overcome any obstacle thrown in my path and the trick is looking for the good in every obstacle.  Here’s what happened to me, I have been trying to find any job I can to supplement my income and help me dig out of the financial hole I am in as result of my business failing.  I applied for almost 600 positions and emailed off over 100 resumes, I finally got a call back and an interview with a major  Gas and Convenience store chain.  The first interview not only went great it was a lot of fun and the company seemed like a great company with great pay and benefits.  I got a call back for a second interview which also went great and I was told that the HR department would be calling me to finalize everything so they could bring me on board.   While applying for this job I of course had to agree to the background check and requested that a copy of the report be sent to me.   At the first interview, I told the recruiter that my credit was horrible as a result of my business failure and the foreclosure of my home, she told me not to worry about it that while it would come up when talking to their HR people it would not have a bearing on their decision to hire me.  Let me stop here and mention what I think about the current FICO credit reports,   they only give you a snapshot in time of the most recent history, in my case I personally had perfect credit from the time I was 16 and got my first Daytons Department store credit card until age 47 when the economy tanked and my business failed.   So my credit report stinks because of the last two years, nothing in the credit report mentions my perfect credit for 31 years, my American Express Platinum card with no limit that was never paid late from 1983 until 2007,  the 20 plus cars I paid off early without a late payment, none of that history matters with today’s credit reporting system.   So you have excellent job candidates out there who are unable to get a job because their credit stinks because they lost a job or had some crisis that was no fault of their own.  Go figure, there is no justice in that system.   So that covers the credit check but what about the background check ?

The background check could be even worse than the credit check.  Here’s what happened to me, my background check came back today with an adverse action letter which means that something showed up on my criminal background check that I didn’t disclose in the application.   The application specifically asked if I had ever been arrested, which I never have, it then asked if I had been convicted of a crime with a side note that said if the conviction had been expunged you should answer no, so I answered no.  What the report showed was that I was charged and convicted of disorderly conduct in 2001 and the way it was worded on the report you would have to assume I was arrested and convicted.   But here’s the rest of the story, what actually happened;  on February 15, 2001  I was watching my son who was 11 at the time practice with his ski racing team.  I saw him get on the lift and also saw a gang of about 10 snowboarders follow him up the lift.  It took quite a while for my son to come down the hill but when he did, both of his ski poles were broken in half, he had holes in his ski jacket and he was crying, when I asked what happened he said the snowboarders ganged up on him, broke his poles and beat him up.  I immediately ran to the chalet to look for the security people but couldn’t find them anywhere, I then went to the car and got my son another set of ski poles.  When I returned to the ski run where my son was practicing, a group of snowboarders showed up at the same time as my son, my son immediately said “those are the guys”  I calmly looked over at the tallest one in the group, he was about 6’2″ to my 5’10” and with his helmet, goggles and size I figured he must be in his early 20’s.  I asked him why he had his gang beat up my son, his response was an expletive filled rant and threat that his gang was going to get me next, that was it I lost my temper and grabbed the guys jacket and told him never to threaten me of course then a bunch of other parents showed up and the event was quickly ended or so I thought, the next thing I know the snowboarder has called the police and I find out he is 17 not 22.  When the police arrived, I calmly told the police what happened and asked them what they were going to do to these kids for beating up my son, their response ” it’s your son’s word against these 12 kids” we have nothing to go on, but you sir can not touch a child !  So now I am the bad guy, well it turns out the police called the kids parents, they wanted nothing to do with the situation (bet it wasn’t the first time) and I was free to go and was told nothing would happen unless I got a letter in the mail from the county prosecutor.  So for the next 5 months I worried about the situation until the letter showed up charging me with assault and ordering me to appear at the Dakota county court.  This was so unbelievable, I didn’t know what to do so I hired an attorney who I had met at a baseball game (word of advice, don’t hire attorney’s you meet at baseball games, even if they have successfully defending pro athletes in DWI cases).  So the attorney and I show up at court (with my wallet several thousand dollar lighter)  My attorney has a closed-door session with the prosecutor and comes back to me and says that the prosecutor is a friend of his and that he has worked out a deal, all I have to do is plead guilty and they will charge me with disorderly conduct, give me a small fine and clear the record after 1 year.  But I am not guilty I proclaimed, the attorney said this is the best way to handle this, you can never win when there’s kid involved.   So while I disagreed, I just wanted it over, we proceeded to the court room and the judge said, I understand that deal has been reached, the prosecutor said yes and described the deal.  The judge then asked if the victim (the 17-year-old kid) was ok with the deal, here’s the mind-blowing part where I knew I had been had by everyone except the judge,  the prosecutor said, “Your honor I have attempted on at least 40 occasions to contact both the victim and his parents and neither one of them wanted anything more to do with this case, the Burnsville police have also attempted to contact the victim and his parents over 50 times and they had the same result.  So here I am pleading guilty to a crime I am not guilty of, would have easily been found innocent of, because the victim never would have shown up and the best buddy, the attorney and prosecutor both got what they wanted.   I was so upset, I asked the judge if I could tell my side of the story for the record, he allowed me to do so and gave me a look like he didn’t know why I agreed to the plea agreement.   Anyway, the deal was that after one year, this misdemeanor would be removed from record.   For years I was a ski racing official and had to undergo a background check each year before my officials license could be renewed, since I passed the background check without a problem every year, I assumed the court had removed everything from the record as I was told they would.  It wasn’t until today that I was reminded of that ugly incident and it may have cost me the opportunity for a job that I desperately need.  Injustice…only a part of the story and you tell me if this incident should affect my chances of getting a job.

So where is the good in this ?  Well, I have to say that God and the Universe always has a plan and I have to believe that the reason this happened today is that there is a bigger plan for me and that I am not supposed to spend my time working at a convenience store.   The thing is, when things like this happen to you, it is not always apparent why but I guarantee the reason will be revealed to you and you will find that things always happen for a reason.  So I could be furious, I could stay up all night thinking about this but instead I am waiting for something even better to come along and the sign that this happened for all the right reasons.  Joe Vitale is a guru of mine and he says when you are focusing on dreams or writing your life scripts and discussing goals you should always say “my goal is to achieve this or something better”.  The other thing you have to thing about is the old saying, when one door closes another one opens.   Today instead of getting upset about a setback look at it as being just a step closer to achieving what you really want in life, the last door that needs to close before that ultimate door opens.   You are in charge of writing the rest of the story, don’t leave it up to anyone else.

Don’t Stop Believing !

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Sitting here this morning realizing I hadn’t posted a new blog entry in almost a week.  I had a pretty good run there for a while, the ideas kept flowing and I had more material than I had time to write.  My mind was totally blank trying to figure out what to write this morning when just like magic, I am looking at everybody’s daily facebook updates and I see a status update from one of my kids ski coaches “start shopping for airfare now for fall ski camp” and immediately nostalgic thoughts of following my kids to ski racing camps swept over me.  Of course with the personal financial crisis of the last couple years my first thought was feeling bad that I couldn’t do that any more because I couldn’t afford it, then suddenly the song starts playing in my head…”Don’t stop believing…hold onto that feeling” and I immediately was reminded that, “that feeling” is what it is all about.  When you truly believe and know that you can do things, you can !.  I know it sounds simple but doing a thorough analysis and having the opportunity to spend some time with a recent college graduate and incredible entrepreneur I met at Target Field, I know it had worked for me in the past and I know when I focused on “not losing everything”  I lost everything.  When you proceed confidently and know you can do something without a doubt, it always happens exactly the way you visualize it.

Crazy thoughts started popping into my head as ‘Don’t stop believing” continued to play in the background.  I thought about taking a trip to the Caribbean this fall like my wife and I always used to do to celebrate the anniversary of our first date on November 1, 1975.  I thought about going to Colorado in November to watch my son train for the upcoming ski racing season and for some strange reason, a thought came to me to look up the address of our home that we lost to foreclosure in December of 2009 on Google earth.  Now the home issue has been particularly sensitive for me, I haven’t been able to drive by the house we lost and lived in for 25 years, I get physically ill when someone mentions it and for the most part I just had been trying to completely erase it from my mind.   But for some reason this morning, something was telling me to look up the house on Google earth, so I looked it up and there beside the satellite photo was an ad from a realtor saying to look at this listing… so I clicked on it and up popped the listing for the home I lost.  Unlike the last 12 months when mentions of that house made me feel sick, this morning thoughts of hope were rushing over me.  I read the ad for the listing and took a look at all the pictures they had posted.  I think something amazing is happening, first, I thought someone had bought the house and moved into it, second, I thought even if we could have stayed in it I couldn’t afford to fix all the problems that had cropped up with the house over the past few years but when I looked at it, no one had bought it and someone had fixed all the problems with it.  It has a new roof, new windows, the theater in the basement has been restored, the ceiling in the kitchen has been redone and the light fixtures that needed to be replaced have been replaced.  It looks brand new inside and out and my yard that I worked so hard on for all those years still looks great.  Can you guess what my next thought was ?  It was  an unbelievable, I should buy it back thought !  Once again….”Don’t Stop Believing” started blaring in my head. How I could I possibly buy this home back before someone else gets there hands on it ?  To pull that off I would have to come up with millions of dollars to dig myself out of debt, pay everyone back and pay cash for the house because no one is going to give me a loan.  Millions of obstacles, huge barriers and the words impossible haven’t even crossed my mind.  Am I back to being my old self where I could make the impossible happen ? am I going nuts ?  Should my family find some serious psychiatric help for me ?  I choose to think that I am back and better than ever. 

Dreams can become reality, you just have to really believe and know they are going to happen.  I spent the last few years worrying about and focusing on trying not to lose things, trying to keep my business alive and trying not to lose my house.  You might think those were admirable things to focus on but in fact by thinking that way (trying not to lose) I was doing exactly the thing that made me lose everything.  If I had focused on growing the business, improving my home and setting goals for new things to attain, I can guarantee that I wouldn’t have lost everything.   I don’t like to make excuses but it is important to find the cause of your issues, I believe mine all started with a CFO I hired, we would have weekly meetings where he would present spreadsheet after spreadsheet, projected on the wall, showing me when my company was going to run out of money.  Guess what ? we ran out of money and got into a mode of never having any money.  In 27 plus years of being in business I had never taken the approach of looking at when I was going to run out of money and I never did run of money until our focus became “when are we going to run out of money”.  We should have been focused on the things we needed to do to generate money and looking at spreadsheets of what were going to do when the money came in.   A very successful mentor of mine once told me that there are only two things in business: Growth or Liquidation either you are growing the company or the company is going out of business.   I think the same can be said for people as well, either you are learning and growing in your personal experience or you are liquidating everything preparing for things to shut down.  It all comes down to what you think about most.             

As we head into the fall of another year are you heading into the fall of your life ? or are you focused on building yourself up and preparing for another Spring ?  My little journey of the past few years that took me down the wrong path is being quickly corrected, it just took getting the right mental GPS turned on.   No dream is too big, no dream is impossible and fixing the past (including buying your foreclosed home back) is not only possible it easily could become reality if you “Don’t Stop Believing” !