Up Your Outlook

Day in and day out, we go through our paces. We eat, sleep, work, and train, and do all the other things that make for a regular day. Most of it we accept as just part of life. Some of it, we take to heart. We do our best, sometimes getting in a muddle and once in a while doing just brilliantly.

How you do is NOT who you are, but sometimes we associate our performance with our person.

Ever watch a tennis player who was having a bad day? Such a person can start calling himself names such as “stupid,” or even resort to throwing or damaging his racquet. Usually such behavior just brings on more of the same performance problems, and the downhill spiral continues. On a day when everything goes right, an athlete feels entitled to shout, “I am the king of the world,” as Cassius Clay did after his completely unexpected defeat of Sonny Liston on February 25, 1964, when 43 of 46 sportswriters picked Liston to win. Peter MeWilliams changed the consciousness of the people when he brought forth a new concept in his 1995 book, “You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought.” Negative or positive, our thoughts are heard by every cell of our body, and each cell responds accordingly. Where nerve messages begin their trip to every cell of the body from the brain at the speed of light, hormones slowly travel through the circulatory system at a relatively glacial pace. Yet those very hormones affect our future thoughts.

Like waves bouncing off the walls of a pool after a big splash, or echoes repeating on and on, the hormones and nerves bring the same slowly fading message repeatedly to our cells. Successful performances bring on more successful performances, and failures bring on more failures. Practice wisely, so as to succeed time and time again. Once that fight was won, and Clay declared himself to be “The Greatest,” he remained The Greatest, in his mind and in ours, to this day.

Banana Island Escape