Today's Random Thoughts on Motivation

As I am thinking about my second half I have spent a lot of time over the past couple days thinking about goal setting. As an expecting teenage mom married to a slightly younger expecting teenage "senior in hight school dad" we were hit with a lot of growing up and responsibilities. Looking back on it I wonder how we all survived. My parents made it clear that they would love and support me but I was on my own, a pretty scary place to be at seventeen. We moved into an apartment with the money earned from selling a dune buggy. Thank goodness the wedding showers and soon after baby showers were well attended.

After my oldest son Johnathon was born we were forced to give up our apartment and move into my in-laws living and dining room. The rooms were set apart from the rest of the house and did have a little privacy. As a high school student I had hoped to go into acting and modeling and eventually get a degree and and become a buyer for a large department store. I thought I could make these two rather incompatible goals work in a city like New York. But as a teenage mom in a small town there isn't a lot opportunities for an 18 year old with a new baby to start a career.

I was a very shy and sometimes awkward child and my parents sent me to modeling school at the age of thirteen or fourteen to give me some confidence. While it didn't make my shyness go away it did allow me to develop the skills I needed to be in front of people. As a student I worked hard and focused on the performing arts because I had absolutely no talent for signing or dancing. But as a new mom the future became singularly focused on providing a home for our new family. Long range goal planning seemed like a luxury and took a back seat to getting our own place again and having enough money to buy diapers, food and gas. And that was usually the priority placed on our purchases too.

I started reading self-improvement books when I was about 19. I thought How to Win Friends and Influence People was the most amazing book I had ever read. I then found See You at the Top and Your Eroneous Zones and again I thought I had found gold. I truly believe without those pearls of wisdom tucked away in those books I would have never finished college and started a real career. And now as a I start on this journey through the second half I realize that I have forgotten some of those important lessons and may need to go back and visit some of those basic ideas that kept me motivated and allowed me to set out a plan that took me out of poverty and into a world that is usually only a dream for girls who attend their senior prom and have to leave their six week old baby with grandma.

Zig Zigler cautioned against stinking thinking and as a young person I always tried to be positive. He also said you must become a meaningful specific and not a wondering generality. As the CEO of two large organizations before I was thirty-two I can tell you there is a lot to this idea of being mission oriented with clearly defined goals. But as fifty-one year old women looking at the second half I fear that it might be easy to become a wondering generality as a matter of fact if I were being truthful I probably already am a wondering generality. It is time to get back on track and not any track but a track of my choosing.

Today's Random Thoughts

This past week I was sitting in front of a legislative committee with a client trying to stay focused on the subject at hand. My client was doing an excellent job explaining a complicated and no so very interesting topic (at least not to the general public) to the committee. Now you have to imagine that she and I and two colleagues are sitting in a large gymnasium like room with a crowd of public advocates from across the state. We are at a table directly in front of the crowd, facing a two-tiered dais filled with legislators. I am trying to stay focused and not let my facial expression reflect the glazed looks of our audience, when I remember a book that sat on my desk for sometime nearly 25 years ago. The title of the book was "This job should be fun." Now why that title and the brightly colored cover popped into my mind at that moment is unclear, except for the obvious, we weren't having fun. But no one has a job that is always fun. Rather, I think it was because of my current situation and my internal personal struggle of, for lack of a better term, has now become the story of the second half.

Now for those of you that know me, you can confirm that I am not very eager to reveal my age. It used to be because at the beginning of my career I was usually the youngest person in the room. I even once told a reporter who was interviewing me for an article that it was rude to ask a ladies age. He laughed and said he knew that but he had to ask anyway and repeated the question. I told him that my mother had always told me that if a person was so rude to ask a lady her age then it was not rude to decline to answer. I remember that event of 21 years ago like it was yesterday. We had just finished a cocktail party where I was being introduced to the community as the new CEO of the local chamber of commerce. At 30 years of age I was considered very young to hold the CEO position of one of the top five chambers in the state. Now that I am sometimes the oldest person in the room my view of the world is changing.

I am calling this my second half, though I will probably not live to be 100, because it feels more like a second half than the third quarter.

Over the past month I feel like the universe, or God specifically, is telling me that it is time to get serious about the second half. In the past month, my house was struck by lightning, jarring the house and leaving a gaping hole in the bedroom ceiling. In addition the strike took out about half of our homes electronics. The following week I was at the doctor complaining of some memory issues so she ordered an MRI. The following Sunday I felt an irritating scratch in my eye, which on the same day of the MRI escalated to an ulcerated cornea. Then to top it off while I am sitting at the Ophthalmologist office for my now very painful eye problem, I get the call from the Doctor with the MRI results and I have suffered a minor silent stroke at some point in the past. All this news came on a Monday and for the next two weeks leading up to the committee meeting with my client I was at a Doctor's office nearly every day.

Now the good news is I have seen a neurologist and she says that the stroke happened a long time ago with no apparent side effects and no reason to believe I am at any risk of suffering any significant issues in the future. She then gave me a dementia test and determined that my memory issues were all stress related. I know what day it is and can remember a random string of unrelated words. I can even draw simple and complicated shapes on demand. My eye on the other hand is going to have some long term issues. I lost all of my vision in my left eye due to the ulcer and raging infection. My vision is returning but there is significant scaring and it appears based on all of the Doctor's opinions that I will have to a cornea transplant in order for my vision to return.

So here I sit on a Saturday morning with more work than I can comprehend to catch up with and I am pondering what the second half is going to look like.

If I were honest with myself, and I might as well be because I don't think anyone else is going to read this blog, I have lost some of the motivation that I knew as a young person.

At seventeen I had already come in second in an national commercial competition in New York. I was a spokesperson for a local restaurant and appeared in weekly television and print ads. I had landed a couple of national print jobs, was set to graduate from high school a year early with honors and had been offered a contract with the Wilhelmina  Modeling Agency. But the day I was to go look at apartments in the Village in New York I got sick and had to cancel. It was July and I had planned on staying in New York but I just couldn't shake what I thought was a stomach virus. I had a round trip ticket back home so I went home and planned to return in August. But that stomach virus just didn't get any better. The doctor thought it was Mono. My father, always the practical one said I should enroll in the community college and not waste time since I was home anyway. I could go back to New York at the end of the semester after Christmas. Of course great plans of mice and men tend to change and the first day of class the Doctor determined that it was not Mono, commonly known as the kissing disease, but rather I had something far more serious, I was actually pregnant. I am certain of all the stressful news that the freshman on campus may have received that day, my news had to be at the top of the list.

Within weeks I was modeling a wedding dress and within a few months I was modeling the latest in maternity wear. I wouldn't go back to New York for years and my modeling career was over. My father had been right though I did not attend classes the next semester either because I gave birth to my oldest son, Johnathon, in late March. I had my second son when I was twenty and I was a single mom by the age of twenty-five. I may not have had a solid plan at seventeen but the path I went down wasn't even imagined.

I took a job as the director of an outdoor drama and moved me and kids into a RV at a state park our first year on our own. We ate at the theatre or peanut butter sandwiches every day for a whole summer because the raccoons chewed my gas line into and I didn't make enough money to replace them. The summer was stressful and by fall me and my boss knew this was not going to be my calling. So I left that position with two kids, no money and no job and moved into the upstairs of my parents house. It had been seven years since I lived in that house and while it had been home to me, it wasn't home to me and my boys. I had still not finished college but I was close. I had managed to meet some folks who were very helpful and within a few months I had a new position as Executive Director of a statewide tourism organization and the boys and I moved away to the big city, Louisville. I was finally on my own in a big city but taking care of two children and trying to start a business career is not always the most compatible jobs. But we struggled together. And we grew together. We suffered setbacks but for the most part we were having fun.

If it had not been for various books and tapes that I listened to between the age of seventeen and twenty-two I am certain that I would have never made it out of poverty. Even though I had the mental capability for college the hardest part is showing up and finishing. And with two kids and no money it was easy to find excuses to miss a semester or drop a class to two. But thanks to encouragement from my father and pell grants I did finally get a bachelors degree. During that time I also became an avid self help book person. When the world seems stacked against you as I thought the world was at the time you need reinforcements. And I found comfort and motivation from other's stories and the famous Zig Zigler quote, "Its your attitude not your aptitude that will determine your altitude." And as I consider the second half I think it is my attitude that I need to focus on first.

I think that may be enough random thoughts for the moment. The sun is shining, work to be done and I am beginning to get hungry. LOL!