Week 2 Watch Your Thoughts
“Truth”
Sometime around 6th or 7th grade I began to have difficulty concentrating. It showed up in my school work and specifically my grades. I was pulled out of class one morning and taken to the principal’s office. That particular event is still not clear to me even to this day. I do remember being asked lots of questions and taking several tests. In the end apparently they determined and told my parents in essence I was not applying myself. To make this even worse my complexion began to show the signs of being a teenager. Personal appearance and grades, the end all be all of teenage life.
I will tell you the next 5 years until way after high school graduation were difficult for me. The truth is I don’t remember much of it. I guess in my mind it was just too painful so I set it aside to move on. The embarrassment of struggling to concentrate and study along with the shame of thinking not only was I not very smart but physically flawed as well. Don’t get me wrong I fought to keep up a good front and did the best I could. Those who knew me then may have just thought I was just another struggling teenager. A nice guy but really nothing special. The truth is how I saw myself and the world around me in hindsight was distorted as a result of wanting to be what others seemed to be to me. Better.
In my thinking at the age of 14, as a result of looking at those around me, I decided that to be successful, I needed to be more than I was. I came to the conclusion that to be successful in life, and by successful I mean that the girls wanted, pursued, or made a fuss over me, the guys respected me, and people in general admired me. So with that bit of false wisdom I decided (1) I needed to be tall, (2) I needed to be handsome, (3) I needed to have great hair. That seemed to be the key for others why not me. Now that may very well be the roadmap for success at 14 but quite the disaster for lasting success in the real world. Yet in my thinking it made perfect since. Truth was I was not really any of those what I believed to be necessity’s for success.
It has been lots of years since then yet in many ways how I allowed my mind to run me then has to be managed, even today. I have had lots of life experiences, lived in numerous cities and states as a result of my work, been places and have had the opportunity to do things not everyone gets the opportunity to do. I have been kidnapped at gun point while sitting in my car at a mall in Houston Texas, I have ridden in a helicopters taking me to work on numerous offshore drilling rigs, as well as being in some of the most sophisticated manufacturing plants, petro chemical, food and beverage facility’s, as well as ridden on a giant tunneling machine while it was boring and setting the concrete walls as it moved along an underground train track 50 yards below ground in downtown San Antonio Tx. Not to mention the people I have met.
Ok let me just mention a couple LOL Boomer Isaisan, Vernon Jordan Bill Clintons lawyer, Mrs. America Debra Downs, General Brannon US Air Force, Pat Robertson, Actress Stockard Channing, The CEO and his wife of Exxon mobile, and many more. I unexpectedly was offered a job during an interview for sales position that required me to work as a corporate Chauffer for 12 months after a layoff. Their importance and success had nothing to do with me or changed how I saw myself for the better. I did learn a valuable lesson “work is about service not about self”. More on that later.
So what’s your point Dwight? It’s this, that even though my forward progress in life was going well, in my thinking more often than not, I was still that insecure teenager especially in what I wanted or thought I needed in life. So for many years I struggled, failed, got back up and failed again, got back up and so on. As I continued as most of us do to make my way along what I refer to as the Broken Road I realized in a rather dramatic encounter that there was actually a very simple yet difficult answer to my ongoing problem. “Change”
“It’s just words”.
Dwight L. Carter Sr.
Writer, Speaker, Author.
www.tellthemyourstory .org
[email protected]