Here’s a quick story that I picked up years and years ago from a training by Brian Tracy, who’s a particular favourite of mine.
And it’s about a preacher (now this won’t be word for word but you’ll get the gist of it)…
A preacher who is trying to come up with a topic for his sermon the coming Sunday, and he is really struggling for this and coming under a lot of time pressure.
And this is compounded by the fact that his young son keeps coming into the room and begging him to play with him, and he keeps fobbing him off, saying “I need to finish what I’m doing son”.
Anyway, one final time his son comes back in again begging for him to stop and play games with him, and the preacher caught sight of a magazine lying open on the coffee table, and it just so happened to be open on a picture of the globe…
And he suddenly got an idea…
He tore the page out of the magazine, ripped the page up into pieces and said to his son… “Son, this is the deal, you go away and put this picture back together, make the world complete again, get it all put back together with all of the right bits in the right spots, and when you have finished that task, come back and ask me again. Even if I have not finished what I am doing I promise I will drop everything, and I will play with you”.
And his son was really happy with that and he had all of the motivation in the world to go away and put this picture together.
But his father thought… Great! He’s going to be hours, and it’s going to give me plenty of time to come up with the topic for my sermon, and it takes the pressure off.
Anyway, literally 15 minutes later, the door opens and his son walks in, and he’s got a perfectly completed picture of the world. His father is absolutely staggered by the amount of time it has taken him. How short an amount of time it took for him to put this picture together. He found it absolutely staggering!
So he asked his son… “Son, it’s amazing what you’ve done. You’ve done really good job and I am going to honour my promise. I’m going to drop everything now and to play with you, but you must tell me, how on earth did you manage to put that picture together so quickly?… … I thought this was going to take you a lot longer than it did”.
And his son simply turned around and said… “Dad, I noticed that on the other side of the page was a picture of a man, and I figured that it would be easier to put the man together, and I knew that is the man was right, then the world would be right”.
And the preacher instantly said… “My son thank you so much. You have now given me my topic for my sermon on Sunday… If a man is right, then his world will be right!”
And, that’s what I wanted to share with you today… … If you are going through any kind of situation in life or business where you seem stuck, frustrated, and things aren’t perhaps happening the way you want them to, look inside first.
Often the challenges or problems we’re encountering in life, are generally emanating from ourselves first. Don’t look outside of yourself, look inside, see what you’re contributing to the situation, and see what you can fix there first.
Just a little tidbit of advice for today 🙂 OK, I’m gonna cut it there… … Hope you’ve enjoyed this post, I’ll be back with plenty more soon.
Warmest
