Be Your Best

Todd Gifford – Success Coach

I found out several weeks ago that one of my friends had passed away.  It happens to all of us, and as we get older, it will happen more frequently.  The real troubling thing about this situation is how he died.  This one really rocked me.

I was contacted by my friend’s son to let me know his dad had passed way.  The last time I spoke to my friend’s son, I think he was only about 6 years old.  He is 21 years old now.  This friend is someone who I got to know very well in the early 1990’s.  I spent a lot of time around him in my job and he was someone that I highly respected and my wife and I got to know his entire family.  After that time, we had moved away, as did he and his family, and we moved on with our families and lives.  From then on, we had only stayed in touch by phone occasionally, some emails, and exchanging Christmas cards.  Regardless of how often we communicated, I considered him a very good friend.  Not sure about you, but there are certain people I know and no matter how much time goes by in between seeing or talking to each other — the next time you talk it is like no time had elapsed.  This was one of those situations.

When the son contacted me via online, I gave him a call right away.  When I asked if his dad had gotten sick, he explained to me that his dad had attempted suicide, immediately determined that he had made a huge mistake, called 911 himself, but ultimately could not be saved and passed away that night after coming off life support.

I was nearly speechless, as I simply could not understand why my friend would attempt to take his own life.  Wonderful family, beautiful home in a great place to live, healthy, and just a super person to be around or associate with.  Even as I write this I am still somewhat in disbelief.  This was a very tough phone call for me, and I can only imagine what it was like for the son I was speaking with, and the rest of their entire family.

After I hung up the phone, my mind immediately went into the mode of thinking about the last time I spoke with him.  Why had I not spoken to him more recently or frequently?  When I spoke to him last, was there anything he said that I should have picked up on?  Could I have done anything that might have made a difference?   I was racking my brain to try to figure it out.  Ultimately, after talking to a number of people including my wife about it — there is no ultimate answer that makes you feel any better about it.  Although I don’t want to keep beating myself up about it, I do want to take something important from it that is constructive and apply it going forward.

My takeaways:

1. Yet another reminder that life is really really short.

2. Keep in touch with friends and family more often than you think is necessary.  Work hard at it.

 

The 6 Reasons Why People Give Up

This is what I was going to write about in this month’s letter before I learned about the death of my friend.  But I think there are some interesting and potentially spooky parallels between what happened to my friend and the topic of why people give up.

In the book “Mojo”, Marshall Goldsmith outlines the 6 Reasons Why People Give Up.  I wanted to list these here because they are so universally applicable to just about everything we do, everything we want, and anything we want to achieve in life.

The better we can manage these ‘give up reasons’, the better off we will be in our quest.  Not being able to overcome these 6 reasons means falling short of goals, underperforming to expectations, and not achieving what you want.

6 Reasons Why People Give Up:

1. It takes longer than we thought.

2. It’s more difficult than we thought.

3. We have other things to do.

4. We don’t get the expected reward.

5. We declare victory to soon.

6. We have to do it forever.

It is not just a matter of discipline.  Optimism has as much, if not more, to do with success than self discipline.  Remaining persistently optimistic despite repeated setbacks is a “behavior” that must be mastered.  Most think that optimism is just a mindset, but it is most effective as a ‘behavior’.  Behavior is action — mindset is thinking.  Action wins over thinking, although both are important.  Goldsmith in the Mojo book is not suggesting that you employ ‘blind optimism’ and forget about realism or realistic thinking.  But you want to understand that optimism is a behavior that is positive, attractive to other people, feels better, can be self-fulfilling, and is contagious.  Know that these 6 factors listed for ‘giving up’ will happen.  And when they do, you will be ready, because they are normal and expected.  Planning how you will optimistically deal with the 6 reasons and then behaving optimistically when any of the 6 reasons happens puts you way ahead of the pack.

Be Your Best,

Todd D. Gifford