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Expecting the Best
Alan Loy McGinnis

Discouragement
tom walsh

Encouraging Blossoms of Achievement
Steve Brunkhorst

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When we elect a positive view of people, lots of buried talent begins to surface.  Elbert Hubbard said, "There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability.  It is the ability to recognize ability."  Average people have a way of accomplishing extraordinary things for teachers and leaders who are patient enough to wait until ability becomes apparent.

The history books are full of stories of gifted persons whose talents were overlooked by a procession of people until someone believed in them.  Einstein was four years old before he could speak and seven before he could read.  Isaac Newton did poorly in grade school.  A newspaper editor fired Walt Disney because he had "no good ideas."  Leo Tolstoy flunked out of college, and Werner von Braun failed ninth-grade algebra.  Haydn gave up ever making a musician of Beethoven, who seemed a slow and plodding young man with no apparent talent--except a belief in music.

There is a lesson in such stories:  different people develop at different rates, and the best motivators are always on the lookout for hidden capacities.

One chief executive officer, when asked, "What are you in business for?" replied, "I am in the business of growing people--people who are stronger, more autonomous, more self-reliant, more competent.  We make and sell at a profit things that people want to buy so we can pay for all this."  

A Climate in Which to Grow

We can render the people around us a great service if we can provide an environment in which they not only can discover their gifts but also develop them.  Theodore Roosevelt wrote, "There are two kinds of success.  One is the very rare kind that comes to the person who has the power to do what no one else has the power to do.  That is genius.  But the average person who wins what we call success is not a genius.  This is a person who has merely the ordinary qualities that he or she shares with ones fellows, but who has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree."

People need an atmosphere in which they can specialize, hone their skills, and discover their distinctiveness.  The biographies of the great are sprinkled with accounts of how some teacher or some kindly employer looked closely enough to see a spark no one else saw and for periods, at least, believed in their ability to perfect that gift when no one else did.  The Taft family, for example, was evidently good at pushing their children to cut their own swath and to find a specialty of which to be proud.  When Martha Taft was in elementary school in Cincinnati, she was asked to introduce herself.  She said, "My name is Martha Bowers Taft.  My great-grandfather was President of the United States.  My grandfather was United States Senator.  My daddy is ambassador to Ireland.  And I am a Brownie."

The Nature of the Human Spirit

It is quite important to understand that the attitude with which we approach people will be largely fashioned by what we believe about the nature of the human race.  Douglas McGregor, a pioneer in the field of industrial psychology, became more optimistic about human nature the more he studied it.  Attacking what he called "Theory X"--the authoritarian view of management which assumes that people are morons who need to be told what to do--he advanced "Theory Y," the theory which treats people as individuals and respects their human rights.  Abraham Maslow's research corroborated McGregor's theories of management.  A psychologist at Brandies University, Maslow was particularly interested in peak experiences--what he called the "higher ceilings of human nature."  The more research he did on these phenomena, the more convinced he was that people have much greater potential than we give them credit for.  "There's more of the transcendent, the altruistic, the idealistic in many more people than I had ever expected," he wrote.

In graduate school I was exposed to some very bleak theories on the nature of mankind and read philosophers who saw homo sapiens as quite depraved.  But the longer I talk to people in my counseling chambers--especially when they are under hypnosis or tell me their dreams--the more I am convinced that human nature has often been sold short.  I see the worst sides of thousands of people, yet I believe more than ever in the possibilities of the human spirit.

One reason I can be more tolerant than most is that as a therapist I have the advantage of information about my patients that most people are not privy to.  And I discover that we rarely if ever see the totality of another in ordinary social intercourse.  When an individual appears mean and lazy, we are only seeing one part of the person, elicited by a particular set of circumstances on a particular day, and we do well to wait a while before concluding that what we see is the whole person.

When People Change

Some pessimists would say that no one changes, that the leopard never changes its spots.  But in fact everyone is changing every day, either for better or for worse.  Here is a young CPA sitting in my office, asking about his mother, who is a patient at our clinic.  As he talks about himself I learn that his career is soaring, that he has recently become a partner in one of the big eight accounting firms.  "Most people would have a hard time believing that I spent almost four years whacked out on drugs," he says, "but it's true."  He goes on to explain how that ended because of the woman he fell in love with almost nine years ago, and as he sits here in my office, healthy, alert, and successful, I realize what foolish cynicism it is to say that people never change.

Of course they change, and we can influence, to some extent at least, how they change.
  

Discouragement

I've been discouraged lately.  Some things that I'm doing in my life these days aren't working out as well as I had hoped they would.  Some tasks that I've undertaken aren't showing the positive results that I had hoped they would show by now, and they don't show any real signs of getting better.  I'm pretty optimistic by nature nowadays, but these things are testing my optimism to the fullest extent, causing me to doubt the sources of the optimism, to doubt the optimism that says that things will turn out well.  (I don't mention any particulars because other people are involved, and my discouragement has nothing to do with them or with who they are as human beings.)

The question that I'm having to face, of course, is what to do with this discouragement?  What do I do with these feelings that have me thinking of myself as a failure, even though I know that I'm no such thing?  It seems that the greatest disconnect in this situation is the difference between what I know and what I feel.  I know that I have to be patient and let things take their course, but I feel that things are going badly and need to be fixed.  I know that I'm doing the best I can and that things aren't that bad, but I feel that things should be better.

We all find ourselves in battles between our feelings and our knowledge, between the part of ourselves that's hard on ourselves and the part of ourselves that's doing the best it can.  I guess the important thing to do in this situation is simply to make sure that I don't give up, and that I do all that I can not to give up or give in.

One thing that I can do is make plans for improving things.  I can look at the situations and figure out what can be done to make them better, what can be done to deal with problems and negative issues, and then deal with them head-on, rather than letting the ideas of them fester in my mind, keeping me from seeing possibility and potential as I focus on what I see as the negatives.

It also will be wise for me to keep in mind that discouragement is a temporary state, and that it will soon pass.  We go through an awful lot of different states in our lives, through cycle after cycle of ups and downs, and one short negative cycle truly isn't going to harm me.  It may be difficult to get through with the feelings trying to bring me down, but this, too, shall pass.  If I recognize that fact and keep it foremost in my mind as much as I can, then I can use that fact to keep my spirits up--there truly is a light at the end of the tunnel, and I have to keep my eyes wide open to see it.

I can also ask other people for help.  Now sometimes when I'm feeling discouraged and the feelings are getting the better of me, I'll look for help from people who probably will let me down, thus perpetuating the feelings, or even making them worse.  These days, though, I know that if I need help, it's up to me to ask it from people who I know will be dependable, and who actually will help me and not let me down.

Finally, there's another important element of discouragement:  the lesson.  Somewhere inside of these feelings is something for me to learn, something that I can use to help my life move forward, that can help me to understand more about myself and the life that I'm learning to live day after day.  Sometimes these lessons can come to us only when we're in a space to learn them, and a discouraged space is one that can open us up to some very important facts of life--our lives.

Rilke summed it up wisely when he wrote:  "So you must not be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. . . ."

Feelings so very often do not reflect our realities, and they can get us into trouble.  But it's important to pay attention to them, for they can be among our greatest teachers.

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Encouraging Blossoms of Achievement
Steve Brunkhorst

© Steve Brunkhorst. Steve is a life success coach, and the creator of Achieve! 60-Second Nuggets of Inspiration, a popular mini-zine bringing great stories, motivational nuggets, and inspiring thoughts to achievers the world over. Subscribe today by visiting Steve's site at http://AchieveEzine.com

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To enter the Kingdom of Ideas, become as a little child.

"There is nothing more resembles God's eyes," wrote Nikos Kazantzakis, "than the eyes of a child."

A child has wide-eyed interest in everything.  As God did, he looks upon the world and finds it good.

A child does not block the flow of goodness into her life by thoughts of fear and prejudice. Her mind is as open as are her eyes.  She experiences the wonder of life.

A child is an explorer.  He is curious.  He wants to know what is on the other side of the moon, or the room.  He investigates things to find out what they are and how they work.  He asks questions.  He loves to experiment.

A child lives in the world of fantasy where all great ideas are born.  It was probably a child who first dreamed of flying through the air, hearing voices and music from the sky, penetrating to the ocean depths.  Before the reality comes the dream.

A child has the magic gift of imagination.  She sees things that aren't there.  She creates in her mind the kind of a world she wants to live in.  She visualizes things as she wants them to be.

A child has freshness of response.  To him the world is ever new and full of miracles and adventures.  He reacts spontaneously to the discoveries he makes each day.

A child follows the simple way.  She does not become bogged down in the complex and the obscure.  She is natural, direct and genuine.

A child is confident.  He has not learned all of the reasons why a thing cannot be done.  He ignores obstacles because he does not know they exist.

This we learn from the child:  The more childlike we are in our approach to problems, the more creative we will be.  Try the fresh approach of a child.