“Never had a better day!”

  

Spend anytime around my mother-in-law and you’ll likely hear her say, “never had a better day!”  Yes, for years, any time someone ask, “how’s your day?”, Mary Lou (aka Buddy) normally responds with “never had a better day!”.  While at times I think she’s trying to convince herself it is true given difficult circumstances, in general, that is Buddy’s general attitude toward life.  As such, her attitude has become infectious to the family and we, too, have adopted the mindset of “never had a better day!”

So, why is this a blog worthy topic today?  Well, it’s a reminder that we get to choose our attitude.  Often in coaching, we discuss the concept that our circumstances are “neutral” and we’re the one’s who assign the meaning.  Normally, when we assign meaning to circumstances, we either are assigning a “negative” or “positive” meaning.  Obviously, there are extreme circumstances in our life such as a death in the family that it would be difficult to tell someone we’ve “never had a better day”.  However, the majority of life’s circumstances don’t fall into these extremes.

Let me illustrate an example.  

Say you recently lost your job.  One viewpoint might be to become victimized over your circumstances.  You can spend days reflecting on what a jerk your boss is and how wrong he was in his decision.  Or, you might even begin to become down on yourself for legitimate poor performance.  This normally ends up in a negative spiral downhill that is difficult to recover.

Another viewpoint is to understand that we’re all gifted differently.  Chances are a contributor of why you lost your job is because you were attempting to perform in an area your not most gifted.  Or, maybe like in my case, deep down you were not happy in your job but couldn’t make the decision to leave on your own.  In these cases, a response of “never had a better day” and seizing the opportunity to move on to something greater in life is a much more empowering response.

So, if you find youself feeling down sometime, remember Buddy’s “never had a better day” response and start acting in accordance with it.   I assure you, the outcome will be far more productive.