A Kick in the Attitude: An Energizing Approach to Recharge your Team, Work, and Life

Chapter 11. A Kick In the Attitude Principle #9: You Can't Move if Your Battery Is Dead—How to Give Your Attitude Muscles

The greatest secret is that we become what we think about all day long.

—Earl Nightingale

One day 10 years ago, I went for a jog to burn calories and stress. It was relatively warm when I set out for the quick run. I had been putting it off all day due to my very long to-do list. I had phone calls to make and projects to finish, and was feeling the stress. It was hitting me in every direction. I could feel my mood shifting to a negative one. I had such a pounding headache. I knew that I had been on this same schedule for weeks and my body was about to crash.

As I started jogging, I was reviewing the daily tasks in my mind and I became even more stressed. Crack! My ankle twisted. I fell to the ground and laid there in pain. I was no longer thinking about my to-do list, the phone calls, or what was stressing me out. The only thing that mattered was the searing pain in my ankle.

I was about a mile from home and knew that I could not walk that far. A farmer driving by saw me lying there at the side of the road and offered me a ride home. When I got home, I plopped right down on the couch with a bag of ice. The situation forced me to relax.

Later I went to the doctor to get my ankle checked. He told me I had a sprain and needed to ice it, stay off it, and relax.

There was a word I was not used to hearing: relax. How do you do that? My mind and body were not trained for ...