I hadn’t realized how entitled I feel when things aren’t going my way. It’s been a rough couple of weeks. I have heard a lot of bad news around me. One of my close friends’ wife has cancer, another friend’s father passed away last week and I have been having a few personal problems as well.
I am normally able to wake up in a happy mood and get my day started with some uplifting self development audio just to get myself in the right mindset. Yesterday was the exception. The night before is when I found out about my friends’ wife. I called him and he said to me with a sigh of relief “FINALLY!” as if he had been expecting my call. He was in the hospital with her while she was undergoing surgery.
Yesterday, I woke up REALLY pissed off. It wasn’t just my friends wife (who has been through cancer before). It was also my own life. My internal clock woke me up at 6:00am, my normal time. I came downstairs before anyone else got up and sat at my computer with this face that looked as if I had sucked on a thousand lemons. I tell you, sometimes we want things so badly that we can’t help but get angry at ourselves or wonder if there’s something that we could have done differently.
In my desperate attempt to find something that I could feel good about, I remembered these uplifting videos that I have always loved… I couldn’t remember the man’s name, but I remembered a few of the videos and what they were about. I finally found him “Rob Bell.” I went to his Youtube channel called “NOOMA” and subscribed to it. There I found a video by a young woman who’s name is Amy. I hit play and sat back with my headsets. That’s EXACTLY what I needed yesterday. You see.. I have felt entitled many times. I often think that “I’ve been working SO hard” at something that I “DESERVE” to be successful at it, whether it be fitness, my business, parenting, health, being a wife, whatever it is… and on those occasions when things are falling apart and I hear that someone is being more successful than me, I get jealous, so jealous, that I get angry, not at them, but at myself for not being able to “figure things out.” I get so angry that I forget to be grateful for the gift of being a parent, of being a wife, of health, of my business, of my home, of my fitness, of X whatever that blank is. The message was simple, but it spoke loudly to me… “Entitlement kicks gratitude out the back door,” there is no question about it.
Here is the video:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/HiMeVcuH08w[/youtube]