I’m not one of those people who believe everything happens for a reason. However, I do believe we can choose how we respond to obstacles in life and that every obstacle opens the door to an opportunity. In this episode, I go deeper into this topic by telling a story about how my dog made the best of a bad situation because she didn’t know any other way to respond. I also talk about how this lesson can help you find the opportunity in any obstacle.
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Transcript
Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! Alright, so I’ve got a story for you and this one is about our dog, our dog named Belle.
My husband has always really been into dogs. I knew this coming in to the marriage that if I was to love my husband, I would have to love his dogs. At the time he had one and it was actually part of the thing that maybe I fall in love with him because, I mean, he has this dog trained so well, George is his name. Anyway, I’d talked about that in my book but, I have to love dogs because I love my husband.
Well, about five years ago or four years ago something like that, my husband was like kind of looking through, he’s always kind of paying attention who’s selling dogs, what dogs need a home, you know, this sort of thing and he points some out to me every once in a while. And I suppose he was trying to like warn me up the idea of having two dogs and not just one, and I was never that big of a fan of the idea.
But then he found this one dog and this dog needed a home. A groomer had kind of rescued this dog and it was about 6 months old and he looked at it and he’s like “This dog is a good dog. I can tell this is a good dog. I need to go check this dog out.” And I’m like “OK, fine.” So he goes to check this dog out at the groomers. He brings the dog home to kind of you know see what she’s like with our kids.
Dog comes home and she’s super sweet. She’s humongous because she’s like a great Pyrenees poodle, we decided, and I don’t know if you know anything about dogs but that means she’s really big. At the time, she wasn’t that big, but now, she’s probably 90 pounds. So, anyway, Belle is what we ended up deciding to call her because she had a name and it was not a name we could use because another dog in the family had that name. So we named her Belle.
Well, a few months later, I’m not exactly sure when it was, but a few months later, Belle was able to get out of our backyard and so she would run away and just have a grand dog time in our neighborhood. Just running through everybody else’s backyard and across the street and then always going to freaked us out because we thought, “Oh my goodness this dog is going to get hit by car,” we just knew it.
Well, this kept happening. My husband kept finding all the holes that he needed to pin down in our backyard and we had everything kind of figured out, we thought. And then she got through again. She pushed away underneath of our fence of our backyard and she took off. We didn’t know where she was but it was pretty late at night, I don’t know, maybe 10 o’clock or so and the kids were already in bed. We don’t know what’s going on. We don’t know where she’s at. It’s really hard to find a dark mostly kind of grayish black haired dog. How do you find a dog like this who is so fast in the night like that?
So we opened up our front door hoping that she would just come back in because she had done that before. So I’m like scrubbing our floor or something and working and all of a sudden we hear breaks and a thud and a dog screech, and our hearts just about popped out of our chest. We ran outside and the dog was not there. The dog had moved. So, Aaron talked to the driver of the car and had found out that she had hit the side of his car. She’d actually run into the car itself. The car didn’t run into her, she ran into the car and then she took off.
Well, she took off behind our house where there’s like this river behind our house and so we didn’t know what’s going to happen to this dog because she could get eaten by a fox or something like this because we’ve seen with a fox behind our house before and oh my goodness all of the things! We were just feeling horrible about it and the next morning, we told the kids and they felt really bad and they were outside yelling trying to get Belle to come back home and I felt so bad for them.
Well, the kids went back to school and went back behind our house and thought “I’m gonna have to find this dong. She’s probably out there lying on the ground some place. She could be dead, who knows.” But when I got to the back of our fence, she was kind of barking, crying at me. And it turns out that her leg was broken. So, I had to lift this dog, who at that time, I don’t know she was 50 pounds or something like that. I lift this dog up. I carried her all the way, take her to the vet. I just couldn’t believe that she was so alive, neither could Aaron, of course. The kids, of course, thought that she would be but I just couldn’t believe it.
Well, this dog, we love her so much. I should say, everybody else loves her so much. I try. I do try sometimes. But anyway, dogs can be a pain when you’re the one has to kind of, I don’t know. Anyway, so the dog gets a cast on her leg because her leg was so broken and of course she a puppy still. She was at the time, maybe 6 months to a year old, I can’t remember exactly. So she’s wanting to bite at her cast all the time.
Well, you know, what happens when dogs aren’t suppose to bite things, they get a cone around their necks, the cone of shame. Have you seen this? You know, what I’m talking about. It’s that plastic cone that goes around the dog’s neck and it goes out beyond their face so that they can’t actually bite anything so that she couldn’t get to her leg and bite her cast off. Well, we thought it was pretty funny at this point where she had the cone of shame. She didn’t act like was ashamed at all.
This dog is so funny. I mean, there are so many lessons to learn from this silly dog. But she wasn’t afraid at all. She just was like “whatever, I got this cone on. It’s not a big deal. I’m just still trotting around even though I have a broken leg and I’m still the happy go lucky dog that I am and what not.”
Well, one day, I looked in the backyard and Belle had bird feathers all over the inside of her cone of shame. That dog took her cone and trapped a bird underneath her cone down that thing and just ripped it to shreds and ate it up because she had this cone on her head. Oh my goodness and there was just such a mess. I have a picture of her. I’ll find it and put it in the show notes. It was so funny. I mean, it was terrifying for me, but it was so funny because this dog had figured out how to take an obstacle and turn it into opportunity.
She didn’t look at her cone and be like “Oh my goodness,” like all the dogs would do. We would look at something like that or something that is supposed to be full of shame. This supposed to make you feel horrible. We would feel that way. We would feel like wanted to hide. We wouldn’t show anybody that. We don’t want to have to deal with it. We felt bad about it. You know, maybe we would go hide in the corner, stay in our homes, whatever. Not this dog. She doesn’t know what shame is.
And so what did she do, she just “OK, well, this is what I got. This is what I got to work with. Let’s make something happen.” And she sure did. She made something happen. She trapped the bird and ate that thing up.
Well, I love this illustration and obviously, I took a whole 9 and half minutes to tell you this story because I really do believe that we can find opportunities in our obstacles. It maybe trite to say that in some ways, but when you’ve actually gone through stuff, when you’ve gone through really hard things then you start to look around and you realize, “You know what, I made it through that.” And how did I make it through that? I found a way. I found opportunity even in the obstacles and then it’s not so trite anymore.
You start to realize that “You know what; this is actually really, deeply true.” There are things that I’ve experienced in my own life, family situations where an illness in the family has caused me to really take a hard look at myself. It has really had me thinking, and multiple illnesses and things that have happened, you know, when you start to realize how short life is, when you start to realize how old you are and that life isn’t just this infinite expansion of opportunity that there are serious obstacles in the way then you could do a few different things.
You could go hide and you could find a way to push it all away. How do we usually do this? We do this with food. We do this with alcohol or drugs. We do this busyness. We push away the things that don’t feel good, those obstacles we don’t have to think about. We just push them away because we don’t want to deal with it. But you know what happens when we do that. You’ve probably seen that before in yourself. You’ve probably seen that before in other people.
When we push away the hard stuff, it has its way of working its way really deeply inside of our souls to a point where you start to really kind of have gaping wound on the inside, things that we haven’t really dealt with that really start to eat away at us. It’s not healthy. It’s not good. It’s painful to actually look and stare obstacles in the face. It can be painful to say, “Oh my goodness, I have this cone of shame on. I’m dealing with this horrible broken leg. How am I gonna go chase squirrels now?”
But that’s not the only way to look at. There’s also other ways to look at. You can look at it and say “OK, so what do I have to work with now? How do I make it work with what I have now?” And not only that, this is one of the other things that has really hit me, sometimes obstacles like place on us limitations that now we have to deal with those limitations. And I’ve done this before where a limitation is placed on me and so I think “Oh my goodness, I can’t do it then. I guess these walls have been put up. These limitations had been put up. Apparently, I’m not gonna able to accomplish what I need to accomplish. I’m just gonna give up.”
Instead, what we can do is we can say “OK, this limitation could be a gift.” How could it be a gift? It could be a gift because it’s helping me make decisions. “OK, I can’t go that direction so I’m gonna have to go this other way. So this other way has to work for me. It must be the direction that I’m supposed to take.” Instead of looking at this “Oh my goodness, there’s this obstacle on the way. There’s this branch in the middle of the road, this big huge tree in the middle of the road. I’m not gonna be able to take that road now. I always wanted to take this road. This is the path that I wanted to take but I guess I’m not gonna be able to.”
So you can just turn around and go back home. Or you could say, “Alright, so this isn’t the path, let’s look around whatever options are left? Well, it looks like I could go this way or we can go that way. Well, at least now I know that this is not the way so that gives me fewer decisions to make, fewer choices. I can make a decision on my own. I don’t have to be drawn just by what I was wanting to do in the first place, instead I get to make a decision now based on the circumstances that I have in front of me.”
How do we turn obstacles into opportunities? A lot of people take tragedy in their lives and they actually find meaning and purpose in helping other people avoid that tragedy sort of like the Mothers Against Drunk Driving. I think I remember a story a long time ago how some mother lost her son or daughter to a drunk driver and she started MADD. She started Mothers Against Drunk Driving and turned it in to her purpose to help other people avoid it.
Now, when I say opportunity, I don’t mean that it something that you would necessarily want for your life. When you start out your life and you’re looking forward, you’re not saying to yourself “I really would like to experience tragedy here so that I could find purpose in helping other people avoid that tragedy.” Of course, you’re not saying that. Nobody is saying that. I’m not even saying that you should think that. However, when you do confront tragedy, when you do confront the hard stuff of life which so often just hits us and we can’t even control then we have to take a step back and say “But what can I control? What can I do now?”
Yes, there’s been a stake in the place in the ground. There has been a fork in the middle of the road, a tree that fell down in my path, a cone around my neck. There’s a serious obstacle right in front of me. Am I going to crumble and just fall to the ground? Am I going to back off and just say forget it? Am I going to avoid the pain and the tragedy? Am I going to avoid having to deal with it or am I going to look at this straight in the eye and say “OK, now what am I going to do with this?”
For a while you may need to mourn. For a while you’re going to need to grieve a lost opportunity. For a while you might be sad. It might be three seconds, it might be three years of grief depending on the kind of obstacle or tragedy that has hit you. But all the while, you can have this internal belief that there can be meaning that could come from it. There can be something important that can come from this struggle.
You see, this is really about having a growth mindset. It’s about saying, “You know what, I acknowledge that I’m not gonna able to just have what I want all the time. I acknowledge that life is hard and I can’t avoid the pain that this life is going to bring me.” But the question that ends up coming is what am I going to do with what I have? What internal resources, what external resources, or what belief do I have that I can drop them that will help me to move forward, that will help me to find a new purpose, a new path.
There are a lot of things that I’m doing now that I never in my life would have thought I would have been doing. But I came up against obstacles. I came up again needs in my family, in my life, in my own personal sense of self, things that were difficult then I had to take a really hard look often after years of pushing things away or trying to be distracted or being in depression or things like this. I finally came to sense of purpose and meaning that I could still find having gone through the battle, having gone though the struggle, having encountered the obstacle and those things kind of marked my path.
They sort of gave me direction toward the next step that I needed to take, to the point where now I’m doing something in Voice of Influence that even though I always wanted to do something like what I’m doing now, I never would have thought that I would have started a business. I never would have thought that I would be offering strategic advice, offering the opportunity for teams to really gel and align to a company’s vision. I never would have thought about, “Oh my goodness, this is what I wanna do when I grow up.” I had no idea that that sort of thing even existed for quite a while.
But those obstacles that kept coming into my road, kept directing me to the next step, to the next place along my path. And I think in the end, we all have to just admit that this is a hard, hard thing, walking through life. It’s not easy to figure out how to handle everything. It’s not easy to know how to prioritize or what decisions to make for your family or what decisions to make for your company, how to help a team member through a really hard time.
But in the end, I think we have to just go back to asking “What is the opportunity present? What is the opportunity? You’re not saying to yourself, “Well, everything happens for a reason.” I’ve said this so many times, guys. I’m not saying that that everything happens for a reason. I don’t think that that’s how we should look at it. Instead, this hashappened so, now, what I’m going to do with it. Now, what am I going to do? I don’t think we have to look at it as destiny. I don’t think we have to look at it that God is trying hurt me or allowing really bad things to happen to me that sort of thing and that it’s all for a reason, somehow it’s for a reason. I don’t think that we have to look at it like that.
But I do think that when we do come up against hard things, when we do encounter tragedy, when we do encounter obstacles, when we sort of have this cone of shame around our neck that is supposed to be something that’s really shameful, maybe instead of walking around in shame or hiding in shame, we can shrug our shoulders and say “OK, so what are we gonna do with this today? How do we I still make this work?”
That’s what my silly dog Belle taught me. How do I still make this work even though I’m a silly old dog that ran into a car? (I do not understand how it happens) But how do I make this work? What am I going to do with this now?
Friend, please take the obstacles that are in your path and ask, what is the opportunity here and go make your voice matter more.