Andy Albright was back in Burlington, N.C. to host The Wednesday Call live from AMP Studios at The Alliance headquarters.
In life, when you send a bucket down a well what comes back up is what is in the bottom of the well. Is your bucket coming up full of water or is it empty? Your heart and your head are what you put in the well. Your head and heart are impacted by what you listen to, what you read and who you are hanging around.
What are you putting in your heart? Are you being positive? When you are joking in a negative way you are actually being negative. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t mean it and you were being sarcastic. It isn’t helpful. You cannot engage in that behavior and still think you are being positive.
Here’s the great news: you can change what you put in your well. You can do it every single day. You can change what goes in and what comes up. Maybe you are tired. Maybe you are not focused. Maybe you had too much to drink. Work hard to bite your tongue and keep negative thoughts and comments away!
A speck of sand in your eye is not a good thing. However, a speck of sand in an oyster can create a beautiful pearl. How can it be that the same speck can be so bad and so great at the same time? It happens. The Alliance has some sand too. We are not perfect. The way you handle an irritant can determine where you end up in life.
When you are dealt a grain of sand will you let it be an irritant or will you let it develop like a pearl in an oyster? It sounds simple, but that’s the trick to being positive.
Do you listen to people and try to apply what they are going through to what you are going through? You can’t do that. You don’t know the whole story and you can’t know it because it is them and not you. Remain calm. You have to say how can we fix a problem? What can I do? Who can I ask? How can I help?
Don’t try to change people if they don’t want to change. Don’t get caught up in trying to keep score when it comes to problems. We all have them and we all have them at different levels. Focus on making the sand in your life a pearl.
How about this: when sun bakes down on clay it can make a pot, but if it were hitting butter it could melt it. What is your makeup? Are you clay or butter? Are you allowing the sun to melt you down to nothing or help sculpt you into a great masterpiece? How are you going to handle the heat? When the pressure is on your response is your responsibility. You can’t take it lightly. It is a great responsibility. How you react is completely up to you. It is your choice. Do everything you possibly can to act out of love … always … no matter what. That is very hard to practice 100 percent of the time, but you have to keep trying.
Don’t let people head fake you and let you think everything is perfect because it is not. They will never tell you everything. We all have hidden stuff that we don’t share with the world. People, by nature, don’t want to share their personal stuff when it is not good. They might confide in a select few, but to the general public they don’t want to air their dirty laundry.
Don’t fall into the trap where you think somebody is perfect or lives the perfect life. That’s the kind of life you see in movies, but it is not reality. The outer shell of a turtle is there to protect the soft makeup of the turtle. Don’t let the shell confuse you when you are dealing with people.
Judge people by results and not what they say or would have you believe. When a person is about the money and not the mission, then you’ve lost. When what you do is about the mission then you get great results. People need love and encouragement. A small gesture could be exactly what a person needs to push them to greatness.
When you decide to be positive and bloom where you are planted, your life will change. When you make your mind up about what you are going to do then you have figured it out. The Alliance believes we need more eyeballs and not more “new” ideas. We want to help more people and make a bigger difference.
Our HotSpots are a well full of water. We have clean air to breathe in these meetings. It’s an environment where you are free to grow. We create a good, fun, safe, fertile environment where you are required to be positive and are allowed to have all the water you want for your well.