After The Fall

Life has sent more than what I consider my fair share of stumbling blocks my way over the years . My great friend and mentor Les Browns says “When you fall try to land on your back because if you can look up, you can get up. But the problem is most of the time the fall is totally unexpected.
People don’t get married to get a divorce, they don’t start school to drop out. They don’t start a business to go bankrupt. But the reality of it all is bad things do happen and they even happen to good people.

A fall is really difficult when it happens to someone who is accustomed winning. I now realize it is impossible to go through life without taking a fall in some area. And the world does not stop because you have taken a spill. One of the biggest decisions you will ever make in life is, what to do after you fall.

You see for months after my setback I parked on the sideline of the game of life nursing the wounds I received from my fall. I refused to get back up again and get back in the game. As I mentioned earlier a fall is sometimes not as easy to overcome for someone who is renowned for winning. A fall can be a real shock to the person who is familiar with success.

I don’t know if you remember the television commercial with elderly lady lying on the floor saying “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” That statement become my theme song for several months. Life blind sided me, I took a fall and I thought I couldn’t get up.

Much like a champion boxer who takes a powerful blow to the head, he is stunned but doesn’t fall. He is out on his feet, I was physically still standing but mentally I had been knocked unconscious. While I was standing there out on my feet I was hit with another test which sent me tumbling down to the canvas of life.

I couldn’t get up because I spent most of my time trying to figure out why in the world had the fall come way? Why didn’t I see it coming? I was asking myself disempowering and negative questions. I was focusing on the problem and not the solution. Rather than getting up and creating a strategy to win I kept replaying the fall in my mind.

In school we were not taught how to recover after a fall. To be honest most of us grew up in homes where we were not trained how to recover after a fall.

Can you recover from rejection, divorce, betrayal, being laid off? Can you get up and beat cancer, a drug addiction, a failed business, abuse, a financial setback? I am writing you to tell you that you can recover from a fall, you can get back up. You may be down but you are not out. And consider this, you are not failing, you are learning. Turn your falls and mistakes into miracles.