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Focus on the Top

Especially but not limited to folks with disabilities, choosing a Winners Don’t Quit attitude of resilience decides between success and failure. (Winners Keep on Keeping On.)

Concentration camp survivor Psychiatrist Dr. Viktor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, described seeing the “first piteous, then amused, mocking, insulting” expressions on the guard’s face when he learned that Frankl wanted to keep a manuscript he’d been working on. As Dr. Frankl realized his former life was gone forever, it became clear that to motivate himself to survive an Attitude of acceptance and resilience was an absolute must. Attitudes of resilience are simple to build.

.A resilient Attitude is like a model airplane in that they both have specific parts. Attitudes of resilience may be simple to build, but they are not easy to build. Being locked in a body that wouldn’t move required me to develop Attitude resilience. Before I could build my new Attitude, I had to fully accept that my former life was gone. My experience on rehab floors and in outpatient clinics gives me a correctly focused perspective.

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“Pain is inevitable, Suffering is optional,” M. Kathleen Casey

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Unlike Dr. Frankl, I can’t say on exactly what occasion I quit the various denial systems I used and finally realized my former life was really gone, but I did get to that place of utter hopelessness. At any point, short of dying, as many in the concentration camps did, the human animal can choose to be amazingly resilient.

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Through the love of family and friends, I eventually rebounded enough from my state of shock and delusional apathy to want to find a way out of my quagmire of hopelessness. I found my resilience and a will to push on by reading key Bible texts and various self help books that describe our power to choose our Attitude and our self image.

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The Power of Attitude

Books by Dr. Maxwell Maltz and Norman Vincent Peale gave me my first exposure to the power of one’s Attitude—I gobbled it up. I love this Attitude stuff! My reaction to my disabling motorcycle crash stuck me in a negative mind set for years. Learning to have a resilient Attitude was like climbing from a mucky swamp.

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Since libraries tend to frown on folks writing in their books and then keeping them for future reference, I’d drive past a library on my way to a local bookstore. My memory was pretty poor, and I wanted to keep the Attitude gold I was learning, so I underlined and wrote in the books I found in the self help section. These books helped me get my feet back on solid ground.

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Keep on keeping on.

Summary: Since the journey toward a better Attitude continues indefinitely, with the health of the Attitude ever increasing, it’s not like I’ve arrived, or like I even can arrive. But, since resilience is keeping me on the right path, it can also be seen that I arrive every minute of every hour.

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To hire Al to share his humor and motivation at your event, or to participate in his seminar, fill out our initial  questionnaire. He’ll customize any of these  topics for your event. His book No Limits can be obtained separately or  in bulk as part of a package deal.

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