It's a Team's Life
Let’s not go Negative
I was brought up in a household where being negative was normal and being positive was just weird. My most positive influence died when I was around the age of fourteen and my life crumbled and negativity started to really set in. When there is negativity it is always easy to see the bad in everything and it feeds upon itself. As time went on it became a part of who I was and I was pretty darn good as seeing the negative aspects. Life can really be bad when seeking eyes are tuned to see the bad. Not saying it was immediate because it was not but in time I started seeing the good in life and the positive.
With work, reading, thinking, and not allowing myself to wallow for too long in self-pity it became easier to see the positive in good and now I get accused of wearing rose colored glasses. Well after trying it both ways, negative and positive, give me my rose-colored glasses and life it pretty darn good. Is it perfect? Heck no and each day I still work to improve my thinking as well as my habits. It is not always easy to see the positive especially as something is happening but once calmness sets back in we can change our attitude.
To this day though I stay away from people who beat their heads against a wall to solve a problem instead of logically thinking it through, fixing the problem, deciding how to deal with the problem, or figuring out some other way of not having to deal with the problem. Many things hit us in life that seem insurmountable at the time but life keeps ticking on and we will either conquer what has happened or we will go through another door and change our lives.
Another downer is comparing ourselves to others or looking back and saying we should have done this or that. We made our choices and each day it is up to us and no one else to make our lives better. When I look at Bill Gates and his life style I do not turn around and look at mine and decide it is miserable. Good for Bill Gates he has done remarkable as well as Mark Zuckerberg, they exceeded beyond anything I can imagine. Personally, I look back at our lives and I think we have done pretty darn well and I can look back with pride of what we have accomplished. Different choices could have easily have been made and our lives could revolve around waiting to get our next fix and living on the streets.
When we first got into trucking as drivers after many years of waiting I got to the point where I dreaded each day for many reasons and it was time to leave trucking as I saw no positive. Not to long after going back home the negative receded and it was time to look at trucking again as way to make a living. Having a mindset change was the first step that had to happen and that started with self-evaluation and what were the trigger points. While I am not going to go into them here it was pretty easy for me to figure what would set me off and I needed to figure out either how to get over it or to avoid those situations. We changed two things, we became truck owners, and we entered the world of Expediting and what was my trigger points to stress were no longer in the equation.
Life is not always rosy and wonderful and at times it can be downright dreadful but it will pass and the quicker we can get ourselves back to the positive the better we feel. One of my favorite sayings is “It is what it is” and it is time to move on.
Bob & Linda Caffee
TeamCaffee
Saint Louis MO
Expediters since January 2005
Expediting isn't just trucking, it's a lifestyle;
Expediting isn't just a lifestyle, it's an adventure;
Expediting isn't just an adventure, it's a job;
Expediting isn't just a job, it's a business.