Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas
Make the most of yourself for that is all there is of you. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Today I am giving my final speech to receive my Distinguished Toastmaster designation. It’s taken me seven years since I last started Toastmasters, and I was away from Toastmasters for thirty years.
There are many lessons I’ve learned from Toastmasters, but they aren’t lessons special to Toastmasters. Toastmasters might only have helped me be more courageous and go after my dreams with more vigor. We can only juggle so many balls at once and Toastmaster has always been a ball I could set down and pick up again, unlike marriage, family, and business. Writing, art, and Toastmasters are back in my life because the heavy lifting of raising children is over.
No matter what we do in life we need to set goals, persevere, and realize that the journey as well as the destination is important. When we reach a pinnacle of achievement we need a new goal because although it feels great to meet our goal it also feels like we’ve lost something. If we don’t replace the goal we just attained with another one we may feel let down which hits us hard because we weren’t expecting that.
There’s something magical about putting yourself into life. You’ve got to stand up and take responsibility for your own life and you cannot abandon that. Bill Kurtis
Nothing in life lasts forever an old phase ends, and a new one begins. If we set goals for every phase of our life we will continue to grow, but if we begin to think that the best is in the past, why bother to set new goals, we can become disheartened, and life becomes bleak and colorless.
My cousin is staying with Mom and sent a picture yesterday of Mom knitting. Staying interested in things or getting interested in them again can be a boon to our lives. We might think little goals aren’t important, but little goals lead to bigger goals, and over time a series of small goals we’ve accomplished might lead to more success than we thought possible.
Life is a series of choices and we make choices that affect our lives every day. The better the choices we make the better our lives will be. We might think as we get older we don’t need to set goals but even the goal of going for a walk every day will make a big difference.
I met a lady years ago whose aunt said to her, “It takes a long time to die.” She had been given a prognosis and instead of living until she died, she was waiting to die. It might seem like a subtle difference but we hear about people with a bad prognosis that live with as much gusto as they can manage.
In truth, we all have a bad prognosis, because this life will be over at some point, so we need to make the best of the opportunities and choices we have while we have them.
What do we still want to do, what is still possible, and what is our next step?
The success of any change depends, in large measure, on your attitude about that change. David Cottrell
You can change yourself and you can change the situation but you absolutely cannot change other people. Only they can do that. Joanna Trollope
The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. Stephen Covey
Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.
