Article 204 - Fall - What a wonderful time of the year and an opportunity for a change

Fall is a time of change

Fall is that time of the year that I simply cannot appreciate enough. Something about fall is magical, unique, genuine, and heart-warming. When leaves begin to change color turning from green to yellow, red, burgundy, creating an aura of pure peace, hope, and change. Such experience reminds us that we are not standing still, and time and life goes on with or without our involvement. We cannot stop the time, we cannot change our past, but we can appreciate the world around us, people who were there when we needed help and support, and welcome life as it is with all of its challenges, surprises, and happy moments.

Every year during the last two weeks of November I look back at everything that has happened during the year – good and bad – and remind myself how fortunate and how thankful I am. Everything good that happened in my life will be remembered forever, and everything bad that happened were opportunities that I have used to learn a lot from and continued to grow as a person, as a father, as a son, and as a husband. We should not dwell on our past or criticize our present life, what we should do is show our appreciation for everything and everyone in our life who helped us to overcome life’s temporary challenges and come out as a much more confident and stronger individual.

Everything that happens in our life is, in a way, a test of our character, our will, and our strength. How we choose to deal with and react to specific situations is what determines the outcome. We can choose to give up, we can choose to place blame on others, or we can choose to fight, get tougher, learn from our opportunities, and become unbeatable no matter what happens, or which surprises life may present us with. I am not saying this because it sounds good, I am saying this because I live it every day. I face daily challenges, learn from them, and make a decision to keep going, keep fighting, because I know that until we give up, we can conquer any challenge, any problem or obstacle on our life’s path. Everything boils down to what we choose to do and how we choose to react in any given situation.
Fall is a time of change, as leaves change their color, we have an opportunity to change as well. If things have not been going well during the year, why not take a step back and see what we may have done differently? Would we make the same choice as we did during the year knowing what we know now? If the answer is ‘no’ then this is a wonderful opportunity to reflect and change the course or change the approach on how we do certain things. Perhaps we need to change on how we view specific situations which we encounter on the regular basis at home or at work. Maybe, instead of getting frustrated because our day is packed with meetings and complain for barely having any time for other tasks, we thank our employer for an opportunity to be a part of a great organization that cares for its employees, for receiving regular paycheck which allows us to take care our family and put food on our family’s table, for giving us an opportunity to have very good health insurance and other benefits like taking time off whenever we need it to recharge.

If we run our own business, instead of complaining about financial losses and lack of profit, we take a step back and analyze our business model and see how our model aligns with the business plan, and actions that we take every day in running the business. Perhaps it is time to change our marketing strategy and reallocate marketing dollars towards other channels that we have not explored yet. Or, maybe, it is time to change our focus from trying to manage multiple projects at once and, instead, focus all of our time and energy on one or two projects so that we do not spread ourselves too thin.

My hope is that after reading this article you will see fall as a time of change, and not only what we see outside by observing leaves change their color and fall from the tree giving new leaves an opportunity to take their place next year, but as a opportunity to change inside by changing how we look at the world around us and how we respond to life’s lessons.