Start with the Good Stuff

Although I have been off coffee for over a month now, I had a sip of a mocha from Caribou Coffee today, and I admit that it was heavenly.

After savoring my sip, I swore that I would never have another mocha from "that other coffee franchise," because as in life, you can't just keep adding sugar and milk to a situation to make it better, when you know the problem with the bad coffee begins with the beans. (I hear that their beans are intentionally burned, and it tastes like it too.)

Basically, good things are built from a good foundation. If we believe that the basic premise, intention, or objective of a project is flawed or comes from a place that is below who we are we will not trust the project's outcomes either. Early on as a project manager, I discovered a strong correllation between lousy results or stalled projects and the extent to which all the members of the project team were "vested" or genuinely interested in a good project outcome. Perhaps you've discovered this yourself. This was how I became just as interested in getting people "on the same page" as I was in getting all the tasks and timelines in place.

When we believe we come from "good stuff," then we are capable of producing or creating good stuff. But when we don't believe that we have much value, then what we create isn't going to have much value either.

This is why stories of people who have risen up from adverse childhoods are so inspiring - amazing people with disabilities, or people who grew up in modest households and have made it big, or people who immigrated to the U.S. with littel and now prosper with lives they couldn't have realized if they hadn't left their home country. These stories remind us that rising up out of any situation, big or small, starts with believing in our own "good stuff."

Each of us has what we need to create a blessed life already! Simply told, the only difference between good outcomes and bad outcomes is the mindset they were created from.