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Attitude is
everything
By Francie
Baltazar-Schwartz
Jerry was the kind of guy you love
to hate. He was always in a
good mood and always had something positive to
say. When someone
would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, "If I were
any
better, I would be twins!"
He
was a unique manager because he had several waiters who had
followed him
around from restaurant to restaurant. The reason the
waiters followed Jerry
was because of his attitude. He was a natural
motivator. If an employee was
having a bad day, Jerry was there
telling the employee how to look on the
positive side of the
situation.
Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up
to Jerry and
asked him, "I don't get it! You can't be a positive
person all of the time.
How do you do it?"
Jerry replied,
"Each morning I wake up and say to myself,
Jerry, you have two choices today.
You can choose to be in a good
mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood. I
choose to be in a good
mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to
be a victim or
I can choose to learn from
it.
I choose to learn from it. Every
time someone comes to me
complaining, I can choose to accept their
complaining or I can point
out the positive side of life. I choose the
positive side of life."
"Yeah,
right, it's not that easy," I
protested.
"Yes it is," Jerry said.
"Life is all about choices. When you
cut away all the junk, every situation
is a choice. You choose how
you react to situations. You choose how people
will affect your mood.
You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The
bottom line: It's
your choice how you live
life."
I reflected on what Jerry
said. Soon thereafter, I left the
restaurant industry to start my own
business. We lost touch, but
often thought about him when I made a choice
about life instead of
reacting to it. Several years later, I heard that Jerry
did something
you are never supposed to do in a restaurant business: he left
the
back door open one morning and was held up at gun-point by three
armed
robbers.
While trying to open the
safe, his hand, shaking from
nervousness, slipped off the combination. The
robbers panicked and
shot him.
Luckily, Jerry was found relatively quickly and rushed to the
local trauma
center. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive
care, Jerry was
released from the hospital with fragments of the
bullets still in his body. I
saw Jerry about six months after
the
accident.
When I asked him
how he was, he replied, "If I were any
better, I'd be twins. Wanna see my
scars?"
I declined to see his
wounds, but did ask him what had gone
through his mind as the robbery took
place. "The first thing that
went through my mind was that I should have
locked the back door,"
Jerry
replied.
"Then, as I lay on the
floor, I remembered that I had two
choices: I could choose to live, or I
could choose to die. I chose
to
live.
"Weren't you scared? Did
you lose consciousness?" I asked.
Jerry continued, "The paramedics were great. They kept telling
me I was going
to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the
emergency room and I saw the
expressions on the faces of the doctors
and nurses, I got really scared. In
their eyes, I read, 'He's a dead
man. " I knew I needed to take
action."
"What did you do?" I
asked.
"Well, there was a big, burly
nurse shouting questions at me,"
said Jerry. "She asked if I was allergic to
anything. "Yes," I
replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they
waited for my
reply.. I took a deep breath and yelled, "Bullets!" Over
their
laughter, I told them, "I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if
I
am alive, not dead."
Jerry
lived thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also
because of his amazing
attitude. I learned from him that every day we
have the choice to live fully.
Attitude, after all, is everything.
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