Get Up! A Great Story!

Each week I try to send our team at work a little weekly inspiration to start the week of right.  I sent this to our team a few weeks back and had to share it with everyone today.  I think it is a great story with an important message for all of us.  Everyone needs to continue to dream big in this day and age, life is not easy but if you set your eyes on a goal or a dream and keep trying for it then it will come true.  It's about your internal self saying "Let's go, and keep on keeping on" when you are down or something doesn't go your way. Interestingly enough I have found that despite being an emotional person I feel like when something is not going right or something bad happens that I am good at handling crisis's.  The reason is because when something happens instead of feeling bad for myself, I say " How can I make this better".  The power of attitude is an amazing thing, now mind you depending on what it is I will complain to someone about it but normally just try to fix it and move on.  Enjoy the day!

Get Up

Bringing a giraffe into the world is a tall order. A baby giraffe falls 10 feet from its mother's womb and usually lands on its back. Within seconds it rolls over and tucks its legs under its body. From this position it considers the world for the first time and shakes off the last vestiges of the birthing fluid from its eyes and ears. Then the mother giraffe rudely introduces its offspring to the reality of life.

In his book, "A View from the Zoo", Gary Richmond describes how a newborn giraffe learns its first lesson.
The mother giraffe lowers her head long enough to take a quick look. Then she positions herself directly over her calf. She waits for about a minute, and then she does the most unreasonable thing. She swings her long, pendulous leg outward and kicks her baby, so that it is sent sprawling head over heels.

When it doesn't get up, the violent process is repeated over and over again. The struggle to rise is momentous. As the baby calf grows tired, the mother kicks it again to stimulate its efforts. Finally, the calf stands for the first time on its wobbly legs.

Then the mother giraffe does the most remarkable thing. She kicks it off its feet again. Why? She wants it to remember how it got up. In the wild, baby giraffes must be able to get up as quickly as possible to stay with the herd, where there is safety. Lions, hyenas, leopards, and wild hunting dogs all enjoy young giraffes, and they'd get it too, if the mother didn't teach her calf to get up quickly and get with it.

The late Irving Stone understood this. He spent a lifetime studying greatness, writing novelized biographies of such men as Michelangelo, Vincent van Gogh, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin.

Stone was once asked if he had found a thread that runs through the lives of all these exceptional people. He said, "I write about people who sometime in their life have a vision or dream of something that should be accomplished and they go to work.

"They are beaten over the head, knocked down, vilified, and for years they get nowhere. But every time they're knocked down they stand up. You cannot destroy these people. And at the end of their lives they've accomplished some modest part of what they set out to do."

- Craig B. LarsonIllustrations for Preaching & Teaching from Leadership Journal