Dear Cowgirl, What Happens When You Face Defeat?

Dear Cowgirl,

What happens when you face defeat?

When happens when you get knocked down, beat up by life and left as a catastrophic failure?

What lesson do you allow the experience to teach you?

 You have a few different choices, and not one of them can be made for you….but you can always choose the extraordinary over the expected.

1. Allow the judgement and beliefs of others dictate your next move. Stay down or only crawl your way through life on your belly. Don’t stand up. Be quiet, be still and stay as small as possible. They might not notice you. You might not be a threat to them. You might “skate” by without being seen. Live small, it’s safer.

2. Choose to stay “down” right away. Embrace victimhood, the mentality that the world is out to get you and you can never win. Feel threatened by others success, ignore your dreams and chase mediocrity with a ferocious and dogged misery. Settle for mediocre relationships, less than average lifestyles and terrible health. Keep a job you hate because “it’s safe” and become the cookie cutter person you never imagined yourself as when you were a kid.

3. Stand up. Set your shoulders and smile back at the pain when life tries to knock you down. Take a moment to fix your eye on the good waiting for you in the future and lift yourself off the floor. Embrace your own bravery, your strength and your dreams as possible. Wake up earlier, run farther and faster, demand respect and make someone smile. Honor the tough stuff. Refuse the ordinary, disregard victimhood and insist on extraordinary…because you, the you reading this are capable of incredible things.