Hello entrepreneurial women!

Today’s little tidbit is designed to help your mental health, and shape how you think about your business and entrepreneurial venture towards a more positive angle.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the proverbial glass: It’s the same glass, and when you look at it, is it half full or half empty?

Okay, so it’s a cliche and I too have heard it for years. So often, in fact, that I’ve stopped listening to it.

But recently I’ve had cause to revisit that phrase. And because I’ve had to re-hear it, so too do you my entrepreneurial dear!

My grandmother, who shall simply be referred to as “Nana” for the purposes of this article, recently suffered a STROKE. The term, stroke, immediately conjures up images of life-long debilitation, and I think of people who have lost significant functionality of speech or bodily mastery of half of their body.

Nana went to the hospital and spent three days in the hallways of emergency while the hospital tried to find a room for her. On the first day, she couldn’t speak. She had lost her ability. Prone to drama and unable to verbally impart her suffering to the world, this caused her HUGE distress. But by the second day, she could speak again (though when over-tired her language skills would slip, she would panic and the stress would further erode her language skills, and then she would FREAK). By the second day, she was wondering through the emergency halls and checking out everyone else’s distress. By the third day, she was talking up a storm. And walking. And chewing gum .

In other words, Nana had fully recovered from a stroke after only three days. The hospital eventually found her a real bed, kept her for two more days for observation, and then sent her back home, where she lives independently.

This was three months ago now.

Were her glass half full, she’d look at her experience and count her blessing. Not many 85 year old women get off so easily after a stoke! Many are wheelchair bound for the remainder of their lives, some are locked into their own bodies having lost the capacity to communicate through words, some have compound speech and muscular issues.

Nana is up and running, fit as a weasel. You’d never look at this woman and see any signs of a stroke.

But Nana, dear negative-bound Nana, is committed to reliving only misery. She remembers only her suffering. The inconsistant care (in emerg, the nurses rotate frequently), the roughness of one nurse, the panic of not being able to speak, the fear of that feeling returning, and on it goes.

The result is this: when she gets locked into her past experiential misery (and, yes, it’s true, it all DID happen) she spirals into the future possibility of the return of that pain.

The glass half empty is where you focus on the upper part of the glass, the content that has gone and will never re-appear in it’s original form. And you cling to holding on what is left. The scarcity mentality sets in. I can never consume this because LOOK WHAT HAPPENS it all disppears and my life depends on me hanging on to what is left. Wo! is me. In Nana’s case, life now begins and ends with her miserable hospital experience. Any little headache turns into weeping sobs. Any mention of hospital turns into a repetition of what was.

Many of you may know someone who has suffered a stroke, and may be amazed at Nana’s incedible outcome. She’s gotten away with suffering stroke, and being able to walk away in three days and lived to talk about it.

So the glass half full is where you focus on the wealth of what is left. You can still look at the upper part and savour the flavour of what was. And then you look at the remain part, and anticipate what joy it will bring you. The spiral here is a positive one. And as ANYONE who has ever drank a glass of anything knows (pay attention here!), that glass can always be refilled again.

• Abundance instead of scarcity.
• Joy instead of sorrow.
• Anticipation instead of fear.

And the only thing that is different, the ONLY thing, is how you think about it.

What you carry with you in the present is what your future will bring.

To your abundant world,

Britt Santowski