JJ's (October '05) Tips in this issue: 1. Wake-Up Calls In Our Lives! 2. JJ's Favorite Quotes 3. Tele-Coaching & Tele-Mentoring Use the following tips as training tools. Present this situation to your group and brainstorm solutions together, or submit your own situation question to be answered in an upcoming newsletter. ------------------------------------- SITUATION QUESTION: ------------------------------------- What kind of wake-up calls have you experienced in your life and work, and what changed after you experienced them? --------------------- SOLUTIONS: --------------------- This email newsletter is meant to be a wake-up call to you and the people you love and work with daily! Life happens when you are making other plans. Read on. It can come out of the blue, perhaps when you get a poor performance review, someone proposes marriage to you or asks for a divorce. When you think it's always someone else's fault that something has gone wrong at work, only to find out that you're the main one who needs to change, to grow, to get a different perspective. At first you just want to crawl in a hole and lick your wounds so to speak. Then you "wake up" and need to start swinging the pendulum the other direction, to do something about it. Encourage others to help in your new resolve to change, to influence others in a more positive direction, to grow yourself and your company, family, or relationships. Sometimes the wake-up call comes at your annual doctor's check up, or when you have the results back from a routine test, such as a blood test or mammogram (breast x-ray). The latter was my wake-up call a few weeks ago in late August. I was consulting and training with a company in Ohio and when I checked my phone messages, I heard four calls urgently asking me to come back for more x-rays and an ultrasound. They had found something suspicious on one of my x-rays. Talk about using your mind over matter, for the rest of the week in Ohio I overrode my feelings of doom and gloom, and threw myself into my work until I could get back to my radiology appointment the following Friday. That Friday, the very day of a significant evening birthday party that my two daughters, sister and husband were throwing for me, I saw the x-ray and the ultrasound results that did not look good. A core biopsy was scheduled for the following Tuesday to determine if the small lump was malignant. Again, I overrode my anxiety to thoroughly enjoy my birthday party with my family and friends that evening. But a week later my real wake-up call came in my surgeons office as she said, "JJ, the biopsy shows you have breast CANCER! I sat there in disbelief, not me, why me, and then the tears as I thought of my former assistant, Marie, and close dancing friend, Carol who had both died of breast cancer about 5 and 6 year ago. In the week that followed, I went through denial, anger and finally acceptance. I heard myself saying again to myself, "JJ, It's not what happens to you, it's how you deal with it that matters." Thank God I had the yearly mammogram, because after a lumpectomy surgery to remove the lump, and a second surgery two weeks later to get a bigger margin around the lump, I was told that the margins were clear of cancer cells and they had not spread to my sentinel lymph nodes or the rest of my body. Ironically, October is National Breast Cancer Awareness month, and I'm a cancer survivor because of my awareness to have a yearly x-ray. None of the doctors could feel the lump, so my radiology doctor probably helped save my life by catching the cancer in its early stage along with recent research that has found ways to treat it. Even some men get breast cancer, so urge the people you care about to get annual checkups. If even one person reading this catches a cancer in its early stage, it will be worth my going public with my very personal situation. Since only the lump has been removed (I still look the same), I will be going through six weeks of radiation therapy, 5 days a week from mid November through December to prevent a reoccurrence. There's also a possibility I'll be taking an estrogen blocker pill daily for several years starting in January. You do whatever it takes. If I had not discovered the lump early, I would have had to undergo chemotherapy if it had spread to my lymph nodes. I kept saying to myself and my husband Scott, we must look for the positive side of this. It's there somewhere. Look for the positive side of your wake up call, and do what you need to do, NOW! Then get on with enjoying your life, family and work. Your mind is indeed powerful to overcome whatever comes your way. So hopefully your wake up calls are only small ones from your alarm clock, or from what you need to change, and not from a doctor saying you have a life threatening disease. Remember this is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October. Make it all year round. Urge your mother, daughter, friend and wife to make early detection a "way of life" to live life to the fullest. Thanks for listening to my personal story, and helping me fulfill my purpose of helping others help themselves. JJ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ JJ's FAVORITE QUOTES: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along'." - Eleanor Roosevelt "It's Not What Happens to You, It's What You Do About It." - W. Mitchell ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tele-COACHING & Tele-MENTORING ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ TRY our one-on-one Tele-Mentoring (phone coaching service) that is available to business owners, executives, managers, supervisors and staff members. Call for your FREE CONSULTATION now! 800 500-9656 or 408 445-1590 DO YOU WANT TO IMPROVE in an area? Customer service or sales? Inbound or outbound call center sales and service? Dealing with irate internal or external customers? Motivation and growth of your people? Leading and Coaching your staff? __________________ EVALUATION OF YOUR ENVIRONMENT: _________________________________ Have you had an Evaluation of Your Environment lately so you could receive suggestions on improving it? (It's like the doctor's check up, you often don't know you need it, until after you've had it.) http://www.jjlauderbaugh.com/about.html **************************************** ---------------------------------------------------------- |