Take Your Goals Seriously, But Keep Your Sense Of Humor

Good morning, and Happy Weekend! I hope you had an amazing week. I think I did. 😂 I was really busy this week, and will be again next week. I think it was a good week, but looking back on it, it kind of all runs together. 😂

Someone asked me this week how I could do so many things and not have burn out. That was an easy question to answer. 🙂 You have to keep yourself looking for the humor in all situations. If you are guessing that I have a story to tell you about keeping your sense of humor, you are right!

A couple summers ago, my family went on an European vacation. We had some good friends that were stationed in Stuttgart Germany, and we went to visit them. With our friends, we decided that we would rent a car and drive from Stuttgart Germany down through Switzerland, to Milan Italy to see Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper”. My family had never been to Germany or Switzerland. While driving is driving, and that is not too different than in America, the street signs are different, the roadways are different, and when you travel in between countries there are different rules that you need to follow. So for my dad, this excursion was a new learning experience.

Well, we reserved our rental car and when we went to pick it up, we were quite shocked. Instead of the smallish Volvo we reserved, we were presented with a van (definitely not a mini van) that was the same size as the vans, hotels use as a shuttle to and from the airport. The rental car company explained they ran out of the smaller cars, and that is all that they had to offer us.

Bock, J. (2016). Airport Shuttle. [digital image] CC BY-EU

Now, it might not sound too bad to have a car where you can taxi 14 of your closest friends with you, wherever you go. However, have you ever tried to park a car in Europe? The parking spots are not too much bigger than my lunchbox. Plus, the roads in Europe are really little, so driving was challenging too.

My family had a choice. We could be nervous and unhappy about this car situation, or we could try to see the humor in it. We decided to see the humor in driving the airport shuttle van everywhere. I mean we were on vacation, and we decided to not let challenges with a car ruin that. We had all kinds of problems with this car, but you know what? Looking back at this trip, my family laughs so hard about this situation. We don’t have bad feelings about it because we MADE A DECISION, to approach the situation with humor.

I have blogged in the past about the importance of attitude. Attitude makes such a difference in everything that you do. Attitude can cause you to feel excited about learning and have a lot of energy for it, or it makes you feel stressed out, and burned out. Attitude can take you from an “I get to do this, Yay!” to “I have to do this, Sigh!”. The really awesome thing about attitude is, YOU GET TO DECIDE what kind of attitude you are going to have.

So just like my family decided driving a cruise liner sized vehicle was not going to ruin our trip, I decided that all of my rehearsals until 9 p.m., club meetings, homework, and music lessons were not going to stress me out. I decided to look for the humorous events instead. Finding the “funny” in my week, makes busy weeks easy to take. Looking for humor is not always an easy choice to make, but trust me, the more you do it, the easier it will become.🙂

Have a great week! Go play Acalympics

Oh! We did make it to see Da Vinci’s Last Supper, and it was incredible because it took up the entire wall.