The news media is full of individual stories of specific situations, such as their experience of a dysability assessment, that is often extremely negative and full of inconsistencies that make me want to ask more questions to discover the precise truth of the situation. If we were to take these experiences at face value then we would believe that the whole world is plotting against them in some great conspiracy.

Endlessly reading these bad experiences, and then trying to understand them based on my own experiences of the world, led me to an interesting conclusion. I began to understand it is ourselves who decide if we have a good or bad experience of a situation by how we decide to respond to events around us. We decide if we are going to allow small or not so small imperfections to ruin our day. It is ourselves who write our own history and we personally decide how a specific day is going to be remembered.

I am not at all suggesting we should ignore the problems and bad experiences when they arise, but we can choose how we respond to them. We can become hot-tempered and emotional, causing frustration for everyone, or we can decide if we are going to try to constructively and calmly resolve the issue. People will always try to hurt us and to a degree, they may succeed but we can decide how we are going to respond.

Being constructive about a negative situation enables us to take more action to put a matter to bed. This surely must be better than spending hours, days, weeks, months and sometimes even years moaning and whining about how bad a situation was to anyone who will listen, adding further dramatisation every time the tale is told, without actually resolving the matter with the people involved.

This realisation there is a choice to how we perceive the situations around us, whether that is positive or negative, means we can decide to remember one of two versions of each day. I have always decided to try to remember the positive version, acknowledging the difficulties I have experienced. When others choose to see the doom and gloom of life in 2018, stating how bad life is supposedly is for one or another section of the population, like people with impairments, I prefer to reflect on all the positive things we have and how life continues to improve over time as we have opportunities previous generations could not even dream of.

The version of each day that you decide to pick will tell others about how you wish to relate to them. Do you wish to be a victim of your circumstances, as an easy state to pick, or the controller and leader of your circumstances, a harder but more rewarding place to be?

If you like my blog article, have a look at some of my products;
Achieve Support – Coming soon
Having Pride (My Life Story) – http://www.balsy.me
Stevens’ Manifesto – Coming soon
Understand Accessibility – Coming soon
Understand Assistance – http://www.understand.tips
Understand Dysabiity – Coming soon

or visit my website at http://www.simonstevens.com

You can also email me at simon@simonstevens.com