The Extraordinary Power of PMA

Life happens, but the thing is, life happens for everybody, good, bad, ugly, or indifferent. What makes a big difference is how we prepare or prevent and how we react. While prevention is the message of my entire book, Get the Life You Deserve, today, I want to focus on the aspects of our lives that can't be prevented, those very things we can't control.

We all have to deal with elements of our lives that are out of our control, such as the illness or death of a loved one, our own chronic pain or critical illness, the choices of others that negatively affect our lives or the consequences of our own wrong choices (hence, that's where prevention comes in handy!), a job, a boss, or a co-worker we can't stand or who makes our life miserable, an accident, the loss of a job, financial problems, or whatever else it may be...

The fact is: bad things happen to everybody. No one is immune! While we can't control some of those things however, we can control the way we react to them with a Positive Mental Attitude (PMA). Mental attitude is the difference between feeling like a victim and wallowing in it or making the best of your negative experiences.

Let's face it: we can all get drunk or dive into some type of drug to avoid dealing with the pain. However, numbness doesn't provide the answer and becoming addicted is not worth the risk. We can also spend the rest of our lives feeling sorry for ourselves and ruining our opportunity to find the happiness we deserve, but why would you allow something that happened in the past to destroy your present or future? You only have one shot at this life, and while this life is short, it seems like it is never ending when you're miserable!

A positive mental attitude is the best way to ride the tide. Make the best of the situation, no matter what the situation is. I am not going to tell you that I have always done that, because like most people, I have given in to depression when I have faced adversity. For instance, it took decades to get over my father passing away on my 18th birthday and I allowed events from my childhood to ruin my first marriage. What a waste of years and happiness that was! Worse yet, it affected other people! Once you understand that you can't move forward looking backwards, you simply stop looking backwards.

When I finally learned that lesson, I reacted differently. One example of that is when my 14 year-old ran away a few years ago. I could have fallen into depression again, but instead, I took a second job to stay busy in the evenings and weekends. I would come home between 10:30 and 11:00 pm and would cry myself to sleep. Then it was time to get up and go to work again. Likewise, I could have been depressed for the past several years, as I have been unable to find full-time employment, but I decided to use that spare time to write a 440-page book. You see, you can make lemonade out of a lemon, and in the end, you are stronger for it!

by Joelle Osias, MBA

President and CEO, Osias International, LLC

Author of Get the Life You Deserve

Loving Life with ADD, ADHD

"Your child has ADD-ADHD." That's a little sentence every parent dreads to hear. I remember when one of my son's elementary school teacher tried it on me. I almost replied, "Putting him on Ritalin? What if we put you on Prozac instead?", but I held back.

The truth is: he has been a tough kid to deal with. Like many people with the same issue, the tendency to self medicate is great, and the best prevention and/or remedy is for him to gain a full understanding of what Attention Deficit Disorder entails. Sadly, he inherited it from me. People must wait for you to die to inherit your possessions, but not your genetic dysfunctions. Those are readily available, whether they claim them or not!

As soon as people hear ADD-ADHD, they think it's a curse, and it can be if you let it. However, it can also work to your advantage. I was not diagnosed until the age of 45 and 50 jobs later... All along I knew something wasn't quite right, but I was clueless as to what it was. I mastered all major functions of my new jobs within the first three months, by which time I was making major process and procedure improvements and saving the company a lot of money. It entertained me for about one year, then I was ready to move up or on.

It is true that we get bored, very impatient, forgetful, that we procrastinate, that being on time seems very trivial to us, that we hate being distracted and disturbed when we are in the middle of concentrating because we have a hard time getting back on task once we get out of focus. Background noises drive us crazy. We love to interrupt and be noisy. We talk too much. We blurt things out without thinking. Yet, ask me today if I regret going through 50+ jobs and I will tell you that I don't: My boredom has allowed me to go from field to field. I have done more things than anyone I know: law school, business school, business, HR, and economics majors, modeling, accounting, sales and marketing, advertising, public relations, photo shoots, writing, designing, human resources, management, retail and business sales, consulting, legal work, starting Europe, being on a city council, you name it, I have done it, have loved it, and have been fascinated!~

Had I known years ago, I suspect that my life would have been much different: my awareness would have allowed me to find ways to tame my eagerness and insatiable thirst for learning. This said, I love who I am today and enjoy the incredible amount of knowledge I have acquired.

However, being or living with a ADD or ADHD person can be challenging. Whether medication is the answer or not is an individual decision. As a ADD sufferer, I feel that I do well without help. For my ADHD son however, it appears as though the extra H (for Hyperactivity) creates some additional trouble. When you are constantly bombarded by information so fast that you can't possibly assimilate and process it all, it takes away your peace of mind and interferes with your ability to think and function, hence, the tendency to self medicate to calm down. Medication is a healthier solution than drugs or alcohol, and that's precisely the argument made by those who support medicating ADD and ADHD sufferers. Many ADD/ADHD patients have difficulty being slowed down by medication, however. When you have spent your entire life thinking and living at 200 miles an hour, being held back and slowed down by medication can be uncomfortable. Many of us enjoy a lot of the advantages of our ADD/ADHD condition: we are masters at multi-tasking and at accomplishing tasks much faster than most people. We also get easily bored, and therefore are very curious, and learn everything we can get our hands on. Under medication, it seems that our desire to accomplish a lot remains the same. What changes is our ability to do so. We feel held back, like you would when you feel sick yet have a long list of things you want to get done and don't seem to have the energy to get to it. It causes much frustration and can make it difficult to stay medicated.

ADD/ADHD sufferers may find it difficult to live a normal life. The disorder affects their education and schooling, their work, their relationships, their driving ability, and their marriage. Subsequently, they may have bouts of depression which brings them down, although the ADD/ADHD disorders tend to make them talkative, expressive, and obnoxious at times. Because of these ups and downs, it s not unusual for a depressed ADD/ADHD patient to be misdiagnosed as a bipolar disorder patient, with the ups mimicking the manic state, and the depression resembling the down state of bipolar disorder. That's why it is crucial for the patient or a family member to ensure that the counselor is very familiar with both ailments. Most counselors specialize in one area or another, be it alcoholism, marriage counseling, child psychology, mental illness, sexual disorder, etc. Just like you wouldn't want a foot surgeon to operate on your heart or brain, you wouldn't want the wrong counselor addressing your or your loved one's emotional issue. Here is a crucial piece of information: anti-depressants will appease a depressed ADD/ADHD patient and throw a bipolar patient into a manic state. One counselor out of four told me that. The three others misdiagnosed me. Don't be misdiagnosed!

For further information and practical advice to deal with ADD/ADHD, download the guide at ADHDactionguide.com or call 1-800-563-2265.

Joelle Osias, MBA
Author of "Get the Life You Deserve!"
President and CEO Osias International, LLC

If You Want Success, Welcome Failure...

Success doesn't happen overnight. It takes time, effort, patience, perseverance, persistence, and confidence. People tend to give up within the first few tries. Truly, the only difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is the number of times they both try. 

Some of the most successful people failed many times before succeeding. Take Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh for instance: He created some 900 paintings and 1100 drawings, yet only sold one, The Red Vineyard, in his lifetime. After his death, he became truly famous. His portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $82.5 million~!

Many of us look at the word failure in  a very traumatic way, when indeed it is nothing more than another experience, which has its rewards and benefits in the sense that it allows us to grow and become stronger. Short term, it certainly doesn't seem that way, but long term, if you can only apply what you have learned through failure, you will overcome it. 

Don't be paralyzed by fear, be it fear of failure of fear of success. For one thing, most of what we fear and worry about never happens. So, it's just a waste of energy. Then, fearing something that is imminent doesn't prevent it from happening, as my father taught me, therefore you just make yourself miserable in the process. Rather than wasting your time in futile worrying, plan your next step. It will keep your mind off the bad things and keep you focused on moving forward. Finally, when you avoid making some important decisions due to your fear of failing, you are ensuring your failure. The best way to fail is to do nothing!  My favorite quote from Guillaume Apollinaire reads:

"Come to the edge, he said.

They said: No, we are afraid!

Come to the egde, he said.

They came.

He pushed them

And they flew."

Don't let failure devastate your future. Realize that both success and failure are two sides of the same coin and that they are only temporary. Failure is not a dead end: it's only a detour. Don't blow it out of proportion. Get up and get going again! It's not much different than when you fell as a little kid. You got up, cleaned up your knees, wallowed in it for a minute, and perhaps got your mommy to kiss it better, but did it stop you from walking or running ever again???

Does Your Definition of Happiness Sabotage Your Life?

Do you ever wonder why you are not as happy as you would like to be, or not happy at all, for that matter?  Do you envy other people who appear so much happier and luckier than you are?

If you do, you’re not alone. I was unhappy for countless years until I finally realized what I was doing to myself. I got a break from my misery for several years, until I set another unrealistic definition of happiness for me to live by.  Here is how it all started…

Many years ago, I defined happiness as being married. When my seven-year marriage ended in a divorce, I was just 28, and still insisting that happiness was being married. I spent the next 15 years frantically looking for the love of my life. I lived for one thing and one thing only: being married. I became terribly needy, a quality that men find really attractive in a woman, as they run for the front door as fast as they can. I felt depressed, incomplete, undesired, and like life was terribly unfair. Why was the world depriving me of a husband and step dad for my son?

It took me a long time to understand what I had done. I had defined happiness in terms of something – finding the right man to marry – that was outside of my control. I was no longer whole either. I had become so needy that I was dysfunctional. Co-dependents go through a similar situation. They base their happiness on “saving” an addict partner or family member. People cannot control someone else’s behavior. In fact, it’s usually just the opposite: the addict affects the behaviors of the codependent person, who dodges the issues at stake, tip toes around the anger and abuse that ruins most of his or her days, and pretends that life is as good as it is going to get.

When you define what makes you happy, keep a realistic perspective on things. Define your happiness based on things within your control. Furthermore, if you find yourself saying things like “I will be happy when…” immediately switch your mindset to the here and now. You want to be happy now, not if or when… You want to enjoy the journey, not just the end result, because life is a journey, not an end result.

By Joelle Osias, MBA, Consultant

Author of “Get the Life You Deserve”

President and CEO, Osias International, LLC