Riding the Roller Coaster

A     The past couple of weeks for me have been quite the roller coaster. A couple of Monday's ago I was given some tickets to an Oiler's game. It was nice to be able to take Baker to the game, I mean who wants to actually purchase tickets when they are playing the way they have been this year. On Tuesday night I was not feeling so good and was really sick on Wednesday morning. As I started to feel better Thursday I broke out in super itchy bumps from head to toe. This past week I was in a class at U of A so sitting for 8 hrs a day in a chair trying not to scratch was not a lot of fun. By
Wednesday the bumps had mostly disappeared and I was faced with a new challenge.
     By the time I got home from school on Wednesday I could barely lift my right arm. This is the arm that I had shoulder surgery on a couple of years ago. With a few anti-inflammatory's I was able to move my arm but with very limited mobility. With my palm down I was not able to lift my arm to the height of my shoulder. For me this was a very scary thing. The surgery, or more accurately, the after effects of the surgery sucked. One of the first things that went through my mind was "I am not doing the surgery again I hope this goes away". Over the next couple of days I kept moving ti as much as possible. Saturday I was able to pick up a stick again and do movements that were close to the body.
  One of the good things that happened last week was graduating from the MEP program at U of A. They call it their mini MBA as it gives you a brief look at several of the classes that are included in getting your MBA. Handily enough it also gives you three credits towards your MBA if you decide to go down that road. Although I fear that I did not get all that I could have from the first couple of days as I seemed to be fairly focused on not scratching, the last couple of days had lots of lessons. Our last day of the course was a continuation of a class that started in the first set of classes back in November, Strategic Planning. Anyone who has had the "pleasure" of sitting through a strategic planning session would probably cringe at the thought of sitting through a class, or several classes as it was, on this subject. This instructor however made it probably one of the best classes of the course.
     One of the things that we discussed in class was intention vs mechanism. There are many things that impede our goals no matter what the goals are. Being at work on time - traffic was bad, there was a train, my alarm never went off. These are all mechanisms that affect the results that we are going for, our goals. Now imagine someone tells you that you would receive a million dollars if you showed up for work on time. You would then find a way to be there on time with no excuses. You would do this with intention. It is important for us to realize our connection to the mechanism that affects our results. If you do things with intention, you will find a way to deal with the barriers instead of allowing them to affect the results.