How will you respond?

“Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.” (Lou Holtz) – From a recent Jack’s Winning Words Blog. I get a lot of inspiration for life and for this Blog from Jack Freed’s Winning Words daily Blog. Jack is a retired Lutheran pastor, although I think using the word retired with any pastor is probably an oxymoron. He continues to have a positive impact on hundreds of lives on a daily basis.

Lou Holtz was a great college football coach. Currently he is a sports commentator and motivational speaker. I suspect that Lou’s teams were always well motivated for every game and certainly came out of the half-time break fired up by Lou’s half-time speeches.

Lou’s line in this post certainly applies to life in general and kind of takes off on my post of yesterday. We can choose to respond to the news around us in a negative and down way or we can choose to try to see some positive in things and keep an upbeat attitude about life. If you or your life has been a part of the news – a layoff or a plant closing, a divorce or death, or some other natural or man-made disruptive event – then it is how you choose to react to that will determine whether that event defines you or whether you decide to react and deal with it in a way that you define.

In real estate, I’m seeing people who aren’t able to keep up with their house payments take a couple very distinctly different routes in life when that reality sets in for them. One group just gives up and says “here take it” to the bank. They go on to foreclosure, maybe abandoning the house, many moving out of state. The second group generally calls someone like me and asks what they can do to avoid foreclosure or at least minimize the damage. We discuss the options of various workout programs or a short re-fi, offering the deed in lieu, or trying a short sale. I have to tell them that none of those may work and that they may still end up in foreclosure; but at least they will have tried and will have stayed in control of the process until the end.

To get back to the football analogy (and maybe a sore point in this area), can you imagine what it is like to be on the Detroit Lions team and a player or coach? Week after week they have taken the field believing that they could win and trying their best to win, yet they are 0-14 and have a shot at making history (perhaps better stated as a shot at infamy) as the only NFL team ever to go 0-16 in a season. These are professional athletes and as bad as it is to be in their position, even the most critical sportscasters have given them credit for not quitting.

I get to see lots of sad cases in the real estate market right now, but nothing is sadder than seeing a person or couple who have just given up - dejected and beaten-down. What’s that old saying “It’s better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all”? So, I applaud the Lions’ players and coaches for trying and I applaud the distressed homeowner who refuses to go down without a fight. Nobody but you (and maybe me) may ever know how hard you tried and against what odds, but when you have to look at the guy in the mirror every morning you can hold your head up and say, “Dammit, we gave it a good try.” And who knows, you might even pull off that short sale and rescue most of your good credit rating. That certainly won’t be the case if you don’t try.