23 May 2017

The first time this lesson became really clear to me when in Fall of 2013 when I realized that the private school which had hired me was in great financial hardship. If I would have known things were as bad as they were beforehand it’s likely I would have stayed in our home in Fort McMurray. Knowing what I know now, I’m glad we did move because otherwise we would have been caught up in the evacuation in May 2016 and that would have been horrendous.

As it was, I re-located my life believing that I was giving my whole self to advance a school forward. Little did I know within months the school would be falling apart before my very eyes.

At first, it was very hard to acknowledge. I wanted to believe “everything is going to be alright,” but all the signs were there that it was not going to just be “all right.”

I tried to avoid looking at the negatives until they got so big it was like a 100-foot sky scraper towering over me. I had to face the truth. The fantasy dream I had about working in a private school and giving my daughter a high-quality education was just an illusion and like water in the dessert, this mirage was evaporating before my very eyes.

But you know what?

Something really quite miraculous happens when you look the Negative face-on and deal with the reality of things. When you are dealing with the reality of things then there are dozens of options and opportunities. When you are running from reality then there is just one escape route – Denial. And take it from me, someone who used to love denying and hiding from the truth – it is much much better to face the negative, deal with it, and create something positive than to avoid it.

They key to transformation is to first See The Negatives and then decide what to do in order to make it more positive.