Don’t find fault, Find a remedy – Henry Ford

I have recently tried to associate myself with positive things. A desire to be more positive about the world and a willingness to be more willing to see the good in every situation. In my search of inspiration i came across Inspiration Magazine. An online magazine that tells the stories of some pretty amazing people, and stories that pick you up. I truly believe that in order to be positive you need to surround yourself with positive things. It is very easy to become disillusioned in the world we live by focusing on the daily bombardment of negative images, news, stories and general goings on. The press and media on the whole love to tell us about how bad things are around the world. Hostages being killed in Iraq, protests in Iran, corruption in parliament in the UK, F1 racing in turmoil over greed, teenager arrested after beating an MP, Tributes to a dead British soldier, Setanta goes bust. And that’s just reading off the BBC news front page.

I have to admit having read the story about the teenager beating a local MP I had a little chuckle to myself. I am always amazed at how easily the government are willing to sweep yob rule under the carpet and fail to face it head on. Maybe a good clobbering of a couple of MP’s would wake them up to the reality of the problems that their constituents face daily living in today’s Britain. In finding a solution to the problem MP’s and society as a whole are constantly brought back to the reality that without morals, without adequate discipline and without a proper upbringing children left to their own devices are going to go off the rails. The solution to the problem lies in creating a strong sense of family once more in Britain. We need to learn again how to discipline our children. Political interference in the role of parenting has ruined our country. I do not endorse thrashing a child black and blue, but I was given a hiding when I was naughty as a kid and it never damaged me. Could you imagine telling the army they could not discipline their cadets? Well if the army can do it then so should a parent. After all it is in the tender years that a kid learns right from wrong, and negotiating with a child is ridiculous when the child has no concept of negotiation. Lets be realistic. There are as many different approaches for discipline as there are individuals. What works for one is not always going to work for another. Some kids are strong willed and need a firm hand to guide them. Instead in Britain today, parents faced with difficult children would much rather just give up and let them roam the streets than be bothered taking real responsibility for them. Why? Because it is easier to let the state deal with them and avoid a criminal record than to try to take action. We seem to be happier letting a stranger at school teach our children the important fundamentals of life and then wonder why they won’t talk to us, nor have any respect for us when we suddenly try to step in. It is through a real love for your children and a absolute desire to see them receive the best in life that you take the hard decisions to keep them close, discipline them out of love not anger, coach them out of joy not obligation and love them unconditionally not when it suits you most. I would suggest a possible solution of introducing National Service. It’d make gentlemen out of a whole lot of yobs.

But I fear I digress from the initial reason I began this blog today. As I was saying I came across this magazine and I have found its contents to be both encouraging and inspiring. Life is hard. No one promised us it would be easy. And it is hard for us all in different ways. Sometimes when we hear about other peoples hardships we are humbled and inspired to be better people, and the more I hear or read the more I want to read, as I have found a real desire to want to become a better person. Inspiration Magazine tells the story of people that have come from hard walks of life and made a life for themselves. They are people who took the world by the horns and changed it for their own benefit. They gave up on waiting for life to make things easier for them and learned to do it on their own.

There is a great saying on the rear cover of the magazine. It has an image of the word Give on a piece of cardboard. They kind of sign you might expect a beggar to use. It goes on to say. Give – Verb – To present voluntarily and without expecting compensation; This magazine is a gift to you. Give it to someone and let them be inspired by your giving. When someone on the street asks you for some change, just be glad that you are not the one asking. How poignant that is. It cannot help but provoke an emotion within you.

I also came across a website called Make Your Mark. It has the success stories of many individuals. And yes once again I take heart from reading about people that have learnt that they are not the failures that society expect them to be. They are real people with ideas, hopes, dreams and a slightly differnt attitude to the world at large. They have a determination to prove the world wrong. A desire to set the record straight and a willingness to do whatever it takes to make a success of themselves. eg…

Fire Stead left school at 16 with no qualifications, unsure of what to do with his future. Now he finds himself in back in schools every week – running a successful dance business and building pupils’ fitness and social skills through salsa!

Fire is profoundly dyslexic and left school unable to read and write, his teachers predicting he would end up on the dole or in prison. They couldn’t have been more wrong: now nearly 50, Fire is running his own hugely successful dance education company, I Love Salsa.  He was even chosen as one of five inspirational people to feature in a short promotional film for the 2012 Olympics.

Dance classes have long been a fitness trend for adults, but it took a figurehead as dynamic and charismatic as Fire Stead to introduce dance to schools. Some head teachers weren’t convinced that pupils, particularly boys, would be interested in learning dance steps. In fact, the classes have been universally popular. The energetic dances keep the pupils fit; memorising the steps improves their concentration; and dancing with partners has helped has helped pupils to integrate and develop their social skills.

Fire has also been responsible for developing the first ever internationally recognised qualification in teaching salsa dance, the the I Love Salsa Edexcel BTEC.

Fire thinks persistence is the most important quality if you want to bring an idea to life. “My biggest barrier initially was just getting people to listen,” he says. “I am a great believer in always knocking on doors until someone listens.”

I guess the moral of the story is that we all attain our own personal success through perseverance and determination. How we come about to reaching that point in life is individual to each of us, but there is very defiantly one thing that we all need. A positive attitude. By being positive we have a chance to achieve all we desire, and to be positive is a state of mind that takes determination and hard work. And that is wehre we need people around us that are poisitive people. People that lift us up and help us achieve all we can, not thost that pull us down.