“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference.” – Reinhold Niebuhr
Each of us has a personal story to tell – this is as a result of what has happened in our lives. The truth is, we all live our lives as a result of the personal story we believe about ourselves. These stories, I must emphasise, are true stories and mostly very sad. This article is based mainly on the sad stories about ourselves.
My father was brutally stabbed and murdered when I was seven years old. When I was 16 years old, my mother was tragically knocked down by a car, whose driver had been shot dead and lost control of the vehicle. It went straight to my mother so fast that she couldn’t avoid it. Then it knocked her down and dragged her along the side of the road. She died instantly; her body parts were scattered all over the place and were picked up one by one. This is my story as Veli Ndaba.
I shared this with my mentor Les Brown, who then shared his with me. “Veli, my twin brother Wesley and I were born on the floor of an old building. We were adopted. I am 69 years old now, and if a man and a woman were to show up now and say they were my biological parents, I wouldn’t know if they were telling the truth. I never saw them nor their picture. But I refused to be defined by my story. Today, I am one of the top motivational speakers in the world and have since made millions of dollars.”
So, this goes to prove that in every dark cloud, there is a silver lining; but, sadly, most of us focus on the big, dark part of the cloud and lose sight of the silver lining.
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