Not Willing To Give Up On People

Today was an interesting day. I have been going through a few different things over the last little while. School, finances, my faith, my relationships and social life, my career aspirations, and pretty much everything except my family has become an issue as of late. It has been draining to say the least. However, with a little faith and putting God first, things have slowly been coming back into order. I don't know if I can really get into everything so I will try to sum up the best that I can.

I have been working hard to get a consulting internship for this next summer without too much success. I am not sure why that is the case but so be it. However I am a hard enough worker and aggressive enough to not give up at the first sign of opposition so we will see what happens. Either way I have already have had four different companies tell me no, one after a few interviews, and another my most likely option, but again for some odd reason I am hopeful. However, we were in a class today for advanced business writing and public speaking and in one of the exercises we needed to go in groups and explain in a minute who we are and what we want to do. Open to interpretation and not specific... I know. Annoying. At the end of everyone's presentations we had already chosen our group representative in advance because he had yet to present to the entire class but the interesting aspect was this:

Before we finished in our group, I decided that we needed to go around and give each other constructive criticism because our rep was having second thoughts and doubts. So I gave everyone honest and sincere feedback, first the constructive criticism and then a sincere compliment and afterwards asked for my own. It was a great exercise but the results were amazing. Our representative at first, although having a good story and relatively good use of gestures was unable to emotionally convey much of anything in his tone. But after talking about how to emphasize things and how if you smile more your tone naturally changes and how when he laughs or tells a joke his tone changes, it was amazing to see him actually present his minute speech. In fact, he won the competition. He did an unbelievable job. But the best compliment I got from the whole thing was before he ever presented the whole team looked at me and said that I fit consulting so well because that was exactly what I was doing and then to see him overcome his fear and succeed made me feel successful by helping to empower him to absolutely nail his presentation. It felt good. It felt really good.

As I said before though, I have been struggling a lot lately. I finally decided to ask for a priesthood blessing of comfort and direction and it said that I needed to read my scriptures more and seek inspiration. That through my faithfulness and by using the Atonement and attending the temple, I would be able to find the comfort and direction I needed. I must really be a piece of work but it's true. There are things I need to change right now in my life to get back on the right track and the best time to do them is now. And the amazing thing is that this was the third day in a row that I read my scriptures. It wasn't very long but it was enough. Today I read Doctrine & Covenants Section 6 and the verses that stood out the most to me I took a picture above to share.

On the flip side, I haven't been willing to give up on a specific girl I met up at the college lately. I trust her more than I have trust most people and I don't know why. She is super busy and flakey too but she has so many qualities that I am looking for and I enjoy spending time with her so much that I just accepted and dealt with that for a while. But I have been frustrated and annoyed and it finally got to a point where I decided to just talk to her about it. And the thing I found is that she is afraid. She is afraid her parents won't like the people she dates because in the past they would not approve and constantly point out their flaws. She is afraid of getting hurt and being disappointed. She is afraid of losing her friends and disappearing into a potential relationship. And she is afraid of committing to anything because she is unsure of where her life is heading right now since she is so close to graduation. She has plenty of reasonable and real concerns but after talking I feel and I hope that she won't let those stop us from getting to know each other better.

Challenges are bound to come up in life and how you approach them and how important people and things are to you will help you decide which battles are most important to you. And for me, I am willing to sacrifice and fight for people. I invest in people and I make them a priority in my life. I want to support and love others so that they can be successful, see their own value, be happy, and become better people. But to do that I have to be the right kind of person myself. I need to be someone that people trust: authentic, genuine, caring, and selfless. I am passionate about it and I am doing my best. I just hope that I will continue to get and make opportunities to not just talk about that but show it too, in all aspects of my life.