Change The Negative Into The Positive

By Michael Aun, FIC, LUTCF, CSP, CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame

A great philosopher once wrote "Evil is necessary in order to see the good. Before you can see beauty, you've got to look at the shadows. Before you can see truth, you've got to know ignorance. In other words, the negative and the positive go hand in hand" One of the most fascinating studies in education is the study of electricity. And the reason that it is so fascinating is that electricity is involved in practically everything we do. But if you're reading this column by a light, your probably didn't give it a lot of thought, but that light was the result of a positive and negative coming together in a filament. There is no energy, now power, unless the negative and the positive come together.

Some of the greatest athletes in history became great because there was a negative in their life to overcome. This columnist recently had the opportunity to visit the Track and Field Hall of Fame in Charleston, West Virginia and the woman who greeted me at the door was none other than Wilma Rudolph.

Those who have heard me speak before know of a cripple and how she went on to win three gold medals. She is the greatest woman sprinter the world has ever known. I told her how I loved to tell her story about how she was six before she was strong enough to walk and she corrected me. "Mike," she chuckled, "I was actually seven."

She was born premature only four and one half pounds on a ghetto farm in the backwoods of Tennessee. At the age of four, she was stricken with double pneumonia and scarlet fever and the deadly combination left her with a paralyzed and useless left leg. Doctors told her mother, "She'll never walk." Her mother's only response was that Wilma could climb her highest mountain if she'd only take one step at a time.

Her mother carried her physically from place to place. Her first step was a very painfully massaged step. They had to teach her to walk with an ugly steel brace and that took seven torturous years, but on her seventh birthday, doctors were amazed to see her take a step without the brace.

They spent the next five years developing the broken, limping step into a smooth rhythmic stride. On her 13th birthday, three things happened to her. She entered a Tennessee High School, she joined the track team and she assumed the nickname "Limpy" Rudolph -- because she limped into last place in every single event. Finally, she won an event and then two events and then every event she entered, and then she won a scholarship to Tennessee State University.

After a successful career in Tennessee State, she was selected to represent the U.S.A. in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, Italy. There she miraculously won three gold medals, becoming the first American woman in the history of the games to have done so. And that's the message here. Each of us can shed our steel braces. But we've got to start now by changing the negative into positive. Then and only then can we succeed at the goals we set in our lives.