FogHorn Sept 17 Meeting

She had two friends who were nuns, and told how they blessed her house. She was told by a firefighter that she had 10 minutes to pack and get out of the house. She grabbed up some clothes and photographs and went to a nearby hotel, where a fireman put her in touch with a “Hot Shot” – the fire department's equivalent to a Navy SEAL. That man told her he would do what he could for her, and she came to see that valuable objects she had thought to grab were only “stuff.” Nothing else mattered more than her life. Her photographs, with the memories they held,  were more important. And she had the power to choose her attitude toward what was happening – to choose whether or not to be offended. She watched the fire creep even closer, yet her house was spared.

Though she felt helpless in such a situation, she came to see how we as people need each other, and she puts what she called “priceless lessons” she learned that day from the firefighters into her work as a motivational speaker. She saw the Hot Shots as a “gift to the world – it doesn't get much better than that.” What she took away from that experience was that she could choose her responses – “I choose not to be offended,” as the hot shots say, she said.

 

She gave the Rotarians who were listening an assignment: if there's something eating away at you, you can make the choice not to be offended. Who suffers when you get offended? You do. She uses an acronym: FISH-DI – “Forget it. Stuff happens. Drive in.”

She talked about her background: she had sales training and worked in business for 20 years, in top-level positions in financial districts in San Francisco and Los Angeles. After the fire, she said, she polled people she knew in senior-level positions, asking what were the top five things important to them. Their answers included: Always have a sense of humor. Surround yourself with the best people and let the rest go – that can be difficult to do, she said, and suggested “at least, cubbyhole those people.” Learn to manage and understand that person in the office who is the most difficult to work with – yourself.

She acknowledged that these things were easy to talk about and hard to do. She told about some dark times she went through to find out who she was: She left Tucson and came to San Francisco, moving into an apartment in the Tenderloin, where she hit bottom. Then her daughter came to visit and, horrified, got her out of there. She went through some alternative lifestyles, she said, but eventually came to realize that “the only person who could save me is me.”

She suggested some steps to follow:

"Adorn your life with things that make you feel good."