From Distress To Success: The 3 Choices You Must Make to be VICTORIOUS in Life and Business!

By Deanna Potter

From Distress to Success is an empowering book for anyone facing an obstacle, crisis, or challenge. With the 3 Key Choices concisely outlined here, Deanna Potter shares with you her very intimate struggle to survive the medical tragedy and financial collapse she faced over a 44 month period.
From Distress to Success provides rich content and activities that create momentum and progress to shift your current situation from one of confusion, stagnation, and frustration to that of hope and clarity. Deanna’s down and dirty, honest, and humorous recollection of her journey will amaze and motivate you to dig deep and realize that any challenge can be overcome!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9780986130212

Book preview

gratitude.

Introduction

IN APRIL 2008 I made the decision to have Gastric Sleeve Weight Loss Surgery. Standing slightly taller than 4 foot 11 inches and weighing 205 pounds, I was obese. The forty-four month ordeal that ensued was unimaginable, painful, and often times shattering. And, yet, it taught me more about myself and what success means than all my previous victories in my life combined.

As painful as it was, the beauty on the other side is that I discovered Three Key Choices that brought me to a place of certainty and peace that I had never known before. I have since realized the Three Key Choices are universal to anyone in a place of challenge or struggle who wants a way up and out. This book will outline the Key Choices, their importance, effectiveness, and how to apply them to a variety of situations in order to move away from distress and toward a life of success.

These choices ignited in me the ability to function when I could no longer recognize who I was or predict the range and depth of my capabilities. When I had lost my identity, direction, and hope, these choices led me out of despair and helped me find the path to a new and better life.

This book is for you if you have ever been blindsided by a sudden tragedy, caught off guard by news you weren’t prepared for, found yourself fighting to hold onto something or someone because you thought it was all that mattered, made a decision that went horribly wrong leaving you with regret and guilt, faced a crisis that stripped you of your confidence and identity, or a challenge that left you feeling fearful, uncertain, and stuck.

In this book, I use my struggle as a backdrop to illustrate the Three Key Choices and the lessons I learned that proved critical to my survival and reawakening. The best way to read this is to read it through and make notes on what applies to you. Write in the margins, take notes of what would help you today, at this moment. Then go back and apply it. You will find that as you make progress you will be ready to apply additional items listed in the book. So, keep it close and review it often.

When applying the Three Key Choices your goal is not perfection, but progress. And all progress, even the ever so slight, is a victory and should be celebrated. It is critical to know where you started so that you have a point of measurement. Your perspective is foggy in crisis. Don’t trust your emotions alone for they are not always a reliable source. You need a clear perspective and measuring your progress helps. Small degrees of progress and improvement matter, they create big positive changes when added together over time.

I want you to understand that the Three Key Choices are keys to success whether you are in crisis or not. No matter where your life is at, these are key strategies to ensure high performance each and every day. But, should you find yourself in a situation that puts you in a deep, dark place and forces you to have to fight your way back, keep them especially close—for they are your secret weapon for survival. Because as long as you’re alive, there’s no better choice than to make the comeback!

1

Shouldn’t Success Feel Better Than This?

IT’S CALLED THE AMERICAN DREAM and I suppose I was living it. Perched atop a beautiful high-rise condominium right in the heart of sunny San Diego, my home overlooked a major league baseball park and a city skyline that I never tired of. The buildings glistened against the sunlight during the day, and at night the lights twinkled and made me wonder who was out there and what adventures were taking place. I absolutely adored it. The other thing I adored was my wonderful husband, Jonathan, who was still smitten with me twenty years after a chance blind date brought us together. As a couple, we worked hard and laughed even harder. We took great pride knowing we had started early, marrying when we were only twenty-one and twenty-two. We had a strong commitment toward hard work, and by the time we reached our thirties, we had built a good life for ourselves. Aside from the typical mortgage or car loan, which we qualified for on our own, we had never borrowed or taken a penny from anyone. We were independent and we were living the American Dream.

If our life together were a stock chart it would show a steady upward growth from day one. Jonathan and I had experienced no dramatic dips. We made wise choices including buying our first home six weeks into our marriage and investing heavily into our retirement each month starting at age twenty-three. Our downtown high-rise was within walking distance of everything—pubs, bars, restaurants, ballpark, shops, and conveniently located near an investment property we owned. We bought new cars every few years, took trips abroad, and wore our Rolexes with pride. We earned, saved, and acquired. We were successful, and this version of success was what I believed it should be—what I believe most of us are taught it should be.

I tied my identity tightly to my ability to succeed as a business owner, to earn steadily, and to acquire a certain status in life. I had spent more than a decade in corporate America climbing the ladder to success in the insurance industry. I was promoted at the young age of twenty-three as one of the youngest management members in a major corporation of more than 4,000 employees. I then went into real estate sales where I found my niche during one of the best markets ever. I was outstanding at what I did and reaped the rewards of my efforts. My values, focus, and identity seemed clear to me at the time. For me it was about bringing in money, closing the deals, going for bigger deals and going for more of them. Once I hit a goal, I stretched higher and hit the next goal.

I was a 4 foot 11.5 inch power to be reckoned with. I was smart, ambitious, and focused. Wired with a readiness for business and a take-on-the-world attitude, no challenge intimidated me.

And yet, in the midst of all of this cushiness, there was one sore spot. As in control as I thought I was, and as self-assured as I managed to appear in all areas of my life, deep down inside, I struggled day in and day out with my self-image. I was self-conscious about my weight.

That superficial aspect of appearance is also part of the American Dream. Skinny is a status symbol. Any time I entered a room, I carried my insecurity with me as I scanned the crowd to see if I was the fattest girl at the party. I always felt less than other women because of my obesity. I saw being thin as the one piece missing in my life. I believed that if I had that one trait, I’d have the whole package.

Our society has tremendous judgments around whether a person is thin or fat. And no one was better at judging me than me, every minute of every day. If I made plans on Monday for dinner on Friday night, I would obsess and worry all week about whether I would make a good or bad choice for my upcoming food selection five days later. Every food decision required an evaluation and involved an immense amount of guilt. This was the one area, the only area, of my life where I felt like a failure, so I made a decision to change it.

In my mind I had convinced myself that by opting for Gastric Sleeve Weight Loss Surgery I was saving myself from years of disease and an early death, but I wasn’t being honest. I acknowledge now that it was more than that. I was fooling myself. I did not admit that it was not pure concern for my health that had me signing on the dotted line. I wanted to feel and look good. I wanted to be recognized for every aspect of what made me attractive as a person, not just characteristically, but physically too. I believed this choice would be the final piece in the total empowerment puzzle. It would release me from the prison I was in, and I was willing to risk anything and everything to achieve that last symbol