Tamara shares her takeaways from her interview with Jeff Steinberg. They include some personal stories and 4 critical choices we can make during hard times.
Hello my friends and welcome to another episode of Tamara's Takeaways. Last week I had an amazing interview with Jeff Steinberg. Jeff was born with no arms and 'gimpy legs' as he calls them, and yet he was one of the funniest people I think I have ever interviewed on my podcast. He had such an amazingly optimistic outlook on life. And so it naturally begs the question, if Jeff can be happy having no arms and gimpy legs and live life to its fullest--How can each of us with whatever circumstance we're in, follow that same path?
I would like to build on and dive into 4 choices we make during hard times which I got out of Jeff's episode last week.
The first Jeff Steinberg quote I want to share with you is this: "God makes no mistakes. God makes no junk. God has a design that's bigger and better and that we have value and goes beyond appearances."
So the first thing that Jeff teaches us is you have to understand who you are. You have to understand your worth, that God knows you and that He isn't going to make any junk. This means you have value as His child. And our value goes deeper than what we see on the outside.
I found a really great quote by Dieter Uchtdorf I want to share with you which goes along with this.
"You are not ordinary, rejected or ugly. You are something divine, more beautiful and glorious than you can possibly imagine. This knowledge changes everything. It changes your present. It can change your future and it can change the world."
This choice Jeff made of realizing who he really was flowed into the next choice he made.
And we saw that in Jeff's life. He did not let his circumstance define who he was. In fact, he talks about that specifically. He says, "I'm identified as the guy who has no arms, has gimpy legs, but he seems that doesn't define me. But given the opportunity, my circumstance or my story can refine me, it can make me better, not bitter."
And you'll notice that there's a choice there that he made because we each have that choice. We can make our circumstance or we can choose to have our circumstances make us better or bitter. There are days we might feel bitter and there are days we might feel better. It just depends on the day. And so remind yourself that you can actually make that choice.
My family moved to Argentina when I was eight years old and it was quite a challenge because I had to learn to speak a different language. I had to go to school where my sister and I stood out because we were American. And so every day at recess the kids would gather around us and stare at us like we were some oddity. And that was hard. But the great thing about being a kid when we moved there is that we were able to pick up on the language quite quickly and we learned to speak Spanish fluently.
The problem was the following year, the Argentine government declared war on the British over the Falkland islands. Now you may or may not know where the Falkland islands are, but they are these two islands off the Eastern coast of Argentina, which in Argentina's mind means that they are theirs. The only problem is that these islands have been under Britain's power for a very long time. Of course the United States sided with Great Britain. This meant that all of my cute new little Argentine friends now saw me as the enemy because the United States sided with Britain.
Because of
