Being a financial advisor can be a tough gig. Especially when the market is gyrating, there's world turmoil and the euro's imploding. It's no wonder you don't want to get out of bed in the morning. It's easy to tell yourself, "If the world's about to end, I might as well go back to sleep. I'm sure somebody will wake me after Armageddon."
While the economy and world events can sometimes seem like a dark storm, there's another storm out there that many of you are working through, that most of us will never know about. This storm takes many different shapes and can vary its intensity without warning. It's your very own personal storm.
In many cases, the personal storm is much bigger than any economic work-type storm. Yet, people battle through their personal storms every day for the simple sanity of being able to battle the storms at work as well.
Lately, I've been thinking about some of the people I've met with huge personal storms of their own. Somehow, they still kept the "Open" shingle hanging outside their door. My admiration goes out to those who show such perseverance.
As a wholesaler in Minnesota, one of the first brokers I ever called on was battling kidney cancer. He was on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. Over the course of the next three years, I'm sure I took more sick days than he did (hangovers are technically an illness, right?). Being in the office was where he wanted to be, so he did whatever it took to get there.