LifeSense with Terry Mante: The right to fight

“People who don’t know how to fight don’t know how to win… Everybody must fight for something and against something.”

Cantankerous people are often decried in many social settings. If you like to fight, you are often not deemed to be a person of light. However, this paradigm only holds true for fights that are unnecessary. Not every fight is negative. There are fights which are positive and each one of us is entitled to engage in such.

People who don’t know how to fight don’t know how to win. If you want to win in life, you must know how to fight. The caution here is that knowing how to fight is not enough; you must know what to fight for and what to fight against. Everybody must fight for something and against something.

Fight for your goals
Without a goal, you have nowhere to go to in life. Having a goal determines how you play the game of life. If you don’t have any goal, you can’t engage favorably in this world.

The easiest thing about a goal is to conceive one. The toughest thing is to achieve one. Many times, people conceive lofty goals and ideas that they want to bring into being but those goals become susceptible to obstacles and challenges.

When challenges attempt to dim the light of your goals, you don’t have to give in to darkness. Let the light of your might shine. Don’t throw away your strength. Increase your capacity to drive it. Enhance your competence. Pay the price that is required. Even if you lose a battle, make sure you don’t lose the war. When you fall, nurse your wounds and rise again in pursuit.

Fight for your convictions
Your convictions drive you towards your goals. There must always be an effort to ensure a linkage between your goals and your convictions. We must consciously be in pursuit of ideas that help to safeguard our most innate goals. Some of these convictions may not be popular within our immediate social or corporate setting but they could be your most reliable roadmap to your destiny.

When you know that a particular conviction you hold is crucial to your aspirations and are neither illegal nor immoral, don’t throw them away. Arm yourself with a stone of determination, hold on to it, and move on with it. In due season, you will receive your medal of accomplishment.

Fight for your loved ones
There are relationships to fight for and those to let go. Those you have to let go are the ones that are anathema to your success. Don’t expend your energy on relationships that dissipate your energy, repudiate your convictions and dishonor your goals. When you keep such people in your life, you rob yourself of fulfilment.

Be one who fights for love. Stick your neck out for those you love. Open your heart to those who love you. Don’t abandon loved ones because they did something wrong. The fact that a person does something wrong doesn’t make them bad people. It only confirms their humanity. Fight for correction. Fight for forgiveness. By all means, fight for those who mean the world to you.

While we fight for some things, there are things we must arm ourselves to fight against. You can’t fight for anything if there is nothing to fight against. Two of the forces we must fight against are cynicism and pessimism.

Fight against cynicism
Cynics are mockers. They trivialize things they don’t understand. They make light the big hairy audacious goals of ambitious people. Cynics will make fun of your weaknesses and sow seeds of diffidence into you. Cynics are destructive critics.

The best way to respond to cynics is to fight them; fight them by ignoring them. Keep your mind’s eye focused on your pursuits. When you direct your efforts towards the attainment of your goals and preservation of your convictions, you silence the voices of your detractors.

Fight against pessimism
Cynicism is an external obstacle; pessimism is the enemy within. It is when voices of your past failures and of your weaknesses continue to scream, “This cannot be done” or “You are not good enough.” Every voice that attempts to shut down new frontiers is a voice that must either be silenced or ignored, especially if it comes from somewhere within your conscious self.

We must resist every emotion or reasoning that that casts a gloomy picture of the future. Even if the evidence around us overwhelmingly indicates that the way ahead is risky, we must respond with an attitude of faith and press through with measures to either completely eradicate the situation or mitigate the impact of the risk we face. Life favors those who are able to overcome the demon of pessimism.

In due course, fight but make sure you fight to win.

Terry Mante is an incisive and inspiring author, management consultant, personal development trainer and motivational speaker. Email: [email protected]