Did any of you see Monday Night Football last week?

It was the one where the Seahawks stole the game from the Packers.

You know I’m a huge football fan, and you probably expected me to write about it the very next day.

But I didn’t for a reason.

I wanted to wait awhile.  I actually wanted to wait until this weekend to write about it because I wanted you to realize something that is really powerful.

Did you see all the scrutiny that happened from the chain of events Monday night, from when Golden Tate pushed off on that pass interference to when he battled for the ball in the end zone?

Everyone watching new it really was intercepted. But somehow, the replacement refs decided it was a touchdown.

By the next morning, every sportscaster in America was talking about it.

It really put pressure on the NFL to hammer out a deal with the real refs.

Do you want to know what the most amazing lesson in this is?

All of us have bad days.  

You can’t possibly have a good day every single day.  But your bad day at least isn’t in front of a nationally televised audience. It’s not from blown calls by replacement referees.

Your bad day is not having any control. Your bad day is all in your head, and you have the power to eliminate that bad day immediately.

We all have them.  Not every day is going to be the exact way we want them to be.  But at least no one’s going to steal a game from us.  No one’s going to talk about us on national television.  No one’s going to write about you on ESPN.  And no rule changes will have to come due to the fact that you had a bad day.

A bad day is just that—a day. One. You need to have the power of positive thinking to get you past it and realize that the bad day will not continue when you wake up the next morning unless you bring it with you.

So many people will create an entire story around their bad day.  It’ll start like this:

“You wouldn’t believe the day that I’ve had.  It was just awful…”

And they’ll tell that story to everybody.  And as they tell that story, they’ll compound that story and add a chapter to every single person they talk to, they’ll add another paragraph about why their day went wrong.  So by the end of the day, they convince themselves that this day was so bad that nothing’s going to change it.  But in reality, we never really have a bad day.  We just have a bad moment.

The Green Bay Packers played 59 minutes and 58 seconds of that game.  They were winning.  Sure, some plays weren’t as good as others.  Sure, they made mistakes.  But they only had a really bad moment, not a bad day.

Life is how you look at it.  We really only have bad moments.  It’s how we perceive them and how we let them continue in our minds that makes all the difference.

So the next time you’re stuck in a bad moment, take a deep breath.  Realize that there’s no nationally televised audience on ESPN watching you.  The commissioner of the NFL is not going to be evaluating your plays the next day.

So realize that it’s just a bad moment and call a timeout—a life timeout.  Take a breath and keep moving forward.

That’s all life is, a series of moments. Some good, some bad. But those really successful at life see the bad moments and forget about them as quickly as possible.

Because those who linger in bad moments are those who never move forward.

In which direction are you moving?