Category: Life Coaching

  • Choose your battles carefully

    Choose your battles carefully

    There’s that old saying that reminds us that if we stop to respond to every barking dog, we’ll never get to the end of the street..

    The lack of interest, lack of respect, or lack of appreciation that you receive in response to your efforts towards what should be joint goals is good reason to get into arguments or debates with those around you about what you need from them.

    We’re human, so there will be times when we all need a reminder about what we may be forgetting or neglecting, so those tough discussions are sometimes beneficial when you express how you’re affected by what others are doing or not doing.

    However, find a balance between investing in relationships that are mutually respectful, versus recognising when you’re just seen as background noise because what is important to you is not important to them.

    This is true in every role that we may play, including parenting, professional roles, partnerships in business, and especially with our partners in life.

    The easiest thing to do is talk a big talk about what we stand for.

    Recognising who repeatedly doesn’t live by their words is a good starting point to reconsider how much of your time and effort is justified in trying to get through to them.

    While we must always keep working at creating understanding because that is the root of the love and harmony that we want in life, we must also be able to know the difference between a misunderstanding and a lack of interest.

    It’s the lack of interest in the other person to live up to the shared values that you may have with them that becomes important to recognise when you should invest in building understanding, versus when you are wasting your time trying to get through to someone who lacks interest in what’s important to you.

    This is where mindfulness is more important than commitment, or else you’ll be fully committed to a dead end while convincing yourself that you’re striving towards a shared goal.

  • How much are you worth?

    How much are you worth?

    When your behaviour is driven by how others treat you, the good times become dull, and the bad times become dreary.

    It might seem endearing to focus on how others treat you so that you can return the favour if they’re being sweet or kind, but that means that you are not being true to yourself in that moment.

    Your response to someone should be based on how you feel about what is going on in that moment with them, and not a pacified version of you to avoid conflict or to not let them feel bad.

    The reason this is important is because if you hold back for long enough, you slowly build up resentment about not being able to be yourself, while the other person has no idea that you’re holding back all the time.

    That results in two entirely avoidable issues.

    Firstly, they have very good reason to doubt your sincerity when they discover that you’ve been less than sincere all this time.

    Secondly, neither will you nor they know the real you behind that show of pleasantries.

    That’s just one more way to suck the joy out of life while waiting to find happiness.

    Being true to yourself must be your first priority in any relationship. That’s what adds to the substance of it all.

    But being true to yourself doesn’t mean being inconsiderate or abrasive, or being self-centred or offensive.

    It means speaking your truth and expressing yourself with passion and sincerity without diminishing the other person in the process.

    It’s about giving them an opportunity to experience the real you, the way that you want to be experienced, and not the way that you think they deserve to experience you.

    It always starts with you.

  • Conviction or distraction?

    Conviction or distraction?

    From The Egosystem, a reminder that when you are pursuing something new, don’t expect the people around you to understand or to buy into why you are passionate about it.

    Most of us are surrounded by people who live safely. Who fit in as best as they can.

    When you threaten to disrupt that safe space by going against the grain, you’ll get reactions that are more about their insecurity than it is about how they feel about you.

    One of our biggest mistakes is that we don’t pay attention to what we represent to others, because we’re so focused on what we think they think of us.

    Most people are too distracted to have an informed opinion of who you are, but their defences make them vocal about what they think you should do.

    That’s why mindfulness and self-awareness are critical if you hope to break the hold that your environment or your past has on you.

    If you don’t believe, with conviction, in the value of what you want to achieve, you’ll be distracted by every naysayer that crosses your path.

    Some of them will be really sincere in their concern for you and your quality of life, but their concern does not mean that they’re right. It just means that they care.

    Striking a balance between appreciating their concern, maintaining a healthy tone to that relationship, and still pursuing your dreams with vigour is probably the greatest challenge in pursuing something new.

    Focus on the value that you want to create, and trust that when they’ve had an opportunity to experience that value, those who matter will be by your side, and those who don’t will reveal themselves for the distractions that they are in your life

    Own Your Life.

  • Confidently you…and only you

    Confidently you…and only you

    The question is, do you know yourself well enough to have an informed opinion of yourself?

    When we rely on others for more than just feedback, and instead, we allow them to validate who we are, we essentially give them the power to define how we feel about ourselves.

    Listening to what others think of you must be done with one single focus in mind.

    It must be with the objective of determining whether or not the message that you intended was in fact the message that they received.

    But that means that you must know what your message is.

    What is your unique contribution?

    Self-awareness shifts your focus from being aware of how others see you, to being aware of who you want to be.

    Once you improve your awareness of who you want to be, you’ll begin to accept input from others as feedback on whether you’re achieving that goal, or not.

    You won’t get distracted by trying to convince them to think kindly of you, or by feeling a need to defend what you’ve fallen short in.

    It’s a subtle but critical difference, and the difference could be sanity and peace, versus going crazy looking for validation from people who themselves have yet to accept who they are.

    Choose wisely, or else it will be a case of the blind leading the blind.

    So…do you know who you are, or do you rely on others to validate whether you’re good or bad, likeable or annoying, significant or invisible?

    It always starts with you.



  • Defending myself into misery

    Defending myself into misery

    Defensiveness is driven by a belief that you’re under attack.

    Hence the need to defend ourselves when someone tries to correct us.

    The defensive response on our part confirms that we assume their intention to be other than genuine concern for what we’re experiencing.

    We also assume that we must be right to feel a certain way, and therefore shut down any opportunity to understand why someone’s hurtful or offensive behaviour may be a reaction to their own emotional duress.

    We don’t justify it, but it makes it easier to understand it and respond more effectively to it if we pause to understand the real reason for it.

    The most common reason for feeling emotional is fear.

    In various forms, it is the fear of loss, or the fear of being insignificant that causes emotional duress.

    Therefore, when we choose to honour our emotions above all else, we’re in fact honouring that fear and preventing ourselves from understanding and undoing the grip that it has on us.

    We’re human. So we don’t expect to never get emotional.

    What’s important though is how long does it take us to regain our composure after feeling the emotional impact of an experience, rather than not feeling emotions at all.

    Be careful about losing your sense of self to your emotions, and then insisting that the emotional state is simply who you are.

    Moderation in everything.



  • Are you who you think you are?

    Are you who you think you are?

    Most people see themselves through someone else’s eyes, without ever realising it.

    Without exception, whenever we judge ourselves harshly, it’s because we’re measuring our worth based on what we think someone else will think of us rather than what we think of ourselves.

    That someone else is most often a parent or significant other.

    And the reason we see ourselves through such judgemental eyes is because we lost sight of who we want to be, and replaced it with wanting to be enough for someone else.

    As a rule of thumb, whenever you find yourself reflecting on your achievements or the circumstances of your life within the context of good or bad, right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable, and so on, it means that you are judging yourself based on an external standard.

    When you embrace that external standard as your own aspirational goal, you’ll focus on understanding why you are not as effective as you’d like to be at living your life in that way, so that you can continue to strive towards that aspirational goal, rather than judging yourself harshly for failing to achieve it.

    Remember: Judgement is what we think someone else thinks of us, whereas values is what we want to live by.

    When you connect with the latter, you’ll be less likely to adopt the demons that accompany the judgement of others about who you are or what you’re worth, and you’ll find peace and joy in your efforts towards continually improving the quality of your life.

    It always starts with you.

  • Are you there for you?

    Are you there for you?

    We’re more inclined to recognise the needs of the weak, than we are of the strong.

    Without meaning to, we diminish the humanness of those who persevere without complaint, because they often make it look so easy.

    When we’re the strong ones persevering without complaint, we risk diminishing our own humanness as well, because we become defined by being strong for others.

    Whether you’re strong or weak, you need to take time to connect with the human behind the strength, or the struggle that you observe in others, and especially within yourself.

    If you don’t, you risk becoming the enabler of weakness and dependence, or the enabler of harshness and insensitivity.

    Because that’s what happens when we lose contact with our humanness.

    We stop expecting, or allowing ourselves and others to be human.

    That’s when everything becomes dutiful and focused on rights and responsibilities.

    And empathy and compassion, let alone love and affection, leave through the window.

    All this because we forgot that we’re human, and that the ones failing us are human too.

    We cannot choose differently for how others show up in our lives, but we can choose how we show up for them, and for ourselves.

    Focus on that, and let the rest take care of itself.

    When you achieve this, you’ll taste the sweetness of life and not just the accomplishment of goals.

    Own Your Life.

    It always starts with you.



  • Destroying peace to find peace

    Destroying peace to find peace

    Rage is a destructive demand for significance when we believe that who we are is not enough to be important to those we love.

    The anger that spurs on the rage is a defence mechanism to protect ourselves from becoming invisible.

    We try, in our own little futile ways, to be enough without being able to express ourselves the way others may expect, which leaves us feeling unappreciated when they don’t realise how difficult even that little expression was for us.

    That’s when we feel the rage build up, because we’re reduced to love languages, and token gestures that define how we must express ourselves, when all we want is to just be appreciated for who we are.

    But, that feeling of frustration at not being able to express our emotions in a healthier way was instilled in us long before our adult years.

    Therefore, the rage at our partners or children is simply years of bottled up anger at never being enough, or never feeling heard or seen, by those we relied on most to make us feel safe, and whole.

    It is our invisibility in childhood that creates our demands from the world as adults.

    It is our feelings of inadequacy as children, that fans the rage of abuse and marital rape in our adult years.

    It is our obliviousness to the value of who we are, despite the failings of our parent/s, that keeps us raging at innocent ones who had nothing to do with the nurturing of our insecurities in childhood.

    That’s how we end up repeating the very cycles that destroyed our sense of self.

    When you judge your parents harshly for what they didn’t give you, you fail to see their humanness.

    The very same humanness that you fail to see in yourself, that causes you to rage at the world, instead of appreciating the beauty and peace that it offers.

    You cannot give what you don’t have.

    And you cannot grow if you’re waiting for others to treat you right before you let go of the rage.

    It always starts with you.