Category: Life

  • Are you aware of your legacy?

    Are you aware of your legacy?

    Sometimes, when we’re faced with disappointment about how we’re appreciated by those dear to us, it’s easy to find reason to give up on what we wish to leave as a legacy for them in life.

    So, we withhold our contribution, or pull back on our participation in their lives, assuming that we don’t matter.

    Whether that turns out to be true or not doesn’t mean that we didn’t leave our mark. It just means that the mark we left was not truly a reflection of who we are.

    Giving up on what’s important to you just because it wasn’t as important to someone else means that it wasn’t truly important to you to begin with.

    What was more important to you was the anticipated appreciation or celebration of your contribution, and not the value that you wanted to create for them.

    When we lose sight of this, we also lose ourselves.

    Hope and dreams are most often abandoned because we waited for others to validate what we believed to be valuable in life.

    Regardless of how it plays out, your legacy will either be one of a passionate pursuit of achieving what you believed in, or an abandonment of hope because you were not accepted the way that you wanted to be.

    Either way, you leave a legacy. And if you lose sight of this, you’ll end up blaming the world for what you withheld in your contribution towards it.

    That’s how you feed the very cycles of life that broke your will to pursue your dreams.

    It always starts with you.

    Connect, with conviction, to what you want to add as value to the lives of others, and you’ll find fulfilment in that even if they don’t immediately connect with that value.

    That’s how we have less death bed regrets, and we leave a legacy worth celebrating.

  • A life full of things…except happiness

    A life full of things…except happiness

    While there may be truth in the saying that money doesn’t buy happiness but at least you can choose your misery, we need to consider if we really want to be choosing our misery or experiencing happiness?

    It all starts out with good intent.

    Earn some money to improve your quality of life, or create a home environment that is welcoming and comfortable for those you love, and hopefully in the process, feel appreciated for your efforts.

    But what happens when that appreciation is not as forthcoming as you need it to be?

    Sometimes, we look for that appreciation in a specific shape and form, and if it doesn’t appear in exactly that way, we assume that we’re not appreciated.

    That’s when our relationships become transactional as we start comparing who does how much to maintain the standard of living that we’ve grown accustomed to, while dismissing the efforts and intentions of the one doing all that.

    Valuing yourself comes before any expectation or need to be valued by others. If you don’t value yourself, you’ll look for that validation or appreciation to be served up in a specific way by others, thereby holding them accountable for how you feel about yourself.

    That’s how you end up having a life full of things, but a heart that lacks contentment.

    It always starts with you. You teach others what is important to you by how you treat them.

    And when you value yourself, you’ll realise that when others don’t value you, it’s because they’re struggling with their own self-worth and not because they don’t appreciate you or your efforts in their life.

    Own your life, and your emotional wellbeing will take care of itself.

  • What are you waiting for?

    What are you waiting for?

    I’ve often advised someone about something that I truly believed them to be capable of achieving, and the response I received was, “Not everyone is like you!”

    Henry Ford said, “If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

    Sadly, too many think that they can’t, and then blame the world for the state in which they find themselves.

    But why would someone willingly put themselves down, or sell themselves short?

    Did I hear you say fear of failure? No. That’s what we see, and often what they feel on the surface.

    Dig a little deeper and you’ll realise that failure is such a threat because it threatens to reduce our significance among those who are important to us.

    It’s the threat of insignificance through being incompetent or unsuccessful that fills us with the fear of failure.

    But, we must always remember that fear is only the response to what we’re assuming is the probable outcome of our efforts.

    In other words, when we’re convinced that we won’t be able to accomplish something, or we have doubts about achieving it, the assumptions that we’ve made is what we’re focused on. Hence the feeling of dread or fear when we contemplate the future outcome.

    Hence the fear of failure.

    The important question to consider is therefore not if we’re capable of achieving that goal, but rather why is our feeling of significance as a person defined by our level of success?

    And before you say it’s because people judge you as a failure if you don’t accomplish things the way you’re expected to, the next question you should be asking is why does the judgement of others define your self-worth more than your opinion of yourself?

    People’s opinions will only weigh you down if you give them permission to do so.

    Talking about permission, when was the last time you gave yourself permission to learn from your failures instead of judging yourself for failing?

  • Don’t burn your own hands

    Don’t burn your own hands

    The logic of this is quite obvious, yet we do it, don’t we?

    Sometimes we find it difficult to apologise because we’re afraid that others will think less of us. It feels like a weakness. So we protect ourselves from appearing weak.

    At other times, we find it difficult to apologise because we feel unappreciated. So our offensive behaviour was our way of getting justice for having been treated badly or taken for granted.

    The same reasons that would drive our resistance to admitting fault is what drives others to avoid doing right by us.

    Problems arise when we lose sight of why we expect that much more from them, or worse, why we may be holding them to a standard that is unfair to who they are.

    Sometimes we grow tired of being taken for granted at home, so we lash out at hints of being taken for granted at work. And vice versa.

    Similarly, when our parents may have treated us as insignificant, we end up lashing out at our partners because we fear growing insignificant with them as well.

    That’s how we do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Or why we find it difficult to do the right thing when we know better.

    We complicate life when we lose sight of what we’re dealing with in the moment because we don’t realise that we’re waiting for justice about something that is long gone and forgotten, or unrelated to who we’re with now. .

    Invest in your past, or invest in your present. The choice you make is what determines what you’re investing in your future.

    Emotional mindfulness is key to creating a fulfilled life.

  • Chasing dreams

    Chasing dreams

    Chasing dreams is not all butterflies and roses, or unicorns and rainbows, or whatever.

    Actually, it’s more whatevers than it is anything else because it provokes and inspires changes and new realities in all your comfort spaces.

    But, if you have an endearing relationship with your comfort zones, then chasing dreams is not for you.

    When you chase your dreams, you must be willing to reinvent yourself every step of the way, because what you’re trying to achieve is more than what you have.

    It means that you want to create a version of who you are that will be unfamiliar to those around you, so you risk isolation, being misunderstood, ridiculed, and rejected.

    Chasing dreams means that you’re serving a vision of something you believe to be truly valuable. A vision, not a goal.

    The goals that you define for yourself must be focused on contributing towards that vision.

    Most importantly, it’s your vision. So don’t expect others to believe in it with the same conviction that you do.

    That also means that when others question it, you must recognise that you have more work to do in selling your vision to them. It doesn’t mean that your vision is worthless.

    Chase your dreams. But, before you do, make sure that you own it, or else someone will come along and quite innocently question it, leaving you doubting yourself and potentially abandoning your dream for all the wrong reasons.

    There’s a reason why the majority choose to live by other people’s rules. It’s because they don’t believe in their own dreams, so instead, they dedicate their life enabling the dreams of others.

    There’s no shame in that, provided your doing it consciously, and not out of fear.

    What’s your dream?

  • We’re all searching for home

    We’re all searching for home

    Remember, at some point someone also looked at you in your childhood and thought, “Damn, is this what the future looks like for humanity?”

    Our children have the best of us and the worst of us, and somewhere between those ends they form their own unique character.

    If you hope to understand them, you need to begin by understanding yourself.

    The same way that you didn’t raise yourself, neither did they.

    Therefore, when looking for answers about their behaviour, there is no reason to look any further than the people who have the greatest influence in their lives, their parents, or those fulfilling such parental roles.

    And if you’re a single parent, don’t assume that absent parents don’t hold such influence.

    Often, they hold more influence than the one who stuck around.

    Dealing with the influence of a problematic parent who is present is easier than figuring out the impact of the parent who is absent.

    Either way, understanding is more important than judging.

    Children behave badly when they struggle to find an emotionally safe space for themselves in this world.

    Understanding how this manifests in their behaviour is the secret to raising an adult with a healthy self-esteem, or a troubled child in an adult’s body with adult privilege.

    And don’t forget that you’re raising an adult, not a child.

    So speak to the human behind that bad behaviour and don’t only focus on correcting, through discipline and consequence management, the bad behaviour.

    If you only focus on discipline, you’ll lose the human and repeat the cycle of the problematic parent who themselves also continue to struggle for their place in this world.

  • Live life. Really, live it.

    Live life. Really, live it.

    How do you cheat life? You focus on what you don’t have, instead of what you can give.

    We’re hard-wired, even before birth, to create something bigger than who we are.

    We need to be part of something that gives us a sense of belonging or significance.

    Anything that will convince us that our existence is not inconsequential inspires us to invest our time and energy in its pursuit.

    Time and energy is simply life.

    Both are limited in supply, but so abundant, that we take it for granted until it is taken away without notice, by which time it’s too late to appreciate it.

    Living with conviction and loving with sincerity is only possible when we have gratitude for who we are and what we are capable of creating in the lives of those around us.

    Sadly, too often we hide behind masks and facades to protect ourselves from being hurt. That’s how we create the self-fulfilling prophecies that hurt us the most.

    When we interact with those close to us from behind our masks, we not only deny them the true beauty of who we are, we also deny ourselves the beauty of their responses to the side of us that they otherwise would not have experienced.

    In the same way, we deny ourselves the side of them that we believe to be true, but that they don’t feel safe enough to reveal to us.

    And all this life is wasted out of fear of being true to ourselves because we fear being rejected or ridiculed.

    In other words, we have yet to accept ourselves, but we hold others accountable for accepting us first.

    That’s how conviction is abandoned, and love is lost.

  • What is purpose anyway?

    What is purpose anyway?

    While we chase the big question about the purpose of life, we lose sight of the life that we waste daily as we go about serving some purpose or the other without realising it.

    That’s the thing about being distracted from the present moment.

    We’re so concerned about the future, and often still processing the past, that we lose the present.

    Popcorn wisdom aside, we must connect with the reality of what purpose is driving our actions in this very moment.

    However, we often confuse long term goals with purpose.

    Purpose is not something that has a finite end. Nor is it something that is tangible or measurable on its own.

    It’s a higher calling. Something that inspired us to want to achieve goals that serve that purpose, and not a goal in itself.

    There is only ever a single purpose in life, from which all other purposes are spawned.

    That is, the need to be of positive consequence to those around us, and to the world at large.

    We often behave badly when we feel like the fulfilment of that need is under threat. But we’re so focused on complying with expectations, our own and others, that we lose sight of why we feel overwhelmed, taken for granted, abused, or even invisible.

    Reconnect with purpose and life becomes more fulfilling without the conscious effort of making it so.