Category: Life

  • Who do you want to be?

    Who do you want to be?

    Don’t get so lost in trying to find yourself that you lose the opportunity to reinvent yourself.

    If you’re struggling to discover who you are and what you should be doing with your life, perhaps it’s time to focus on who you want to be instead?

    You cannot be purposeful about life if you don’t have a vision.

    Your vision.

    Not what you think everyone else wants you to be, or what you think you need to be so that everyone can accept and appreciate you.

    Who do you want to be?

    Not only in the bigger scheme of things, or in your career, or the role that you play for your significant others.

    Who do you want to be in every moment of your life?

    When you’re faced with disrespect or ingratitude, do you focus on what the other person deserves from you, or do you focus on living by your values?

    The only time you need to pause and reconsider which values you’re upholding is if who you are enables others to cause harm either to themselves or to others.

    When you find that being generous inspires laziness in others, then practice moderation in your generosity.

    Or if you find that your understanding gives another no cause for restraint or accountability for their behaviour, then practice moderation in your understanding.

    Always be mindful of who you want to be and what you want to enable.

    Striking a balance between the two is the trial of life that brings peace or problems.

    But, if connected to a greater purpose that you wish to serve – your vision of who you want to be – it becomes easier to be composed in the face of bad behaviour from others so that you don’t lose yourself to their demons.

    Don’t be selfish, but don’t be a martyr either.

  • Divinely obnoxious?

    Divinely obnoxious?

    Godliness is like humility. It is lost when we actively pursue it.

    Living by the doctrine to which you subscribe is infinitely more important than preaching it.

    People learn from how you treat them, not from how you chastise them.

    Judging the faith of another reveals the cracks in your self-worth more than it offers any revelation about the faith of another.

    When our self-worth is low, our association with divinity, religion, or other groups will be used to compensate for what we believe we lack in ourselves so that we may get the respect that we need.

    When we assume ourselves to be above those that behave worse than us, or those that disagree with us, we grow arrogant in our thinking and our ways, which directly opposes our efforts towards godliness, or piety.

    When we speak on behalf of the Almighty, we assume to have knowledge of the unseen because we believe ourselves to be devout enough in our practices and superior in our morals to claim such authority.

    Such pride and arrogance causes a decay in the soul that results in harshness, ingratitude, and rigidity, making it increasingly difficult to receive advice from sincere advisors.

    All this conflict within us results from a low self-worth, because when your self-worth is low, your life will be focused on compensating for that, rather than living purposefully or sincerely.

    Peace lies on the other side of gratitude, and gratitude is impossible if you lack awareness and appreciation for who you are, and who you want to be.

    That, right there, is the building blocks of self-worth.

    It always starts with you.

    rewards

  • Gratitude is not an attitude

    Gratitude is not an attitude

    What would life be like if you maximised every resource and every opportunity to which you have access?

    What would the quality of your relationships be if you built on everything that works instead of focusing on what’s not working?

    How would you feel about yourself if you looked at all you’ve overcome instead of being bitter about having had to deal with it all?

    Life is not about an attitude of gratitude, or good habits, because gratitude is not an attitude and habits are formed out of desiring efficiency or convenience.

    Gratitude is an outcome.

    Gratitude is a result of being aware of everything that’s good and right about life, despite there being so many things that could be better, or should be better.

    Gratitude is about understanding what is within our ability to change or influence for the better, and holding ourselves accountable for taking action on that, rather than sitting back and complaining about it.

    Gratitude is not about transacting based on who deserves what. It’s about considering what we wish to enable or what we wish to challenge because of the values by which we strive to live.

    Gratitude, when applied to ourselves, is reflected in how we seek to understand why we are who we are, rather than judging ourselves with shame because of who we’re not.

    Gratitude is reflected in our ability to rise above the anger or bitterness of others, rather than to lose ourselves to it or get drawn into their bitterness because of how they treat us.

    Gratitude is practiced when we approach others with empathy and compassion because we see their struggle with their own demons, instead of judging their inadequacy because we don’t struggle with the same demons.

    Gratitude is not a choice.

    Gratitude is a result of remembering our journey of growth, and owning every step that we took on that journey, both good and bad, while being mindful of the steps that we’re still taking every single day as we work towards our aspirational goals without feeling entitled to having what we strive for.


  • You are your own worst victim

    You are your own worst victim

    The victim mindset wreaks the most destruction and creates the worst of oppressors.

    The victim mindset is established when we find ourselves nursing wounds of experiences and betrayals that have long since passed.

    The victim mindset is nurtured when we are emotionally impacted by the behaviour of those who play no meaningful role in our life.

    The victim mindset becomes more deeply entrenched when we expect others to make up for our experiences from long before we ever knew them.

    The victim mindset is the most debilitating, demoralising, and destructive mindset of them all because it takes offence from being challenged, insult from observation, or feels attacked when advised.

    The victim mindset is set firmly on the belief that we are defined by how others treat us, or treated us.

    The victim mindset denies us the mindfulness and accountability needed to own our life because we’re waiting for our perceived injustices to be remedied before we allow ourselves to move on.

    The victim mindset confuses meaningful action with blind rage.

    The victim mindset destroys, but never creates anything of benefit.

    The victim mindset wastes away life while lamenting the past.

    The victim mindset is a corruption of the soul that fails to separate the moment of being a victim with what we hold onto from the experience long after the experience has passed.

    While we’re caught up in that victim mindset, we lose sight of how many around us become victims of our rage, our neglect, our self-consumed approach to life, and our abdication of responsibility in how we’re supposed to show up for them.

    The victim mindset therefore spawns more victims, and the only way to rise above it is to own it and want to be more than that.

    When you claim your rights before you honour your responsibilities, you’re in a victim state of mind, and you cause oppression while using your feeling of oppression to justify your behaviour.

    It always starts with you.

  • Labelling humans

    Labelling humans

    We dehumanise the human when we label their emotional experience as an illness.

    The moment we attach a label to a life experience, we focus on the label and discard the merits of the experience.

    We make people invisible when we deny the reality of their experience by suggesting that there is something clinically wrong with them, despite causality of their emotional upheaval being clearly associated with their experiences in life.

    In other words, there is a clearly troubling or traumatising experience that they’ve endured to explain their emotional duress, yet we diminish their experience by ‘diagnosing’ them with an illness for feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or stressed, etc. simply because they’re affected by it for longer than we think they should be affected by it.

    The victim readily embraces such labels because it offers hope where they feel hopeless, and allows them to abdicate responsibility for rising above it.

    The oblivious or insensitive ones happily embrace such labels because it demands less emotional investment, or less accountability in their efforts to uplift or support those around them.

    Our aversion to embrace the entirety of the human behind the troubled behaviour denies the victim a voice, or an opportunity to understand their painful experiences in life.

    These labels are worn with shame because it denies us our humanness and makes us a symptom.

    You cannot break the stigma of mental health by undermining the humanness of the ones affected by the stigma.

    Kill the label, kill the stigma.

    If you stigmatise someone’s real life experience, how can you possibly expect them to feel whole?

  • It doesn’t make you stronger

    It doesn’t make you stronger

    The belief that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is a lie.

    It may prepare us for greater trials and opportunities, but we also grow impatient or intolerant when we find ourselves facing the same issues repeatedly.

    Life feels fulfilling and purposeful when we solve a problem and move on, but feels exceedingly frustrating when we are compelled to deal with the same problem every day.

    Eventually, it’s not the repeated problem that gets to us but rather anyone associated with such problems.

    Like going to work and dealing with disrespect or unreasonable demands to constantly have to explain or defend yourself, and then getting home and being faced with similar experiences in a different context.

    Those themes that are similar between work and home is what feels like a trigger or a provocation because emotionally, it resonates with the insignificance that we feel in both places.

    And the same is true in reverse.

    What we experience in our home life preloads us for what we’re willing to tolerate in our public or professional life.

    The more mindful we are about this, the less likely we are to rage at those who have nothing to do with our misery. Be they loved ones, or strangers.

    Don’t go looking for character building experiences that will make you stronger.

    Life has plenty in store for you by design.

  • Who smiles first?

    Who smiles first?

    Are you perhaps the village idiot in someone else’s life, or maybe they’re filling that role in yours?

    The answer to the question as to who puts a smile on the face of the village idiot is that no one does.

    No one puts a smile on the face of the village idiot because no one notices the village idiot.

    But everyone is always willing to take a smile from them, or to be entertained by them.

    Who might that village idiot be?

    That village idiot is the care giver, the supporter, the ones who serve without recognition, or the ones who uplift without asking for anything in return.

    It’s the invisible ones that we expect things from, but don’t consider what they need from us.

    Sometimes we’re the village idiots in other people’s lives.

    But most often, we don’t recognise the village idiots in our lives because when we take people for granted, they become invisible or at the least, their contribution feels like our right or their duty.

    And when they no longer provide us with what we need from them, we don’t stop to consider why.

    If we do, we usually assume that they’ve changed, or that we’re no longer important to them.

    So, we simply move on and find a replacement.

    By making significant others invisible in their contribution to us, or only recognising it when we become invisible to them, we create the environment for depression, anxiety, abuse, and suicide, to name just a few common outcomes of feeling invisible.

    So, I ask you again, who puts a smile on the face of the village idiot?

    Remember : We only contribute towards a significant other when we believe that we matter to them.

    When we discover that we don’t, or that we weren’t as significant as we hoped to be, it tests our emotional resilience and our self-worth.

    How we respond to that test determines the difference between peace or pain.

  • Redirected rage

    Redirected rage

    Our self-worth defines our behaviour in moments when we feel most unappreciated.

    Whether a toddler, a teen, or an adult, we are provoked towards anger and bad behaviour when we feel taken for granted or irrelevant to those who matter to us.

    It doesn’t mean that they must treat us badly.

    It could be as simple as them not noticing what is important to us.

    How we need to feel appreciated is unique to each of us.

    Expecting others to know what’s important to us is how we test for significance without feeling vulnerable by expressing our needs.

    In other words, the moment we need to tell others what we need from them to feel significant, it no longer feels like significance to us. It feels like neediness.

    No one willingly seeks to express their needs without first trusting that it will not be used to weaken their position or standing with those around them.

    But trust is the last thing we can rely on when our self-worth is low, because if we don’t think we’re worth it, we have absolutely no reason to believe that anyone else thinks we’re worth it either.

    That’s how bad behaviour becomes the tool to distract attention away from how we feel about ourselves, while directing attention to what we think is a defendable gripe or anger that we have towards others, or towards life.

    It’s a vicious cycle that starts in childhood, but ends with you.