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  • Embrace the whole of you

    Embrace the whole of you

    We often discard good advice because we don’t like the source.

    Sometimes it’s because we don’t want to appear weak in front of them, and other times it’s because we are trying to save face after having treated them badly.

    Emotional maturity is achieved when we are willing to learn from our enemies and loved ones alike.

    It’s achieved when we are more focused on growth, than we are on how we may appear to others.

    Emotional maturity is key to living with authenticity, and serving with conviction.

    But, emotional maturity is not something that you can pursue directly. It is an outcome.

    What we need to pursue directly is connecting with the gratitude of who we are, while seeking understanding of why they are who they are.

    We must seek to understand the value of every good quality, positive trait, and also every flaw, while embracing how each of these contribute towards making up the whole of who we are as a human being.

    Emotional maturity and quality of life, and relationships, follow from there.

    Any other approach is not sustainable, because every other approach will be dependent on how others treat us, before we will be able to show up as our best selves in that moment.

    Own Your Life. If not, someone else will.

  • To be near death

    Yesterday, I watched a man die.

    I didn’t know him. I don’t know if he was a good person. Nor do I know if he was loved. But his body and his face had all the signs of one who lived in emotional duress.

    He was a married man, and therefore most likely loved. He was an elderly man, and therefore had much life in his years. It appears that he may have succumbed to a heart attack. Alone. In a random street. In a public place. With no celebration of his life or his accomplishments to accompany him, or comfort him in his last moments. Except me, a stranger feeling for his pulse, awkwardly shifting him to ease his breathing, and waiting helplessly for more skilled assistance to arrive while my friend looked on equally helpless at what was unfolding in front of us.

    His dignity was not spared by the lethargic paramedic that eventually arrived on scene. Nor by the inept control room operator that showed zero empathy or urgency in summoning help.

    By the time I left, he was covered in a red blanket, just barely. His hair and feet peeping out of either end. And around his spent body, jovial spirits from five different emergency response services mulled about, paying no attention to the corpse on the sidewalk. He was no longer a name, nor a person. He was a body. A corpse. A reminder of the inevitability of death.

    The only thought that remains, is that death passed me in the street yesterday. And like that man, I left home for a meeting, without any loved ones around, not knowing if I would return home, but assuming that I would. Because that’s what keeps us going, isn’t it? The probability of death in every moment of life is always lower than the probability of surviving that moment and having another, and another, and more.

    Until there is no more. Without warning or ceremony. One day, there will be no more. And the only ceremony that will remain, will be the closure of our life, so that those who survive us may be able to continue living out their probabilities, comforted by the fact that it wasn’t them.

    Yesterday, I stood side by side with death. And I feel numbed by the fact that it didn’t shake me as much as it should have. My effort to reclaim my humanness from an inhumane world continues.

  • A victim of your own mind

    A victim of your own mind

    There’s a difference between being a victim in the moment, versus holding onto the victim mindset long after the moment has passed.

    We hold on to the victim mindset when we need others to recognise our struggle, or to acknowledge what we’re having to overcome or deal with.

    The only reason this becomes necessary is because we feel unappreciated for the most part.

    More than this, we also believe that if we don’t have the victim card to play, we will have no excuse when we fall short of the expectations of others.

    The victim mindset is therefore a result of us believing that we’re not worthy in our own right, that’s why we need to give others something to appreciate about who we are and why we are that way.

    This is a classic example of a self-defeating behaviour.

    In addition to all this, when we’re in victim mode, we place demands on others to compensate for our shortcomings, resulting in strained relationships because they become responsible for how we feel about ourselves, while also having to take up the slack that we leave behind because of how exhausting the victim mindset can be.

    You owe it to yourself to rise above the impact of your last experience. Waiting for justice or retribution, or even an apology only results in you placing your life on hold, and most often has zero impact on the one who treated you badly.

    Don’t give them power beyond the event. If you do, you’re feeding the very cycle of abuse or bad behaviour that you feel victim to.

  • What’s your legacy?

    What’s your legacy?

    Live to love, to laugh, and to leave a legacy.

    It is only through truly appreciating who we are, that we will be able to leave an imprint of love in the hearts of those we cherish.

    Until we connect with that gratitude of self, our efforts will put smiles in the hearts of others, while our own faces carry smiles that barely reach our eyes.

    Without such gratitude, our laughter will be nothing more than an attempt to release, in that moment, the heaviness that we harbour within.

    And our legacy will be one of sacrifice and martyrdom, teaching our loved ones to sacrifice themselves in the service of others, while not teaching them how to connect with the sweetness of such service.

    Material success is only a blessing if it uplifts, rather than enslaves.

    Wealth that enslaves is the wealth that strokes our ego but deprives us of the joy of human connection, or denies us the bonds of beauty that feed our souls.

    Laughter should not be sourced from a business deal that outwitted our opponents.

    Such laughter will mock us in our later years when we realise that our fascination with wealth was merely a drop in the ocean of joy compared to the joy that we could have achieved in investing our incredible talents to brighten up the faces of loved ones, or even strangers.

    Wealth is a means to an end. Don’t get so caught up in the means that you completely lose sight of your end.

  • Peace always starts with you

    Peace always starts with you

    The next time you find yourself having a disagreement with someone, consider if the way in which you conduct yourself is to demand that they show you due respect or consideration, or are you trying to establish understanding.

    When we feel taken for granted or invisible in something that is important to us, we’re more likely to become defensive, aggressive, or passive aggressive in our efforts to get our point across.

    If we’re not aware of our need for significance, we will go in search of significance in almost every setting.

    This is how we end up yelling at cashiers, losing ourselves to road rage, and being argumentative with co-workers, as just a few examples.

    Understanding why we feel insignificant is the first step towards breaking that cycle.

    Understanding why those who are significant to us are not treating us with the significance that we need is the second step.

    And the third step towards breaking this cycle of rage or bitterness at the world is to understand why we need such validation to feel significant before treating others in a way that is true to who we are, rather than being driven by the anger or disappointment that we feel.

    Emotional mindfulness is core to the above, and having a healthy self-worth is what makes it possible to pace ourselves in our efforts towards creating the understanding and establishing the bonds that we believe will improve the quality of our relationships.

    It always starts with you.

    If you need help to understand what drives you to be less than who you want to be, reach out via my website at zaidismail.com or on WhatsApp at +27836599183, and let’s get the conversation started.

  • What are you really waiting for?

    What are you really waiting for?

    In order to know what’s not right, you need to know what right would look like.

    Or feel like.

    Or taste like.

    Just because you don’t know how to make it right, doesn’t mean you have to accept and live with what’s wrong.

    But sitting back and growing frustrated at your condition without trusting yourself to know that it can or must be better is a self-imposed constraint over your happiness.

    Think of your life as your favourite meal.

    Eventually, as life happens, the free who prepared that meal for you leaves your life, or you leave theirs.

    But, your new partner doesn’t know how, for example, your mom or dad, used to prepare that meal for you, so they try their best to make it the way that you like it.

    Despite their best efforts, they just don’t get it right.

    At that point, you have some choices to make:
    1. Blame them for not doing enough
    2. Understand that they can’t recreate something if they don’t have the knowledge or abilities to do so
    3. Accept that your favourite meal cannot be recreated, so you need to discover a new favourite
    4. Work with them in trying to figure out how to create it, so that together, you can once more create what you once loved

    If you choose 4, you will also be creating space for you and your partner to discover something beautiful together.

    You’ll have less reason to blame them for being inadequate, and more reason to play an active part in creating your joy with them, rather than holding them responsible for creating it for you.

    The most important point being that we must avoid the assumption that if someone isn’t doing what we told them we want or need from them, that they’re withholding it out of spite or selfishness, when the truth is more likely to be that they honestly don’t know how because they didn’t have in their life what we had in ours.

    This is how we begin to create space for new joy in our life, instead of wasting life away while lamenting the loss of what we once had.

  • Do you know why?

    Do you know why?

    What we choose to respond to is a reflection of what is important to us.

    The more important it is, the more intense or passionate our response.

    Hence anger that bubbles over, or heartfelt pleas and messages to connect with someone about something.

    The tone and demeanour of how we respond is a reflection of our self-worth.

    The more aggressive or abrasive we are, the lower our self-worth in that moment and about that setting. And vice versa.

    If we’re not mindful about our emotional needs from a given interaction, we’re likely to be distracted by the technical or practical aspects of what we’re dealing with, rather than understanding why it provokes such a strong response from us, or our partner.

    Situational mindfulness is the easy part. That’s being aware of WHAT is going on around you so that you can respond appropriately.

    Emotional mindfulness is more elusive, because it means that we need to be consciously aware of our emotional bias in that moment, or else we’ll lose sight of our bias when interpreting the actions or words of others. In other words, the WHY of our response.

    Understanding your Egosystem that drives you is therefore critical towards improving the quality of your relationships, and your life.

    If you’re struggling to understand why you can’t let go of something that appears hopeless, or why you feel so intensely about something that isn’t that important in the bigger picture, get your copy of The Egosystem now, and begin your journey of reconnecting with you, after having been distracted by the struggles of life.

  • Prisons of our minds

    Prisons of our minds

    Without realising it, we create most of the boundaries and the dependencies that we have on others, often without them being aware of it.

    One of the reasons we do this is because that is our code of life that we’re honouring.

    It’s our way of respecting or protecting what we see as sacred in that relationship.

    However, it’s based on the assumption that our partner shares the same values, and values the same things.

    Healthy communication will make such misalignment of expectations easier to deal with, and resolve.

    But, the moment we tell someone what we need from them, we create an opportunity for doubt within ourselves about whether they’re doing something out of obligation, or sincerity.

    That doubt is the beginning of the prison walls that we erect around ourselves, which slowly isolates us from our partner because we’re expecting them to notice what we need.

    But expectations are important in a relationship.

    Without it, the relationship loses value and the trust fades.

    To avoid this, we need to develop a healthy emotional maturity in the relationship so that issues of trust, expectations, and duty can be discussed in ways that don’t threaten the self-worth of your partner.

    More than this, we also need to realise that if we focused on what we’re not getting, and also focused only on what we’re giving, chances are good that we are unaware of what they need from us beyond the assumptions that we’ve made.

    Thus, the prisons of our minds become the prisons of our lives.