You know that old adage about ‘practice what you preach’?
At some point someone replaced it with ‘those who can’t do, coach’.
And the world has been worse off since then.
Yes, I know I identify as a coach, but it would be opportunistic of me to ignore the large number of charlatans using the profession to project their world view on others.
Too many people are ready to tell the world how to be better, but only so many who try to be better than they were the day before.
Authenticity is not about the spoken word, it’s about action.
Everyone has a nugget of wisdom to throw around, but only so many have the conviction to give it life.
Most often, people already know what they need to change about their lives to be in a better space, but their lack of understanding in how they may be counter productive in their efforts is what holds them back.
So when you tell them what to change, you’re effectively making them dependent on you for solutions rather than improving their understanding of how life works.
Good intentions are never enough.
Understanding the effectiveness of the methods that we adopt is what determines how successful we are at creating the life that we want.
And because you don’t know what you don’t know, it becomes that much more important to choose your advisors carefully or else you risk getting advice that makes you feel better about your contribution towards the struggles of your life while blaming others for it.
Are you sure you’re choosing advisors to help you grow, or do your advisors make you feel better about your faults?
Don’t just preach your philosophy about life, live it.
#hope #expectation #sincerity #selfworth #change #embracingchange #livingchange #influence #inspiration #integrity #authenticity #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #mentalhealthrecovery #egosystem #lifecoaching #lifegoals #ownyourlife #coachzaidismail
Tag: change
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Does your therapist stroke your ego?
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New spaces
My daughter has been nesting more than usual recently. And she’s been bullying me for my phone to take photos like these of her nesting efforts. These flowers from the garden are surprisingly cheerful. They look beautiful in the garden, but they really pop in the house. I guess it’s a reminder in a way that in our usual environment we blend in or appear ordinary, but explore new spaces and what we have to offer suddenly takes on a new richness. I think I’m in this space now…but grappling with the mechanics of figuring out how to insert myself into new spaces. It’s not the unfamiliarity that I find challenging, it’s simply access. Maintaining a low social profile makes it that much more difficult to break new ground when that new ground is intricately woven with other beings. Never a dull life…
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The Lonely Path (II)
That incomplete thought process is hounding me. It feels as if the main point that I tried to convey in the first take on this subject eluded that entire post. The main point was simply this. Before I continue, I am well aware that me using the term simple when explaining what’s going on in my head is quite the oxymoron. So there is no need to snigger about that.
Anyway, the point is, when we choose to pursue a greater calling in life that stretches who we are and what we stand for, we need to realise that the people that are familiar with who we are will no longer know the person that we are striving to become. Under ideal circumstances they will grow with us. But ideals are most often talked about and rarely implemented. So expect to feel a creeping sense of isolation when you push yourself beyond the norms that surround you.
Understand that when you outgrow the environment that you’re in, those that have grown to be defined by that environment will quickly assume that you are trying to be better than them. Or maybe they will assume that you think you are now better than them. Whether that is true is irrelevant. What is relevant is that you are different. You are hopefully a better version of you. But unless you surround yourself with people that appreciate and grow with you, that’s when the lonely path appears before you.
You’ll find yourself growing uneasy as you feel at odds with what used to be familiar and comforting but slowly grows to feel discomforting and somewhat annoying. The comfort of familiarity will be replaced with the realisation of exclusion. Not the exclusion from social circles because that remains consistent for the most part. But the exclusion that leaves you emotionally wanting while physically accepted. An ambivalence sets in that challenges what you believe to be true against what you think may be an assumption of grandeur.
Believing that you are capable of more borders precariously between confidence and delusion. Choose delusion, and you’ll be delusioned about your dreams and aspirations, resulting in an embrace of mediocrity so that the familiar comfort of fitting in continues to stroke your ego. Choose confidence and expect to be tested each time you take a bold step towards being the better version of you. Each time you break away from the norm you risk ridicule or rejection, or both. More importantly, each time you step up, you face self-doubt about your ability to succeed, and your motivation to want to succeed.
Are you still serving that greater purpose or are you serving your ego? Are you pushing yourself to escape complacency or are you courting the admiration of others? The questions that hold you back never cease while the strength to push on is always just out of reach. That’s when you need to stretch yourself into unknown spaces. That’s when doing what feels comfortable and safe threatens to undo every bit of progress that you made up to that point. Even if no one else noticed that progress, you’ll know it was there after you gave it up. Give it up silently and it will haunt you quietly for the rest of your life as you wonder if you would have been able to pull it off. Protect that progress and nurture it into something greater, and you’ll face the reality of success and the horror of failure every few minutes in the back of your mind as you try to focus on what you feel passionate about while trying to subdue the self-doubt that gave you reason to procrastinate for so long.
At that point you’ll slowly begin to realise that life was never about persevering through trials, it was always about facing the fears of success. By focusing on the trials we have something to raise as a trophy just by surviving. Succeeding in moments that trounced others feels like success, but once the moment passes, once the recognition of our struggles and our bravery fades, we’re back to facing off the same questions that taunted us when we grew restless in the first place when we first looked at our life and saw all the gaps we could fill to make it better and improve it beyond meaningless embellishments. You cannot unsee what you stared in the face. The more you try to ignore it, the more exhausting the effort to distract you from it.
The lonely path is the only path that showed others that there is a better way. It is the sacrifice of one that improves the lives of many. Needing the guarantee of reciprocation or reward before setting out to improve this world feeds the transactional greed that defines too many of our interactions. Be like everyone else and you’ll always feel like you belong, except when you’re taking your final breath, or when you’ve aged beyond your fickle social needs. When your energy and your health no longer allows you to pursue with gusto the passion of your youth, desiring to change the world will be nothing more than self-inflicted torture. Building hope on the empty promises of inclusion by society is a foolish way to burn your candle. If you hope to die knowing that the world is better because of your existence, don’t shy away from the lonely path, embrace it.
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The Path You Take
Share your story. A prompt that suggests so much. It suggests that we have a story worth sharing, but equally so, it suggests that there is an audience interested in our story. We all have a story to share. So much so that it is an accepted cliché when seeing untoward behaviour from some, or a lack of ambition from others. We remind ourselves and others that we don’t know their story and therefore should not judge them harshly. That has its merits to a point.
Something not so often contemplated though is the story versus the storyteller. I’ve witnessed many times how a great story is dismissed simply for being told by the wrong storyteller. Not because they did a bad job of telling it, but because the audience saw that person as someone other than a source of credibility, wonderment, or inspiration.
The stories of our lives consists of the people and characters that we most often know first hand. Be that online or in real time, our first hand interactions with them shapes their perceptions of who we are and what they believe we are capable of. It is that perception that defines how our story will be received or how our advice may be taken. Good advice is always good advice. It only becomes tainted in our minds because we contaminate it with our perception of the advisor.
True emotional maturity and a healthy self esteem is defined by our ability to accept the truth, or criticism, regardless of its source. That probably speaks as much about the conviction we hold for objective truth (if such exists in normal human interactions) versus our subjective truth regardless of the facts that may challenge our views. But all this is beside the real point, and instead simply alludes to a much more important point that escapes most of us.
When we choose to change the definition of who we are, or how we are preceived (which is a natural consequence of the former), we forget that others are not as invested in the change that we wish for ourselves. For most, it is more convenient for them to maintain their firmly held beliefs about who we are or what we represent, because it gives them predictability and assurance about their views on life and others. They need that predictability or stability especially when their self image is based on how they compare to others. I think this is an important point.
When we realise how much the way we are strengthens the self esteem of others, we’ll realise why it is that the support that we expect is not forthcoming when needed. Their self esteem could be bolstered by believing that they’re better than we are, or by their association with us if we have admirable qualities that they want to be associated with. It is easy at this point to assume that they do not want us to be successful or ambitious, but the truth lies closer to the fact that they are not ready to reevaluate who they are relative to their changing reality.
When we assume that it is about us, rather than recognising that they suffer from their own feelings of insufficiency, we feel deprived or betrayed by their lack of support. Right there is the struggle of leadership. True leadership, not pseudo leadership associated with an office or title. Leading in your chosen field of passion or influence. Following a calling that demands more than just fitting in or complying with the norm. When you choose that path, one of your closest companions will likely be isolation.
Isolation is an inevitable outcome of influencing change. By definition, change means to be set apart from the norm. You cannot lead from within the masses, or by subtly hinting at improvement while maintaining the status quo to avoid disruption. Unless of course minor incremental changes define the limits of the leadership that you wish to provide, or the change you wish to see realised.
I guess it is therefore more accurate to state that disruptive leadership is a courtship of isolation. Only once the value of your vision is experienced by the rest can you hope to feel any sense of inclusion. However, by that time the harm or discomfort of isolation by those you expected to be your staunch supporters often results in so much damage to the fabric of your relationship with them that their inclusion or support no longer holds any merit. Ironically it becomes a reversal of the point of departure. You risk becoming the one not willing to reevaluate your perception of others because of a moment in the past, rather than accepting that they needed tangible evidence to overcome their cynicism or doubt about what you were striving to achieve and the value that it offered them.
Either way, when you choose your path in life, inclusion will leave you constrained and unfulfilled, while conviction will risk disruption that will set you on a collision course with the people that you hope to keep close through the journey ahead. If you have such people in your life, the ones that grow with you on your journey, cherish them. However, on this point I believe that not a lot of cherishing will be done, because not many earn such respect or gratitude through support and encouragement.
Perhaps it is just my jaundiced view based on a jaundiced relationship with a jaundiced society.
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Writer’s block sucks. So does the feeling of being philosophically constipated. I’m not even sure what that means, but I have this urge to want to write something meaningful about all the changes in my life recently, how it impacts me, and how it’s turned out relative to what I expected, but nothing. I’m anaemic. I sit here at my keyboard waiting to bleed and nothing trickles out.
I’m an impatient man. I’m constantly contemplating the consequences of what we’re contemplating now, and instead of accepting that a long term goal is in fact a long term goal, the moment it takes a shape or form in my head, I feel compelled to realise it now against some ridiculous self-imposed deadline.
At least I can still ramble nonsensically without much effort, so perhaps not all is lost yet. It still sucks though.
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Change is Imminent
Here’s some poetry I wrote, cuz I was boredddd.
Asalaam Alaikum wa rahmatullah
Bismillah
You’ll have to excuse me I developed this with a quick pace so allow me some space as I translate the case of the mistaken race and the warfare we face
As a community wrought with disunity under constant scrutiny by our fearless enemies I feel the need to channel some energy and create some synergy
The last time I spoke of a story, it was one of glory, about a man of authority, the goal was to shuffle your inventory, you see our lives have become oh so regulatory.
In a constant state of reaction towards some illegal action, we’ve made ourselves a faction that serves as a distraction while the real villains roam with satisfaction
You didn’t need to show me that Find Kony was a phony, yet society seems to own me, and my mind is so lonely without the media to control me and so,
I resort to blogging on a social website about the battles I fight where on the same night I feel its my right to point out I’m right and the destruction I type on someone’s profile pic could make the Companions sick because im such a hypocrite.
You ask me about change on a global range, while you hold the reigns and lead the campaign of delivering pains to those you claim to love without blame.
You want rights brother, start respecting your mother.
You want respect sister, stop flirting with that mister
The key to revolution begins with evolution and dissolution of our primal confusion that requires a fusion of respect minus intrusion and a mental ablution so in CONCLUSION.
Implement moderation with a desire for education for that is the foundation that leads to the equation for a united nation
Change is Imminent
I really enjoyed this on different levels and thought it worth sharing. 🙂
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Standing still is your enemy
Before – October 2009
After – February 2012 The table cloth descending on Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa, with a stranded ship in the foreground. I photographed this ship shortly after it ran aground in a storm close to the shore, and went back there on my recent trip to see how it had fared in the stormy seas of the Cape.
It didn’t fare too well at all. It is a stark reminder of people that think that by standing still, nothing will change and they’ll be unaffected by life. No matter how firmly rooted we are in what we believe or how we see life, no matter how much we resist change, we will change. But in resisting it, that change will always be for the worst.
A principled approach to being adaptable is what saves our sanity in the face of life’s storms.
