Tag: expectation

  • Hopefully…

    Hopefully…

    Hope is not hope when it is rooted in futility. That is simply wishful thinking.

    Hope is born from the belief that things can change.

    It is not predicated by statements of ‘if only’ or ‘I wish’, but rather inspired by focusing on the probabilities and the opportunities that we have.

    Hope is born when we focus on what we can do to uplift ourselves or change our state, rather than focusing on what we need from others before things can improve.

    Hope is the most powerful statement of gratitude without having to claim being grateful.

    It is not an attitude, nor is it blind faith.

    It is awareness of who we are and what we’re capable of, so that what we discover to be our limits creates a yearning in us to acquire the skills, knowledge, understanding, and resources to push beyond those limits.

    Hope is always present.

    But when we surrender, we invest that hope in someone else saving us, because we gave up hope in our ability to rise above what we are facing.

    Fear is the enemy of hope, and conviction is hope’s armour.

    If you desire relief from an oppressor more than you desire to destroy the oppressor, you invest your hope in the benevolence, or the mercy of the one who oppresses you.

    That is surrender, no matter how rebellious you may appear in your response.

    If your optimism is not followed by meaningful and decisive action, you’re lying to yourself about being optimistic.

    Where and in whom is your hope invested?

    If you say that it’s invested in the Almighty, then be true to exercising the abilities and competence that He has endowed you with, instead of praying for Him to exercise it for you.

  • Own your life

    Own your life

    There are many unflattering adjectives that have been used to describe me over the years.

    Before life got real, it used to trouble me to think that others had a negative opinion of me despite my best efforts to be a decent human.

    It was a distraction that sometimes still gets the better of me. Fortunately, only in short bursts these days.

    I don’t assume that I’m never any of what they accuse me of.

    I know I’m entirely capable of being a difficult person, or even an abrasive and opinionated fool.

    But, I only reconsider my actions if I receive such feedback from someone who is willing to engage beyond the insult or the negative assumption.

    Everyone is opinionated. Many just don’t have the courage to speak plainly from fear of rejection or being unpopular.

    Those are the ones that I ignore.

    Not because I think I’m better than them, but because they have nothing of value that I can work with in my efforts to be better than who I was the moment before they shared their opinion about me.

    Without such a mindful consideration of what people think of me, I literally would have been six feet under in an unmarked grave from having taken my own life because of the bitterness that others project onto me when they’re not willing to face their own demons.

    My sanity and my life is mine to own.

    If I give up that accountability, I will be no more than an attention whore praying for acceptance by the spineless.

    Life is too short for such frivolity.

    Own your life. If you’re not owning it, someone else is.

  • Toxic blah blah

    Toxic blah blah

    The belief that people are toxic is self-serving.

    The belief that parents are toxic is a sign of ingratitude.

    The belief that others are not allowed to change how they behave towards you when you don’t honour what is important to them is entitlement.

    The belief that what is important to us is more important than those who raised us is probably the closest thing to a toxic trait that we’ll find.

    Societies that have withstood the test of time are the ones who honoured their elders and embraced the wisdom that was passed down to them.

    Adapting that wisdom to solve contemporary problems is the failing of the current generation of parents and children.

    People, not just parents, withdraw from relationships when they feel rejected, betrayed, dishonoured, disrespected, taken for granted, and more.

    If you hold your parents to that standard of supposed toxicity, be sure to apply the same definitions to your own behaviour.

    If you truly understood the effort, self-sacrifice, compromise of dreams and aspirations, and duress that a present parent must overcome to show up as a parent, you might understand why betrayal of trust, disrespect, or rejection hurts them enough to want to withdraw from the life of the child that they spent their life serving up to that point.

    It’s fashionable these days to judge parents harshly while believing that the new generation has a better understanding of what’s needed to make life work.

    Sadly, the current state of society proves otherwise.

    How does your judgement of the people who raised you stand up to the scrutiny of the ‘toxic’ label that you’re so willingly throwing around these days?

    You will be tested by that which you judge others about. Be careful.

    Arrogance is a slippery slope.

  • Deluded confidence

    Deluded confidence

    We treat others the way that we treat ourselves.

    If you struggle to understand what drives the emotional currents that you experience within yourself, look at the feedback that you’re receiving from those who stand to gain nothing from your downfall.

    Remember: The most important feedback is non-verbal.

    When we hold ourselves accountable for what we do or don’t do, we will hold other’s accountable for the commitments or claims that they make.

    When we give ourselves an easy pass, we’ll allow others to be flaky about their commitments towards us.

    We give what we have and we accept what we want must be tolerated about us.

    So when we are filled with self-loathing while pretending to be at peace with and claim to be grateful for who we are, we will be harsh or unforgiving towards those who question our behaviour while being exceedingly gentle and generous with those who affirm our delusions.

    This is not about who is right or wrong, good or bad, noble or despicable.

    This is simply the way life works.

    You cannot give what you don’t have.

    Expecting it to be different will result in contention and stress within yourself as you struggle to find answers to what should not be problems, and it will strain relationships that matter because you will be that much more difficult to be understood.

    That lack of understanding from others, when observed through your delusions about who you are, will seem like rejection or confrontation because when we are unwilling to hold ourselves accountable for the state in which we find ourselves, we will feel attacked by anyone else holding us accountable for our contribution towards any problems in our relationship with them.

    The reasons for holding onto delusions, especially while knowing that those delusions conflict with reality, is a topic for another day.

    But first, we must be willing to test our assumptions about life and about others to ensure that we’re not deluded to begin with.

    It always starts with you.

  • Do you see you?

    Do you see you?

    Life conditions us to look at what we’re getting, rather than what is given.

    That means that we focus on what we’re giving, and not what others are receiving from us.

    That’s how we end up misinterpreting the signals that we get from them, while they also misinterpret the signals that they get from us.

    The result: A lot of avoidable misunderstandings that break down good relationships.

    The reason why everything is tainted or beautified by your self-worth is because that is the lens or the filter through which you view life.

    When we have an unhealthy self-worth, life seems dreary and morbid without any hope that what’s important to us will be important to anyone else.

    When our self-worth is healthy, we see opportunity to create value, and find reason to uplift others rather than wait to be uplifted.

    Self-worth is often over complicated.

    Simply put, it’s our belief in our ability to add value to the world and to the lives around us.

    When we doubt this, or become distracted when our efforts to add value were rejected by someone significant, we question our value first, before we consider that they may have been going through their own difficulty that caused them not to see or believe in what we were offering.

    That distraction is what leads to self-loathing.

    Self-loathing therefore sets in when we stop seeing ourselves for who we are, and start seeing ourselves the way we think others see us.

    Perhaps this is just another reason why the eyes are the windows to the soul.

    When last did you see you and not what you think society thinks of you?

  • Look back with understanding

    Look back with understanding

    When you don’t have a gentle hand to guide you, or an understanding structure to support you, life will be shaped through trial and error.

    In the same way that we can’t give what we don’t have, nor can others offer us what they don’t have – no matter how much we need it from them, or may have rights to get it from them.

    Realising this has been the saving grace of my sanity through a colourful life.

    So many of us set out in life knowing who we don’t want to be based on our experiences with those around us – especially our parents.

    But we fail to realise that it doesn’t prepare us, or give us anything to work with, in determining how to be who we want to be.

    It may sound cryptic, but it’s not.

    It’s easy to identify what we want to achieve in life, but if we don’t know how life works, we will keep tripping up on the subtleties that cause havoc in ways that we never anticipated.

    No one sets out to destroy their own life, even if they persist in blatantly destructive behaviour.

    They do so because they exhausted themselves living life wishfully instead of purposefully.

    Such a mindset results from anger about what you don’t have, leading to acting with haste or impatience in striving for what you want.

    The only antidote that I’ve discovered for this is to observe, with the intention of understanding, those who let you down or didn’t show up the way you needed them to.

    Our trial and error, like theirs, denies others the wisdom and support that they need to learn how life works.

    Self-pity or entitlement, and especially anger, will never change that reality, it will only repeat the cycles that may have caused us hardship.

    It always starts with you.

  • 10 Rules for life

    10 Rules for life

    If you don’t hold yourself accountable before you hold others accountable, you’re insincere about what you claim to uphold.

    If you focus on everyone else’s shortcomings that you think may justify your behaviour, you will be defined by everyone else’s shortcomings.

    Is that really the standard by which you want to live?

    It always starts with you.

    Here are the 10 Rules:


    1. If you want to be trusted, conduct yourself with integrity and consistency at all times, not only when things are easy.

    2. If you want to be respected, learn to respect others, not only when there’s something in it for you.

    3. If you want to be appreciated, show appreciation for what you have and what you receive instead of behaving as if you’re entitled to everything that you need or want.

    4. If you want to be treated like an adult, communicate like an adult instead of throwing tantrums or assuming that you’re right so there’s no need for you to convince anyone else about what you believe to be true.

    5. If you want to feel cared for, show due care and consideration for others, and not only for people from whom you need things or from those who stroke your ego.

    6. If you want the benefit of the doubt, work on your credibility instead of demanding to be treated as if you have credibility, especially if you did something that raised doubts about your credibility.

    7. If you want to be heard, listen with the intention of understanding, and not with the intention of responding to prove that you’re right while ignoring the facts presented to you.

    8. If you can’t handle the answer to a question, don’t ask the question because you’re looking to hear what you want to hear, rather than being interested in what others have to say.

    9. If you don’t want others to assume the worst of you, stop assuming the worst of others.

    10. If you want your rights to be respected, fulfil your responsibilities. All of it. Not only the ones that you think you need to or feel like fulfilling.


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    10 Rules for 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.