Tag: hope

  • Are you throwing away a good life?

    Are you throwing away a good life?

    If you find yourself feeling easily judged about your life, you’re focused on how others perceive you, rather than what you think of yourself.

    In fact, the moment you focus on what opinions others may have about your life or about who you are, it confirms that you are already judging yourself harshly.

    That insecurity distracts us from growing, and encourages us to defend and protect what we have.

    While defending and protecting may seem necessary, or even admirable, it is driven by the fear of losing what we have, rather than allowing us to appreciate our ability to thrive despite what life has thrown at us.

    There must be a healthy balance between the gratitude of what we have so that we maintain it responsibly, versus the belief that we are capable of constant improvement in the same way that we improved our lives over the years of struggle.

    It’s a subtle but critical realisation that will make the difference between feeling burdened and irritable about the present, or grateful and energised about the future.

    Take a moment to consider how much of your time and energy is invested in defending who you are or what you’ve achieved.

    Now compare that to the amount of time and energy invested in recognising the opportunities you have to achieve even more.

    Any sense of uneasiness or unhappiness at the thought of that is an indication of how much you’ve been taking yourself and your life for granted.

    Own Your 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.

  • 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.

  • You judge others as you judge yourself

    You judge others as you judge yourself

    The irony of helping others out of the dark spaces in their lives is that when they emerge, they’re often inclined to avoid you because you remind them of a time when they were weak.

    When we believe that such weakness is deplorable, we remain weak.

    When we view ourselves through the lens of weak versus strong, good versus bad, and so on, we are judging ourselves and others, rather than trying to understand what got us into such states.

    There is a time and a place for judgement. But that time and place is only when we need to stop an oppression from taking place.

    Beyond that moment, we must focus on understanding the human struggle behind that behaviour, or else we diminish the struggle of the one who behaved badly, giving them ever more reason to continue behaving badly. Or worse.

    Gratitude for our moments of weakness is not possible if we still carry a sense of shame about our weakened state.

    It’s one thing to regret what we did and to put in the effort to make up for it. But it’s not the same as carrying shame within us that we need to hide from the world.

    That need to hide our shame from the world is how we judge ourselves harshly and then look for evidence of others judging us.

    That’s often the reason for our defensiveness or aggression in response to any mention of what we once did wrong.

    When you find yourself judging yourself or others harshly, it means that you have yet to appreciate the reasons for your weakness or have yet to connect with your humanness.

    You’ll only allow others to be human when you believe that you’re allowed to be human.

    Right there is the path to peace in your life.

  • 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.

  • What consumes your thoughts?

    What consumes your thoughts?

    The gravity of life is often a distraction from living it.

    So obsessed do we become with the future, or needing retribution for the past, that we lose the present moment.

    But this is a philosophy that many know, yet few understand.

    What we take from the past, determines whether we live in the present moment with hope and joy, or in fear of the future.

    So deeply ingrained is this fear that those who do not embrace it are shunned as being irresponsible, or out of touch.

    Connecting with the reality of your contribution towards your past, offers you insights into how to maximise the value of the present, leaving no room for fear of the future.

    Because the future then becomes a beautiful surprise, offering new opportunities to take even more from each moment that it offers.

    Lose yourself to judging yourself or others about what has already passed, and the future will offer nothing more than the fear of loss, or the absence of peace.

    Choose wisely what you take from your past, and the present becomes the gift with which to create a beautiful future.

    Live. Don’t just exist. And definitely don’t stop at surviving.

  • Where is your faith?

    Where is your faith?

    Fear sets in when we take our past experiences and project it on our future.

    That means that we have more trust in the outcomes of the past, than we do about our ability to shape our future.

    It also means that when we find it difficult to establish or maintain trust in a relationship, it’s because one or both of the people involved are afraid of making themselves vulnerable to what they’ve experienced before.

    That’s why so many hold on to the past.

    It gives us a sense of certainty or safety, while seemingly protecting us from experiencing the same pain in the future.

    But, that assumes that who we were back then, is still who we are now. That assumption is incorrect.

    Every experience changes us, whether willingly or unwillingly, consciously or subconsciously. Change is unavoidable.

    What does faith have to do with it all?

    The irony is that faith is there all along.

    Faith is never blind.

    What we see as the probable outcomes of the future is in fact faith. Faith is always based on evidence that we gather from the past.

    The question is, are we gathering evidence about how often we failed, or are we gathering evidence of how often we persevered beyond those failures?

    When you connect with that realisation, you’ll be able to consciously shift your investment of faith from assuming the worst about the future, to realising that you have it within you to influence how that future shapes up.

    Own your life.

  • Who makes you feel old?

    Who makes you feel old?

    Does being childish mean you’re immature?

    Does being mature mean that you must give up your youthful playfulness?

    Does being responsible mean that you can’t be lighthearted about serious issues?

    The labels and expectations that we adopt for ourselves are more about how we want to be seen, rather than what others expect of us.

    When we lose sight of these choices that we’ve made, we blame society for the weight of our lives.

    Our perception of who we are is the root of the joy or torment that we experience in our lives.

    It is also the root of whether we grow old before our time, or do we remain young until the day we die.

    Sometimes we lose ourselves to duty and servitude because we feel so intensely responsible for doing our part, or because we believe that we must take up the slack that others leave behind while they’re enjoying their life.

    How we feel about doing it is more important than whether that is true, because if we feel burdened, we’ll experience the heaviness of responsibility.

    But if we connect with the value that we want to create through our service of others, we’ll feel the joy of fulfilment in connecting with that value, rather than focusing on whether we’re appreciated or not.

    That is the beginning of learning to appreciate ourselves before we expect others to make us feel worthy.