Tag: loveyourself

  • Break the stigma. Stop the label.

    Break the stigma. Stop the label.

    I think it was Dr Wayne Dyer who said that if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

    This is true both positively and negatively.

    Do you know someone who has a problem for every solution? Who sees doom and gloom at the happiest of moments? Who is preempting a negative outcome despite things going in their favour?

    Do you think they have a mental illness, or have they just been hurt so many times before, that they are afraid to hope for a positive outcome? Are they simply protecting themselves from being let down again?

    This is how we experience life when we finally give up hope about the future, or we give up hope about being appreciated.

    That absence of hope is what causes us to feel depressed. Depression is a legitimate experience of human emotions after we’ve taken one too many hard knocks from life about something important to us.

    The same is true for every other emotional experience.

    Emotions are not deficiencies. They’re the essence of what makes us human.

    If we ever hope to win this battle against a consistently declining quality of life, we need to stop referring to emotions as mental health, and we need to stop defining the duress that we experience in life as a mental illness.

    We need to reconnect with the human behind the pain, instead of dehumanising them by denying the legitimacy of their emotional experience.

    Break the stigma. Stop the labelling. Embrace the humanness.



  • Cheat old age

    Cheat old age

    We seek safety and comfort in planning our life, our vacations, or careers to the last degree when we are afraid of being out of control, or missing opportunities that may result in regret later on.

    Like everything else, there is a place for planning in life.

    But, when that planning denies you the spontaneity of grabbing opportunities that present themselves without warning, then it’s no longer planning. It’s a need for control.

    And control is a defence mechanism to prevent ourselves from appearing incompetent because we’re afraid of what we don’t know or didn’t plan for.

    Spontaneity, impulsiveness, passion. These are the attributes that we embrace when we’re confident that we can navigate life as it shows up.

    What they say about travelling is true about life. Plan your trip, but go with the flow.

    Look back on your life and notice how much of it was unpredictable. Yet, here you are.

    Do you really need to control every aspect of your life, or have you proven, without meaning to, that you’re capable of navigating the unpredictable?

    Live. Don’t just exist.

  • Break the cycle

    Break the cycle

    Character is what is built when we are faced with trials.

    Beauty is what we appreciate when we emerge from those trials.

    Those that have the greatest scars are the ones that appreciate life the most. But only if they don’t allow themselves to grow bitter in the process.

    After hardship comes ease, provided we don’t hold on to past hurts and betrayals.

    When we demand justice or retribution without understanding, we exchange places with those who oppressed us.

    That’s how we grow to be like the one who hurt us, because we become defined by the hurt in the same way that their hurt drove them to hurt us.

    The cycle is broken only when we seek to understand why, so that acceptance is possible, and forgiveness is sincere and not burdensome.

    Otherwise, forgiveness becomes an indulgence of our ego, rather than a true effort towards moving forward with peace in our heart.

    Break the cycle.

    Seek to understand.

    First your own pain.

    Then only will you grow to understand the pain of others.

    It always starts with you.

  • Are you waiting for permission to be who you want to be?

    Are you waiting for permission to be who you want to be?

    Note, who you want to be, not what you want to be.

    We’re so focused on what we want to be, what career, what achievements, what social standing, that we lose sight of who we want to be.

    That’s how we become defined by what we are, or what goals we are pursuing.

    Who we want to be refers to the kind of human we want to be.

    It sounds simple enough. Everyone wants to be kind, generous, understanding, compassionate, benevolent, and so on.

    There isn’t a single person that will say that they don’t want to be those things, and many who think that they are already that.

    So why then are we not experiencing others the way that we all claim we are conducting ourselves?

    It’s because we wait for permission to express kindness, understanding, and all those other beautiful attributes.

    That permission comes in the form of needing others to behave a certain way, or to treat us the way that we want to be treated before we’ll be good and loving and understanding towards them.

    That permission is what we get when we want to feel appreciated before we show gratitude, or we want to feel loved before we express affection. And so on.

    When we wait for such permission, we become defined by how we are treated, and thus, we become part of the harshness or coldness that we experience in our lives.

    So, who do you want to be?

    Are you who you want to be, or are you waiting for permission to be that person?

    Your life is yours to claim. It always starts with you.

  • When one good thing ends, another begins

    When one good thing ends, another begins

    At the end of every road, a decision awaits.

    Do we stop and remain focused on the road we just travelled, or do we choose a path beyond that road so that our journey continues?

    If the road travelled was a difficult one, most focus on the difficulty and choose to protect themselves from such difficulty in future.

    They’re the ones who grow weary about life, and place their happiness in the hands of others.

    Life becomes a burden, and death a morbidly romantic destination.

    But those who look back on that difficult journey and recognise how they managed to create something of beauty, experienced something amazing, or developed a sense of gratitude for the accomplishments that would otherwise not have been possible are the ones who look ahead with excitement and optimism.

    They connect with their ability to live, despite the trials of life.

    They connect with their ability to create happiness for others, rather than waiting for others to create it for them.

    They realise that just as their journey was difficult up to that point, so too are the journeys that others travel equally difficult, if not more than the one that they’re on.

    They connect with gratitude, and create space for joy because they know that what has passed only prepared them to create even greater things in the future.

    Which of the two do you choose to be?

    Fixate on the injustice or unfairness of the past, or appreciate your ability to prevail with joy into the future?

    The choice is yours.

  • 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.

  • Eat more humble pie

    Eat more humble pie

    It only tastes like humble pie when we feel humiliated after being corrected.

    Arrogance is the belief that we’re better…humility visits us when we realise that we’re not.

    The root of arrogance is insecurity, but that’s a discussion for another day.

    If we’re sincere about wanting to benefit others or wanting to create good for those around us, when we get it wrong and we’re corrected, we’ll appreciate it.

    In such cases, we’ll eat gratitude pie, not humble pie, right?

    So, when it feels like we’ve been made to eat humble pie, we need to consider what our intention was behind what we did before we got things wrong.

    On the surface, our intentions always appear noble.

    But it’s that appearance of nobility that distracts is from sincerity.

    When connecting with or checking your intention, be sure to dig deeper than what you experienced in that moment.

    It’s only when we connect with our intention, our true intention, that we’ll be able to recognise how others are not deliberately malicious or selfish in their actions.

    Instead, it will allow us to connect with empathy to the emotional needs that they have.

    That’s how we break cycles of unhealthy behaviours.

    Perhaps if we eat more humble pie we’ll discover gratitude? 🤔