Tag: mentalhealthawareness

  • Allow your children to be their own person

    Allow your children to be their own person

    We always have good intentions when we strive to give our children everything that we didn’t have.

    Often, this includes protecting them from the hardships or difficulties that we experienced.

    Unfortunately, when we do this, we end up protecting them from reality, and in the process, we deny them the very life lessons that taught us to appreciate what we have.

    This is one of the most common reasons for kids growing up to be timid, entitled, or disrespectful…or all of the above.

    Hardships and difficulties are character building experiences.

    Find a way that strikes a balance between allowing them to experience it, and providing guidance and support as they navigate their way through it.

    Too many assume that hardship is a denial of a good life.

    It’s not.

    Allow them to earn their privileges so that they’ll experience gratitude and fulfilment when they achieve it.

    Lastly, when you shy away from something that weighs you down, or you try to hide it from them, you’re teaching them to feel ashamed of getting things wrong, or failing at achieving goals.

    That’s how we raise them with a value system that conflicts with the kind of humans that we want them to be.

    Be mindful of your rule as a parent, but more than this, be mindful of your contribution as a human being.

    It always starts with you.

  • 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.

  • A life full of things…except happiness

    A life full of things…except happiness

    While there may be truth in the saying that money doesn’t buy happiness but at least you can choose your misery, we need to consider if we really want to be choosing our misery or experiencing happiness?

    It all starts out with good intent.

    Earn some money to improve your quality of life, or create a home environment that is welcoming and comfortable for those you love, and hopefully in the process, feel appreciated for your efforts.

    But what happens when that appreciation is not as forthcoming as you need it to be?

    Sometimes, we look for that appreciation in a specific shape and form, and if it doesn’t appear in exactly that way, we assume that we’re not appreciated.

    That’s when our relationships become transactional as we start comparing who does how much to maintain the standard of living that we’ve grown accustomed to, while dismissing the efforts and intentions of the one doing all that.

    Valuing yourself comes before any expectation or need to be valued by others. If you don’t value yourself, you’ll look for that validation or appreciation to be served up in a specific way by others, thereby holding them accountable for how you feel about yourself.

    That’s how you end up having a life full of things, but a heart that lacks contentment.

    It always starts with you. You teach others what is important to you by how you treat them.

    And when you value yourself, you’ll realise that when others don’t value you, it’s because they’re struggling with their own self-worth and not because they don’t appreciate you or your efforts in their life.

    Own your life, and your emotional wellbeing will take care of itself.

  • 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? 🤔

  • Who controls you?

    Who controls you?

    Sometimes, we’re so focused on reacting to the disrespect that we receive from others that we don’t realise how we give up our self-respect in the process.

    If we continue in reaction mode for long enough, we’ll find ourselves not only returning the favour by treating them the way that they treat us, but we’ll also find ourselves blaming them for our response.

    That’s when we go beyond losing our self-respect and we begin losing ourselves completely.

    Strangely though, we’re unlikely to do this with everyone.

    We’ll often encounter total strangers or mere acquaintances who will treat us badly, but we’ll ignore them and continue focusing on what is important to us.

    Therefore, the answer lies in how much significance we place in those relationships to which we lose ourselves.

    The more significant that we want to be in their lives, the more we’ll convince ourselves about their significance in ours. That’s how we become emotionally invested in being treated with respect by them.

    The less respect we receive, the more intense our emotional experience, resulting in us fighting fire with fire. In other words, giving them a taste of their own medicine.

    That’s when respect becomes optional. When we convince ourselves that treating others the way that they treat us is in fact justice, when the truth is that it is returning their bitterness with our bitterness towards them.

    That’s how we give up the good of who we are.

    The greatest tragedy in all of this is that when we lose ourselves, we also lose sight of the struggles, or the low self-esteem that they’re experiencing which causes them to treat us badly.

    Instead of breaking that cycle, we feed it, and in the process, harm ourselves as much as we believed they were harming us.

    When respect becomes optional based on how we’re treated by others, we give them the power to define how we feel about ourselves.

    To whom are you giving your power today?

  • Who makes you feel worthy?

    Who makes you feel worthy?

    Confidence comes from caring less about what others think of you, and caring more about what you think of yourself.

    The question is, do you know yourself well enough to have an informed opinion of who you are?

    When we rely on others for more than just feedback and instead allow them to validate who we are, we essentially give them the power to define how we feel about ourselves.

    Listening to what others think of you must be done with one single focus in mind.

    It must be with the objective of determining whether or not the message that you intended was in fact the message that they received.

    But that means that you must know what your message is.

    What is your unique contribution?

    Chances are good that a lot of the good that you do, you simply see it as duty or responsibility.

    And yes, the outcome that we must achieve may be our responsibility or our duty towards others, but how we achieve that outcome and how we make them feel in the process is uniquely us.

    When we lose sight of that, we lose ourselves to duty.

    When we lose ourselves to duty, we feel worthless when our contribution is not appreciated, because our self-worth has grown to be defined by how much others acknowledge and appreciate our efforts towards them.

    That’s when ingratitude for the self kicks in.

    When we diminish who we are because we’re not validated by someone else, we essentially convince ourselves that all the good that we possess is worthless, because it’s not appreciated by one who probably doesn’t appreciate themselves either.

    So. So you know yourself well enough to appreciate who you are? Or is your self-worth nothing more than an affirmation in the mirror?

  • The need to be godly

    The need to be godly

    Godliness, like humility, is lost the moment we lay claim to it.

    It is something that we may exhibit in our conduct or demeanour, but not something that we can directly claim.

    It is our ability to manifest the attributes of the divine in our character and in our treatment of others without wanting to appear pious or godly in our approach.

    The need to claim such attributes of godliness reflects the insecurity that we feel about our standing among those around us.

    The moment we’re focused on how we appear to others, we begin to lose ourselves to their validation.

    Similarly, the moment we claim godliness, we lose ourselves to arrogance.

    And arrogance is only required to compensate for our insecurities. It is a mask to hide our shame, or to claim our needs because we believe that we’re not significant enough for others to want to care about what we need from them.

    That’s why we take, instead of waiting to be offered. Or why we insult or demean rather than advising sincerely.

    It’s all a means towards demanding that our virtues be acknowledged because we feel unappreciated by those we care about the most.

    If you don’t appreciate who you are, in the absence of validation from others, how can you expect others to appreciate you?

    Gratitude begets sincerity, and sincerity fosters brotherhood. Or sisterhood. And claiming divinity or godliness has no place at all.