Tag: optimism

  • 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? 🤔

  • 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?

  • What are you waiting for?

    What are you waiting for?

    I’ve often advised someone about something that I truly believed them to be capable of achieving, and the response I received was, “Not everyone is like you!”

    Henry Ford said, “If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

    Sadly, too many think that they can’t, and then blame the world for the state in which they find themselves.

    But why would someone willingly put themselves down, or sell themselves short?

    Did I hear you say fear of failure? No. That’s what we see, and often what they feel on the surface.

    Dig a little deeper and you’ll realise that failure is such a threat because it threatens to reduce our significance among those who are important to us.

    It’s the threat of insignificance through being incompetent or unsuccessful that fills us with the fear of failure.

    But, we must always remember that fear is only the response to what we’re assuming is the probable outcome of our efforts.

    In other words, when we’re convinced that we won’t be able to accomplish something, or we have doubts about achieving it, the assumptions that we’ve made is what we’re focused on. Hence the feeling of dread or fear when we contemplate the future outcome.

    Hence the fear of failure.

    The important question to consider is therefore not if we’re capable of achieving that goal, but rather why is our feeling of significance as a person defined by our level of success?

    And before you say it’s because people judge you as a failure if you don’t accomplish things the way you’re expected to, the next question you should be asking is why does the judgement of others define your self-worth more than your opinion of yourself?

    People’s opinions will only weigh you down if you give them permission to do so.

    Talking about permission, when was the last time you gave yourself permission to learn from your failures instead of judging yourself for failing?

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • Chasing dreams

    Chasing dreams

    Chasing dreams is not all butterflies and roses, or unicorns and rainbows, or whatever.

    Actually, it’s more whatevers than it is anything else because it provokes and inspires changes and new realities in all your comfort spaces.

    But, if you have an endearing relationship with your comfort zones, then chasing dreams is not for you.

    When you chase your dreams, you must be willing to reinvent yourself every step of the way, because what you’re trying to achieve is more than what you have.

    It means that you want to create a version of who you are that will be unfamiliar to those around you, so you risk isolation, being misunderstood, ridiculed, and rejected.

    Chasing dreams means that you’re serving a vision of something you believe to be truly valuable. A vision, not a goal.

    The goals that you define for yourself must be focused on contributing towards that vision.

    Most importantly, it’s your vision. So don’t expect others to believe in it with the same conviction that you do.

    That also means that when others question it, you must recognise that you have more work to do in selling your vision to them. It doesn’t mean that your vision is worthless.

    Chase your dreams. But, before you do, make sure that you own it, or else someone will come along and quite innocently question it, leaving you doubting yourself and potentially abandoning your dream for all the wrong reasons.

    There’s a reason why the majority choose to live by other people’s rules. It’s because they don’t believe in their own dreams, so instead, they dedicate their life enabling the dreams of others.

    There’s no shame in that, provided your doing it consciously, and not out of fear.

    What’s your dream?