Tag: theegosystem

  • You’re human. Be human.

    You’re human. Be human.

    We need to be careful with subscribing to a victim mindset.

    Any form of abuse leaves emotional scars.

    But that doesn’t mean it breaks us.

    Nor does it mean that it’s impossible to heal from it.

    Don’t believe everything you read.

    No human is broken.

    And every mind can be healed.

    When we convince ourselves that we’re broken or that we can’t be healed, we create a self fulfilling prophecy, because what you set out to achieve is what you will achieve.

    Besides, it’s not the physical pain of physical abuse that sticks with us, it’s the mental and emotional anguish that it leaves that haunts us.

    Memes like the one above are well meaning, but they cause more harm to our mental health than they offer benefit or relief.

    Be careful what you take from the Internet.

    Good intentions have destroyed many lives.

    No matter how elaborate and sincere your effort at solving a problem may be, if you don’t understand the problem well enough, you will go about solving the wrong problem until you eventually convince yourself that the real problem cannot be solved.

    There is a solution for every problem except death. So if you’re not figuring it out, it means that you need more information and a fresh perspective of what you’re dealing with.

    Remember: No one is broken. No one is damaged. No one is beyond help. It takes a single moment of realisation to turn your entire world around.

  • Honour yourself

    Honour yourself

    Self-respect is more about who you want to be, rather than what you are willing to tolerate.

    Claiming your space while diminishing the contribution of others in your life is not self-respect, it’s unintended ingratitude.

    Self-respect is reflected in how you hold yourself accountable for the impact of your actions on others, and not just for your intentions towards them.

    It’s about showing up beyond words or explanations, and ensuring that your actions reflect your intentions, especially when the feedback you receive confirms that how you treated others is not what you had intended.

    But none of this is possible if you don’t have your own internal compass by which you hold yourself accountable.

    That compass is the values that you claim to stand for.

    When you lack that internal compass, you will be driven by how you feel in the presence of others.

    When our feelings dictate our reasons, we hold others accountable for what we took from them, or from life, without stopping to consider that maybe we were wrong.

    Maybe we understood things poorly, or interpreted things incorrectly.

    When feelings drive rationality, our struggle becomes our war cry and everyone around us becomes responsible for honouring how we feel regardless of the merits of our reasons for why we feel that way.

    That’s when we become oppressors while feeling oppressed.

    Self-respect is born when we choose who we want to be regardless of what bad behaviour others may deserve because of how we think they treated us.

    In that choice lies peace and the promise of contentment.

    Anything less will leave you a slave to society, or an oppressor towards those who fear your outbursts.

    Who do you want to be?



  • Stop judging. Be human.

    Stop judging. Be human.

    ⚠️ TRIGGER WARNING

    This meme showed up on my timeline earlier and highlighted everything that is wrong with the way in which we treat each other.

    There are a few terms that I generally disagree with (sometimes very strongly) if used to describe people.

    These terms include broken, damaged, toxic, and basically anything that reduces a human to a single repulsive notion.

    We lose our humanness when we see someone’s bad behaviour and assume that to be the totality of who they are.

    No one is toxic. We may have destructive behaviours, or dysfunctional perspectives and so on. But that doesn’t make us toxic.

    It makes us a human that is struggling to find our humanness in the absence of understanding or compassion from someone significant.

    What’s more ‘toxic’? A single person that is allowed to define the tone of an entire family, or a family that lacks any conviction in their own self-worth to be defined by a single person?

    Enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong, not only when it’s fashionable or easy, but especially when it’s difficult.

    If we give up our ability to create good with those around us, we lose our right to complain about them letting us down.

    If someone is angry or bitter, they’re feeling unappreciated.

    Reduce a person’s sincere efforts towards fulfilling their part in a relationship to nothing more than duty and minimum expectation, and you’ll very quickly inspire ‘toxic’ behaviour on their part.

    Drop the labels and start seeing the human behind the behaviour.

    There will come a time when you will need others to show you the same empathy and compassion.

    Just because you’re struggling to strike a balance between enabling bad behaviour versus understanding it doesn’t mean that the bad behaviour is toxic. It just means that you are not equipped or are not the right person to influence the positive change that you’d like to see in them.

    Stop judging. Be human.

  • 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
  • Be the village

    Be the village

    While it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to corrupt a child.

    Parenting is a monumental challenge in itself, but becomes infinitely more challenging when being done by a single parent.

    Add to the single parenting challenge by having an obstructive co-parent, and the challenge continues to grow ever more insurmountable.

    If that’s not enough, throw in the depraved value system of the global village that is available on every Internet connected device that your child has access to, and suddenly you realise exactly what you’re competing with in trying to raise a wholesome, healthy, and grounded human.

    But it’s not impossible to achieve, despite those impossible odds stacked against any dedicated parent/s.

    Firstly, you need to realise the impact of your role in their life, especially when the self-pity sets in from the extended struggle of trying to be the most prominent influence in their life.

    Secondly, you need to understand that wayward behaviour is their fears driving them towards wanting to be significant in their social circles. Focus on understanding those fears, rather than fixating on the bad behaviour.

    Thirdly, even if they currently reject the values that you’re trying to instill, you cannot compromise on those values or else you convince them that it’s optional. Standing firm gives them a point of reference for later in life when they will need those values more than ever.

    Lastly, parenting is not for those who need instant gratification, nor is it about the parent.

    It’s about demonstrating the value and benefit of living life the way that you want them to live theirs, and not compelling them through the fear of consequences to do the right thing.

    Fear is never a sustainable motivator to be a good person.

    But sometimes it’s a necessary tool to break a harmful cycle.

    Be very careful with how you use it.

  • 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.