Month: Jan 2020

Success: the Everyday Decision

Photo by Adi Goldstein

How often do you review your goals? Are your everyday actions in line with what you want to achieve?

While we allow our brain to go on autopilot, it doesn’t always choose to create positive, empowering thoughts. It takes daily reminders to think forward and not to get stuck in a loop of randomly picked memories that don’t serve our purpose.

Make it a habit to plan your time in chunks rather than indigestible one year timeline. Don’t wait for a new year to think about what you can achieve and how. Life is now, live with pride and joy.

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Managing the Guilt of Failure

Photo by Brooke Lark

Failure plays a huge part in learning. We associate guilt with pain and we see mistakes as falling off a bridge without a safety net. With damage done mainly to our ego, failure and guilt facilitate growth if pointed towards our goals and not targeting our self-confidence.

Rather than beating yourself up, replace the don’t-s with do-s, the self-judgement with belief that you can learn and grow. Replace ‘I shouldn’t have’ with ‘I will’.

We get as many opportunities as we create for ourselves. Let guilt of failure be the spokesperson of our goals, of what it’s important for us to achieve. Let it dictate our way forward.

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Gratitude: the Skill of All Skills

Photo by Marjorie Bertrand

What are three things that you are grateful for?

I remember being told ‘Don’t be ungrateful’ throughout my upbringing but I never really understood what it meant. It sounded more like a criticism than genuine advice and it probably was.

Gratitude is a concept that can be explained. When you think about all the processes that had to happen to give us rain, the inconvenience of having to carry an umbrella or getting ourselves wet diminishes. Gratitude overcomes annoyance.

The same principle can be applied to relationships, unless a relationship is toxic. In a healthy relationship, mild annoyances can be prevented by gratitude. It allows us to appreciate the other person more and to be more generous with our patience and kindness. Overall this adds up to being a better you.

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Intentional Living

Photo by Derek Truninger

Living a life of focus is easier than you might think. It doesn’t take laser-precision focus 24/7 to know where you’re headed. It takes clearing the mind before starting the day. This can happen in the morning or in the evening before.

Setting realistic goals for the day ahead is mandatory in order to make progress in the right direction. What is an achievable task that can help your overall aim? Is it exercising for an extra 10 minutes, reading a chapter per day, doing 40 minutes work on your long-term project?

Mindful living means ownership of every single day. If you reach the end of the week or even of the day and you think to yourself ‘Where did time go?’ this might be an indication that you’re not present in your life. Awakened day feel long and diverse. Intentional awakened days give you a sense of purpose.

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Seeing Good in People

Photo by Daria Tumanova

Our mindset dictates the perspective of our reality. Being brought up with a distrusting attitude towards people hinges our relationship with ourselves and with others.

Part of the relationship with the self is seeing our reflection in other people’s eyes. Distrust attracts distrust and people cannot connect at a higher level without putting themselves at risk emotionally. Being socially isolated leaves us with the idea of self that our mind makes believe. If our perception of the self cannot be informed by kindness, love and caring from others we become shadows of who we could potentially be.

Seeing good in people allows us to see good in ourselves and for that building trust is a necessary condition. Rather than teaching our younger members of the community about distrust, we can teach them coping strategies when misplacing trust. We can also teach them empathy and forgiveness that liberate our spirit from emotions that are making us guarded and are holding us back. We can teach ourselves to feel big and trust plenty and to experience ourselves and others in as many shades as we possibly can.

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How Relationships CAn Prevent Us From Taking Risks

Photo by Austin Neill

Our identity is more complex than we might perceive it. It has to do with our cultural capital – where we are coming from culturally, our family and upbringing – and also with how we and other people perceive us. How others perceive us influences how we think and feel about ourselves. If someone tells us ‘You are always so brave’ or ‘You should try harder’ will have a deep influence on how we think about ourselves, particularly if we trust that person.

This leads to how relationships keep us in check in terms of who we are. Our life trajectory can be studying law and working in counter-fraud. We would have built a great part of the relationships as part of our professional identity. This might not go hand in hand with playing a leading part in a musical theatre and dropping everything for a different avenue.

We sometimes build arguments whenever we tell people that our interests are not limited to what the outside world knew about ourselves ‘on paper’ or when our decisions might not be approved in the eyes of the plenty. It’s time to acknowledge that we are the ones that have to be at ease with the decisions we made before going to sleep at night and that relationships go both ways: limiting our beliefs and empowering us. Try to find the right people to keep in your life, rather than the right thing to say to people who happen to be part of your journey.

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