Sunday, April 29, 2018

10 Hard Things You Need to Hear About Your Attitude


1. Your attitude often reflects a certain level of self-centered self-victimization. – We all have the tendency to put ourselves at the center, and see everything—every event, conversation, circumstance, etc.—from the viewpoint of how it relates to us and only us. And this can have all kinds of adverse effects, from feeling hurt when other people are rude, to feeling sorry for ourselves when things don’t go as planned, to doubting ourselves when we aren’t perfect. Obviously, we are not really at the center of everything. That’s not how the universe works. It just sometimes seems that way to us. So, be sure to shift your focus when it makes sense. When you catch yourself feeling like a singled-out victim, think about other people you might help. Finding little ways to help others can snap you out of your self-centeredness, and then you’re not wallowing in self-pity anymore—you’re starting to think beyond yourself, for your own good.

2. Your attitude is still greatly affected by old stories.
– In the present moment, we all have some kind of pain: anger, sadness, frustration, disappointment, regret, etc. Notice this pain within yourself, watch it closely and see that it’s caused by whatever story you have in your head about what happened in the past (either in the recent past or in the distant past). Your mind might insist that the pain you feel is caused by what happened (not by the story in your head about it), but what happened in the past is NOT happening right now. It’s over. It has passed. The pain, however, is still happening right now because of the story you’ve been subconsciously telling yourself about that past incident. It’s simply a process of your thinking. Do your best to see it for what it is.

3. Your attitude often reflects your inner resistance to reality. – Most people make themselves unhappy simply by finding it impossible to accept life as it is presenting itself right now. Do your best to catch yourself. Be mindful. When you accept the reality of the moment, regardless of how painful, you allow yourself to grow and heal. Ultimately, happiness is not the absence of problems, but the ability to deal with them. Imagine all the wondrous things your mind might embrace if it weren’t wrapped so tightly around your struggles. Always look at what you have, instead of what you have lost. Because it’s not what the world takes away from you that counts, it’s what you do with what you have left.

4. Your attitude gets caught up in fearing and hiding from change. – Sometimes, no matter how hard it is to admit, there are things in your life that aren’t meant to stay. Change may not be what you want, but it’s always exactly what’s happening. Earth does not stop spinning. And sometimes saying goodbye is the hardest thing you will ever have to do. Or, saying hello will make you more vulnerable and uncomfortable than you ever imagined possible. At any given moment, change can seem almost too much to bear. But, over the long run, change is ultimately the only thing that allows you to learn and grow and succeed and smile again. So, remind yourself that life gradually changes in each and every moment, and so can YOU, for the better.

5. Your attitude is affected by your passivity and procrastination.
– So many of us waste so much of our time and energy waiting for the ideal path to appear. But it never does. Because we forget that paths are made by walking, not waiting. We forget that we shouldn’t feel more confident before we take the next step—that taking the next step is what builds our confidence. And so, we hesitate, procrastinate, and ultimately succumb to the same old routines that have been driving us nuts for far too long. Truth be told, there are thousands of people who live their entire lives on the default settings, never realizing they can customize everything. Don’t be one of them! Don’t settle for the default settings in life. Find your loves, your talents, your passions, and embrace them. Don’t hide behind other people’s decisions. Don’t let others tell you what you want. Design YOUR journey every step of the way! The life you create from doing something that moves you is far better than the attitude you get from sitting around wishing you were doing it.

6. Your attitude reflects your aversion to discomfort. – Many of us don’t want to be uncomfortable, so we run from discomfort constantly. The problem with this is that, by running from discomfort, we are constrained to partake in only the activities and opportunities within our comfort zones. And since our comfort zones are relativity small, we miss out on most of life’s greatest and healthiest experiences, and we get stuck in a debilitating cycle. Let’s use diet and exercise as an example… First, you become unhealthy because eating healthy food and exercising feels uncomfortable, so you opt for comfort food and mindless TV watching instead. But then, being unhealthy is also uncomfortable, so you seek to distract yourself from the reality of your unhealthy body by eating more unhealthy food and watching more unhealthy entertainment and going to the mall to shop for things you don’t really want or need. And your discomfort and attitude both get worse.

7. Your attitude is often rooted in unrealistic ideals. – You aren’t perfect. It’s OK. Despite what you keep hearing inside your head, you can disappoint people and still be good enough. You can fail and still be smart, capable and talented. You can let people down and still be worthwhile and deserving of love and admiration. Everyone has disappointed someone they care about at some point. Everyone messes up, lets people down, and makes mistakes. Not because we’re all inadequate or incompetent, but because we’re all imperfect and human. Expecting anything different is setting yourself up for confusion and discontent.

8. Your attitude easily defaults to self-contempt. – Next time you catch yourself wallowing in self-contempt, remind yourself that you were not born feeling this way. That at some point in the past some person or experience sent you the message that something is wrong with you, and you internalized this lie and accepted it as your truth. But that lie isn’t yours to carry, and those judgments aren’t about you. And in the same way you learned to think negatively of yourself, you can learn to think new, positive and self-loving thoughts. You can learn to challenge those false beliefs, strip away their power, and reclaim your self-respect. It won’t be easy, and it won’t transpire overnight, but it is possible. And it begins the moment you decide there has to be a better way to live, and that you deserve to discover it. Make that decision for yourself!

9. Your attitude gets hung up on longstanding self-limiting beliefs. – Think about a self-limiting belief you have—an area of your life where you believe you are destined to remain stuck. It can be about any part of your life you hope to change—your weight, your career, your relationships—anything at all. What’s one thing you’ve essentially decided is a fact about your position on Earth? And then I want you to shift gears and think about ONE time, one fleeting moment, in which the opposite of that “fact” was true for you. I don’t care how tiny of a victory it was, or even if it was a partial victory. What’s one moment in time you can look back on and say, “Hey, that was totally unlike ‘me,’ but I did it!”? Once you identify the cracks in the wall of a self-limiting belief, you can start attacking it. You can start taking steps forward every day that go against it—positive daily rituals that create more tiny victories, more confidence, gradual momentum, bigger victories, even more confidence, and so on.

10. Your attitude often reflects a lack of presence and self-awareness. – One of the hardest challenges we face in life is to simply live in our own skin. To just be right here, right now, regardless of where we are. Too often we use compulsive work, compulsive exercise, compulsive love affairs, and the like, to escape from ourselves and the realities of living. In fact, many of us will go to great lengths to avoid the feeling of being alone in an undistracted environment. Thus, we succumb to hanging-out with just about anyone to avoid the feeling of solitude. For being alone means dealing with our true feelings. Acknowledging this fact is the first step to healing it. Begin right now by just noticing with curiosity, and without judgment, all of the ways in which you avoid being in your own skin, right here, right now, in this present moment we call life.

(MARCANDANGEL).

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Poetry - You are in my thoughts

You are in my thoughts on difficult days.
In my heart in happy moments.
And on my mind everyday.

You are in my thoughts on my best days.
Flashes and memories of you, extant on my mind.
Your absence still plagues me.
Your departure still breaks me.
The wound has remained fresh.
The tears have gone on, unabated.
At times I pray it is a long horror dream.
I still wish it is a mirage; the kind that fizzles away.

You are in my thoughts today.
You are in my thoughts always.
Till we meet again, I will keep hurting.
And you will forever be in my thoughts.

Monday, April 16, 2018

You can’t Un-Live the past. You just choose to forget


To change something is a choice - Unknown

Some memories can be so painful that you just want to forget them. While it is not possible to erase memories from your mind, there are strategies that you can use to make a memory less prominent. You can also do things to change the way a memory makes you feel and to replace unpleasant memories with new pleasant ones. Keep in mind that it is not always possible to forget a memory, so you may want to consider changing a situation if unpleasant memories are interfering with your life.

Think about what bothers you the most about the memory. Your next step is to pinpoint the most upsetting parts of the memory. Getting to the root of what bothers you the most will help you figure out what you need to forget. Write these specific things down so that you can work on forgetting them.

Are you determined to forget the past? I know many people don’t fully understand what that means. They wonder, “How can I forget something that’s happened to me?” But one definition of the word forget is to disregard intentionally or to overlook. In other words, you have to choose to disregard your past so that it doesn’t hold you back. You have to consciously make an effort to forget, to erase from your extant memory and let go. In other words, you have to choose to forget. That means the good and the bad. Sometimes our past victories keep us from rising higher as much as our past failures can. If we don’t let go of the old, we’ll never be able to embrace the new. It is just the way this works.

It doesn’t matter what’s happened in your past, it’s time to forget what lies behind and make the choice to look forward. Trust that God has a better future in store for you. Trust that He’s working behind the scenes on your behalf. Trust that He who promised is faithful — as you forget what lies behind and press forward, you’ll experience His power and blessing in a fresh, new way.

If all you do is attempt to relive something that has already happened, you’re missing out. The mental space you create by letting go of things that are already behind you gives you the ability to fill the space with something fresh and fun. Joel Osteen puts it aptly when he said “You must make a decision that you are going to move on. It won’t happen automatically. You will have to rise up and say, ‘I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the best of me. I’m moving on with my life.”

(Culled from my book, The Path Less Traveled...https://www.amazon.com/Path-Less-Travelled-Reflections-Learning/dp/1540663507/ref=la_B01NAFINA0_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1518345927&sr=1-1).

Monday, April 9, 2018

10 Great Truths My Grandmother Told Me on Her 90th Birthday


1. There are thousands of people who live their entire lives on the default settings, never realizing they can customize everything. – Don’t settle for the default settings in life. Find your loves, your talents, your passions, and embrace them. Don’t hide behind other people’s decisions. Don’t let others tell you what you want. Design YOUR journey every step of the way! The life you create from doing something that moves you is far better than the life you get from sitting around wishing you were doing it.

2. The right journey is the ultimate destination.
– The most prolific and beneficial experience in life is not in actually achieving something you want, but in seeking it. It’s the journey towards an endless horizon that matters—goals and dreams that move forward with you as you chase them. It’s all about meaningful pursuits—the “moving”—and what you learn along the way. Truly, the most important reason for moving from one place to another is to see what’s in between. In between is where passions are realized, love is found, strength is gained, and priceless life-long memories are made.

3. The willingness to do hard things opens great windows of opportunity.
– One of the most important abilities you can develop in life is the willingness to accept and grow through times of difficulty and discomfort. Because the best things are often hard to come by, at least initially. And if you shy away from difficulty and discomfort, you’ll miss out on them entirely. Mastering a new skill is hard. Building a business is hard. Writing a book is hard. A marriage is hard. Parenting is hard. Staying healthy is hard. But all are amazing and worth every bit of effort you can muster. Realize this now. If you get good at doing hard things, you can do almost anything you put your mind to.

4. Small, incremental changes always change everything in the long run.
– The concept of taking it one step at a time might seem absurdly obvious, but at some point we all get caught up in the moment and find ourselves yearning for instant gratification. We want what we want, and we want it now! And this yearning often tricks us into biting off more than we can chew. So, remind yourself: you can’t lift a thousand pounds all at once, yet you can easily lift one pound a thousand times. Tiny, repeated efforts will get you there, gradually.

5. No one wins a game of chess, or the game of life, by only moving forward.
– Sometimes you have to move backward to put yourself in a position to win. Because sometimes, when it feels like you’re running into one dead end after another, it’s actually a sign that you’re not on the right path. Maybe you were meant to hang a left back when you took a right, and that’s perfectly fine. Life gradually teaches us that U-turns are allowed. So turn around when you must! There’s a big difference between giving up and starting over in the right direction.

6. The biggest disappointments in life are often the result of misplaced expectations.
– When we are young our expectations are few, but as we age our expectations tend to balloon with each passing year. The key is to understand that tempering unrealistic expectations of how something “should be” can greatly reduce unnecessary stress and frustration. With a positive attitude and an open mind, we often find that life isn’t necessarily any easier or harder than we thought it was going to be; it’s just that “the easy” and “the hard” aren’t always the way we had anticipated, and don’t always occur when we expect them to. This isn’t a bad thing—it makes life interesting, if we are willing to see it that way.

7. Our character is often most evident at our highs and lows. – Be humble at the mountaintops, be strong in the valleys, and be faithful in between. And on particularly hard days when you feel that you can’t endure, remind yourself that your track record for getting through hard days is 100% so far.

8. Life changes from moment to moment, and so can you. – When hard times hit there’s a tendency to extrapolate and assume the future holds more of the same. For some strange reason this doesn’t happen as much when things are going well. A laugh, a smile, and a warm fuzzy feeling are fleeting and we know it. We take the good times at face value in the moment for all they’re worth and then we let them go. But when we’re depressed, struggling, or fearful, it’s easy to heap on more pain by assuming tomorrow will be exactly like today. This is a cyclical, self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t allow yourself to move past what happened, what was said, what was felt, you will look at your future through that same dirty lens, and nothing will be able to focus your foggy judgment. You will keep on justifying, reliving, and fueling a perception that is worn out and false.

9. You can fight and win the battles of today, only. – No matter what’s happening, you can resourcefully fight the battles of just one day. It’s only when you add the battles of those two mind-bending eternities, yesterday and tomorrow, that life gets overwhelmingly difficult and complicated.

10. Not being “OK” all the time is normal. – Sometimes not being OK is all we can register inside our tired brains and aching hearts. This emotion is human, and accepting it can feel like a small weight lifted. Truth be told, it’s not OK when someone you care about is no longer living and breathing and giving their amazing gifts to the world. It’s not OK when everything falls apart and you’re buried deep in the wreckage of a life you had planned for. It’s not OK when the bank account is nearly at zero, with no clear sign of a promising income opportunity. It’s not OK when someone you trusted betrays you and breaks your heart. It’s not OK when you’re emotionally drained to the point that you can’t get yourself out of bed in the morning. It’s not OK when you’re engulfed in failure or shame or a grief like you’ve never known before. Whatever your tough times consist of, sometimes it’s just NOT OK right now. And that realization is more than OK.

(MARCANDANGEL).

Sunday, April 1, 2018

It Is Tough To Stay Successful




It is more difficult to stay on top than to get there - Mia Hamm


There is nothing more challenging in business and in life than maintaining success – it is far, far harder than achieving success in the first place. Companies that are able to align their capabilities and build distinctive advantages to perfectly meet current market opportunities cannot necessarily adapt to meet tomorrow’s. Time and again once exemplary companies are relegated to also-rans by their failure to respond to changes in customer need, technology or competitor set. Companies such as Netscape, Kodak, The Gap and IBM (maybe you want to add Nokia to the list) have all suffered this fate and of the top 100 US firms from 1917 only one had outperformed the market average over the subsequent 80 years, while 61 had ceased to exist.

How confident are you that today’s market leaders will still be at the top, or even around, in 10, 20 or 30 years’ time? There is nothing written in stone to suggest that Apple, Tesco, WalMart, Google or even Coca-Cola will be protected from future demise. My hunch, if history is anything to go by, is that several of them will struggle or even disappear in the next few decades.

During the press conference to announce that NOKIA was being acquired by Microsoft, Nokia’s CEO ended his speech saying this “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”. Upon saying that, all his management team, himself included, teared sadly. Nokia has been a respectable company. They didn’t do anything wrong in their business, however, the world changed too fast. Their opponents were too powerful. They missed out on learning, they missed out on changing, and thus they lost the opportunity at hand to make it big. Not only did they miss the opportunity to earn big money, they lost their chance of survival. The message of this story is, if you don’t change, you shall be removed from the competition. It’s not wrong if you don’t want to learn new things. However, if your thoughts and mindset cannot catch up with time, you will be eliminated. Thus, it is not enough to achieve successful, you need so much work to stay at the top because the competition will keep getting better.

In today’s footballing world, the name Cristiano Ronaldo (also popularly called CR7 but with full name as Cristiano Ronaldo Dos Santos Aveiro, born on February 5th, 1985), is unarguably a household name. Lovers of the round leather game have been thrilled and mesmerized by the skills of the multiple time World Footballer of the Year. No one will deny that CR7 is indeed a hard worker and this attitude he brings to any match he plays in. Teammates have confirmed that is one of his success secrets. The question you may want to ask yourself is, how desirous and hungry are you to achieve your set objectives and be the best in what you do? Those with burning desires seldom live average lives. Something on their inside keeps pushing them. However, the biggest secret is the level of work he puts in to stay on top. At Real Madrid, one of his teammates, Jese Rodriguez said, “I remember being called for my first training for Real Madrid. I went two hours earlier to impress the trainer. When I arrived, I saw Cristiano Ronaldo already training.” And that is why he is CR7. What is your own work ethics like? Do you have a time for practice and doing the work and putting in extra in order to become extraordinary and not remain an average? Nothing beats hard and smart work, and it is the only option you have if you are going to get ahead of the lot in the field of play in your career. Complacency is the undoing of many. Arriving and settling too soon. Thinking that the little success recorded is the end and all there is.

It is a cliché in the corporate life that getting to the top of your Industry is difficult – staying there is really, really difficult. We all know from lessons in life that it’s easier to fall off the perch than it is to get there for the simple reason that everyone wants to occupy the top slot. The same goes for vehicles. The Toyota Hilux has been South Africa’s best-selling vehicle of any type for bigger part of its life cycle which in this case goes back to 2005. However, nothing in life stands still and there’s no doubt in my mind that in the auto business, a 10-year life cycle is not far off double the industry average which has made the Hilux unusually vulnerable to attack. One vehicle, and it’s a four letter word beginning with F(ord), has been eating away at the Toyota’s supremacy to such an extent that it has usurped the top slot on the sales charts in some months. Among more than 1,000 companies that Fortune magazine included in its global rankings of the World's Most Admired Companies (WMACs), there are only 56 companies that have retained their status in the top 100 over the past decade. Similarly, in the Hay Group's research of the WMACs 2011 report, of the total 56 industries surveyed, there are 22 industries which have new leaders in their industries. For instance, in the petroleum industry, a long-time champion, Exxon Mobil, has been replaced by Stat Oil of Norway, Alcoa has been succeeded by Posco of South Korea in the steel industry, and in the telecom industry, AT&T has lost its crown to Telefonica of Spain. The Hay Group research identifies four key areas that adaptable firms use for achieving sustainable performance: focus on priorities for growth [focus on high-growth markets and fast-growing organizational units/subsidiaries], culture of innovation, employee involvement, and enabling employees to succeed, onboarding and integrating new staff into the organization; skills development; managers provide coaching, feedback and identify performance barriers. In life and in business, you must always be in shape, bring in you’re A-game at all time, be adaptable, stay innovative and be open to new ideas. This is the number one prerequisite to remain successful in an ever changing world.

(Culled from my book, The Path Less Traveled...https://www.amazon.com/Path-Less-Travelled-Reflections-Learning/dp/1540663507/ref=la_B01NAFINA0_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1518345927&sr=1-1)

Nigeria 2023 Elections: A Crime Scene

The 2023 Nigeria general elections have been a complete sham, and a retrogression of our nascent democracy. Whatever gains Professor Jega ma...