self growth

” Your life would suck a lot less if you practised gratitude a lot more” Mansfield

So your life sucks, that’s all of us, yet through it all, you can still be grateful. My 8-year-old son hit his head whilst doing a backflip in a swimming pool earlier on today. We had been stuck in a small remote town because they had run out of petrol. I thought to myself, if the town wasn’t out of petrol, my son wouldn’t have hurt himself. Then I quickly said to myself, well at least he was having fun, and so was I. We got to see this beautiful town and what it has to offer, memories that will never be erased.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once said that history is the process of freedom realising itself. The fact that you are reading this blog means that you are richer and more educated than 99.5% of people in human history. It means you have almost immediate access to over half of all of the information and data ever created by the human race. It means you have the ability to educate yourself in an afternoon or a week on subjects people previously spent their entire lifetimes to learn.

You may be unhappy with your love life, but just a few generations ago, casual dating was impossible. Contraception was rare, and you could be disowned by your family for fooling around with the wrong person. A few generations before that, you likely never went to school with someone of the opposite gender and your parents chose who you married. In some countries and regions, you could have been killed for sleeping with or even flirting with the wrong person. That includes the US.

Your family may frustrate you, but over one-third of the world’s population has only one parent and 143 million children are growing up with no parents at all. If you’re in university or you went to university, you are part of the lucky 7% worldwide elite. You’re unlikely to ever live at a subsistence level like almost 60% of the population and you surely won’t ever be starving like almost 25% of the world population.

But you’ve heard stuff like this before, after all, it is just numbers, right? And it doesn’t actually help, right? Yeah, you’re lucky, but you still struggle with your confidence, you still feel socially anxious, you still suffer from feelings of inadequacy, you still stress about money/work/family/friends. Your love life is still a mess. Sure, you’re eating well and you have a nice TV and car and you can do long division and code in PHP, but your life isn’t exactly peachy either.

For decades, research has tied being grateful and appreciative to happiness. People who are happier tend to be more grateful and appreciative for what they have.

But what they’ve also found is that it also works the other way around: consciously practising gratitude makes one happier. It makes one appreciate what one has and helps one to remain in the present moment. Practising gratitude increases accountability which directly leads to higher self-esteem and happiness. Not to mention it makes one more pleasant to be around and creates a more magnetic personality.

Your parents may be smothering and obnoxious, but they do it because they care about you and it’s the only way they know how to show it. Be grateful you have people who love you, even if they don’t show it in the way you wish they did. Use it as an opportunity to help them, communicate with them, develop a better relationship with them.

You may be overweight, but at least you’ve enjoyed plenty of good food. It is also possible now more than ever to access the knowledge and resources needed to live a healthier lifestyle. Oddly enough, this can be an opportunity to set goals and to improve yourself.

You may be single and lonely, but at least you live in a society which accepts open communication between men and women, is liberal about dating practices, and allows widely accessible means to get out there and improve your situation.

And you may not be the person you want to be, but at least you have the self-awareness and drive to notice what you’re unhappy with and the desire to do something about it. You are part of the first generation in human history that has truly discovered that we are always capable of improving our lives — socially, emotionally, professionally and financially. In the past, people assumed if they were born into it, they were screwed.

Gratitude is the skill of happiness and it’s the cure. Tweet Me

You’ve been blessed. Even if you rarely realise it. All of us here have.

And you’ll keep forgetting this unless you remind yourself. Remind yourself regularly. Choose to be grateful. Remember how it could be worse because it could always be worse. This isn’t to say one must ignore what’s wrong or broken with the world. I’m the last one to pretend everything is unicorns and rainbows. It’s just to say that when things seem to hit the fan, don’t forget what’s good, true and beautiful. Remember to shut up and be grateful.

Gratitude is the skill of happiness it’s the cure. And it is indeed a skill. It requires practice and effort and habit. But it’s a skill anyone can learn and anyone can do. And you can start it today, right now.

Do it every morning when you wake up, while you brush your teeth, look in the mirror and think of five things you’re grateful for. Pick someone and tell them this week that you’re grateful for them or for something they did. Chances are it will make you feel better than them. Chances are you’ll feel far more comfortable around them and your relationships will begin to improve.

This week has been hectic for me personally, I felt I had so much reason to be mad at the world until it hit me. I have so much to be grateful for, so much to appreciate. I do not know what you are going through right now that is weighing you down. It could be anxiety, depression, a break-up, sickness or loss of a loved one. Keep your head up, I strongly believe if you look around you, you will find something to smile about. Whatever it is, hold on to it. Be strong, be courageous. Keep moving!

As always, hope you and yours are safe. Talk to us in the comments section and share with us your thoughts and views.

(Sidenote: When showing appreciation for someone or something, it should be genuine and not designed to get them to like you. This should be obvious to any emotionally-functioning adult, but I figured I’d drop it in here because you never know who comes by these days.)

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“A difficult lesson in life is learning how to let go of broken relationships, our pasts, and even parts of ourselves.” – Unknown

The 21st of November was my birthday, can’t believe I am 36 years old already, like where does the time go? I sat and just looked back at which had been my best year thus far. With that realisation, to my surprise, I began to experience a faint sort of sadness. I grieved over a tiny loss of myself—that cocky, self-assured 25-year-old who had just been promoted to Sage Projects Manager having no idea what lay before him. The infinite potential that lay before me. The intensity of expectations that I didn’t know what to do with.

The reality that I faced though is that the 25 year old me is now gone. And they would never come back. I would never get to feel that feeling for the first time again. I would never get to fall wildly in love with my job in a way that both excited and terrified me at the same time.

There was a sweet, cocky ignorance to my younger self that has been irrevocably lost. And despite being lost for the best reasons, it still made me sad. For a few moments, I silently mourned my past the way one mourns a distant relative’s death.

And then I moved on.

I’m no stranger to loss. I don’t think any of us are. I’ve watched family members and friends die. And I’ve had romantic relationships end in a spectacular explosion and I’ve had them end in a long, drawn out silence. I’ve lost friendships, jobs, cities, and communities. I’ve lost beliefs—in both myself and others.

Every loss is a form of death. In every case, there once existed an experience—a thing, an idea, a person—that brought your life meaning. Now it no longer exists.

Coping with loss always involves the same dynamics. In every case, whether it’s the loss of a friendship, a career, a limb, whatever—we are forced to reckon with the fact that we will never experience something or someone again. We are forced to feel an internal emptiness and to accept our pain. We are forced to confront that horrible, horrible word: “Never.”

“Never” hurts because never means that it cannot be changed. And we always like to think that things can be changed. That possibility makes us feel better.

“Just work a little bit harder!”
“You just have to want it enough!”

These phrases give us a lil’ kick in the backside. They say if you don’t like it, get out there and change it.

But “never”? Never means it’s over. It also means it’s gone. Never means forever. And that’s really hard to bear.

You can never bring a dead person back to life. And you can never hit ‘reset’ on a broken relationship. You can never fix a wasted youth or redo a past mistake or un-say the words that destroyed a friendship.

When it’s gone, it’s gone. And it will never be the same, no matter what you do. And this, in a real psychological sense, destroys a small piece of you. A piece that must eventually be rebuilt.

Relationships don’t end because two people did something wrong to each other. Relationships end because two people are something wrong for each other. Tweet Me

We’ve all been through breakups before. And we’ve all, in our moments of weakness, pined for our exes, written embarrassing emails/text messages, drank too much on a Tuesday night, and silently cried to that one love song that reminds us of them. Yet what most people don’t get is that relationships don’t end because two people did something wrong to each other. Relationships end because two people are something wrong for each other.

But why do breakups hurt so bad? And why do we find ourselves feeling so lost and helpless in their wake? This post will be covering coping with all loss, but because the loss of intimate relationships (partners and family members) is by far the most painful form of loss, we will primarily be using those as examples throughout.

But first, we need to understand why loss sucks so bad. So I’m going to whip out an epic bullet point list to set everything straight:

• To be healthy, functioning individuals, we need to feel good about ourselves. To feel good about ourselves, we need to feel that our time and energy is spent meaningfully. Meaning is the fuel of our minds. When you run out of it, everything else stops working.
• The primary way we generate meaning is through relationships. Note that I’ll be using the term “relationship” loosely throughout this post. We don’t just have relationships with other people (although those relationships tend to be the most meaningful to us), we also have relationships with our career, with our community, with groups and ideas that we identify with, activities we engage in, and so on. All of these relationships can potentially give our lives meaning and, therefore, make us feel good about ourselves.
• Our relationships don’t just give our lives meaning, they also define our understanding of ourselves. I am a writer because of my relationship with writing. And I am a son because of my relationship with my parents. I am a Zimbabwean because of my relationship with my country. If any of these things get taken from me—like, let’s say I get shipped to North Korea by accident (oops) and can’t write anymore—it will throw me into a mini identity crisis because the activity that has given my life so much meaning the past decade will no longer be available to me (that and, you know, being stuck in North Korea).

• When one of these relationships is destroyed, that part of our identity is destroyed along with it. Consequently, the more meaning the relationship added to my life, the more significant its role in my identity, the more crippling the loss will be if/when I lose it. Since personal relationships generally give us the most meaning (and therefore, happiness), these are the relationships that hurt the most when lost.
• When we lose a relationship, that meaning is stripped away from us. Suddenly this thing that created so much meaning in our life no longer exists. As a result, we will feel a sense of emptiness where that meaning used to be. We will start to question ourselves, to ask whether we really know ourselves, whether we made the right decision. In extreme circumstances, this questioning will become existential. We will ask whether our life is actually meaningful at all. Or if we’re just wasting everybody’s air.

• This feeling of emptiness—or more accurately, this lack of meaning—is more commonly known as depression. Most people believe that depression is a deep sadness. This is mistaken. While depression and sadness often occur together, they are not the same thing. Sadness occurs when something feels bad. Depression occurs when something feels meaningless. When something feels bad, at least it has meaning. In depression, everything becomes a big blank void. And the deeper the depression, the deeper the lack of meaning, the deeper the pointlessness of any action, to the point where a person will struggle to get up in the morning, to shower, to speak to other people, to eat food, etc.
• The healthy response to loss is to slowly but surely construct new relationships and bring new meaning into one’s life. We often come to refer to these post-loss periods as “a fresh start,” or “a new me,” and this is, in a literal sense, true. You are constructing a “new you” by adopting new relationships to replace the old.
• The unhealthy response to loss is to refuse to admit that part of you is dead and gone. It’s to cling to the past and desperately try to recover it or relive it in some way. People do this because their entire identity and self-respect was wrapped up in that missing relationship. They feel that they are incapable or unworthy of loving and meaningful relationships with someone or something else going forward.
• Ironically, the fact that many people are not able to love or respect themselves is almost always the reason their relationship failed in the first place.

Toxic vs Healthy Relationships

To dive into why some people have such a hard time dealing with loss, we need to understand a simple dichotomy:

1. A toxic relationship is when two people are emotionally dependent on each other—that is, they use each other for the approval and respect they are unable to give themselves.
2. A healthy relationship is when two people are emotionally interdependent with each other—that is, they approve of and respect each other because they approve of and respect themselves.

Toxic relationships need drama to survive. Toxic people, because they don’t love or respect themselves, are never quite able to completely accept the idea that someone else could love and respect them either. And if someone comes around giving them love and respect, they don’t trust it or won’t accept it. It’s kind of like that old Groucho Marx trope: “I’d never join a club that would have me as a member.”

What happens is these two people who don’t love and respect themselves OR each other begin to feel really insecure around each other. What if she leaves me? Or what if she realises I’m a loser? What if she disapproves of the pizza I ordered?

As such, these people need a way to consistently test whether or not the other person actually wants to be with them. These tests are accomplished by creating drama. In my head, drama is when someone creates unnecessary conflict that generates a false sense of meaning for a short period of time. Yet because drama doesn’t last. The underlying insecurity remains. So pretty soon, the toxic couple will need another injection of drama to keep the farce of a meaningful relationship going.

Healthy relationships avoid drama because they find that unnecessary conflict detracts from the meaning and importance already generated by the relationship. Healthy people simply don’t tolerate drama. They expect each other to take responsibility for themselves. Only then can they really take care of each other. I always say, you can pour from an empty cup. You take care of you so you take care of the next guy.

Healthy relationships, instead of inventing conflict to affirm their love and mutual support, minimise conflict to make more room for the love and support that is already there.

Toxic relationships are addictive because drama is addictive. Like drugs or gambling, drama is unpredictable; it is numbing and distracting, and it hits you with unexpected rewards of joy or excitement. This is why toxic relationships are diffivult to let go or process.

But something else happens when we’re caught up in a drama spiral. As we up the ante and the drama increases, we become more emotionally dependent on the person, not less. We invest so much into the drama that we come to believe that our partner is far more important to our well being than they actually are.

Incidentally, people who don’t know how to let go of a relationship are often those who were in a relationship with someone who was either abusive or completely disinterested. That’s because, in these relationships, a breakup changes nothing. When they were together, the person spent all of their time and energy trying to win their partner over. After they split, they continue spending all of their time and energy trying to win their partner over. Same story, different day.

Similarly, people who are unable to accept the loss of their relationship will badger their ex and instigate drama with them to re-live the sensation of that relationship. But they need to create that drama again and again to keep that feeling alive.

Drama, of course, can infect other relationships as well. People create drama at work to overcome their insecurity of not being valuable or appreciated. People create drama with authorities or governments when they feel an existential insecurity. And people create drama with themselves when they imagine they aren’t living up to some sort of past glory.

So How Do You Get Better at Accepting Loss?

1. Understand that our memories can lie to us and convince us that EVERYTHING WAS TOTALLY AWESOME BACK THEN, even though it wasn’t. The usual mantra, “I miss the good ol days” is a scam. If you have ever gone back to your high school or a reunion, you will see how lame you probably were back then.
2. Surround yourself with people who love you and appreciate you for who you are. Not who you were, or who you can be, but who you are presently. What that means is you have to reconnect with people who care about you. It’s these people and these activities that will carry us through and be the emotional bulwark as we begin the hard process of rebuilding ourselves. This sounds easier than it is. Because when you’ve been destroyed by some loss in your life, the last thing you want to do is call up your friends to go get a beer. Or to call mom and admit that you’re a total failure.
3. Invest in your relationship with yourself. Basically, how do you treat your own body, mind, and emotions? This is the time to join a gym, to stop eating tubs of ice cream, to get outside and get reacquainted with your old friend called sunshine. It’s the time to sign up for that course you’ve always wanted to sign up for, to read that book that’s been sitting on your nightstand for six months, to finally floss for the first time ever. Now is the time to also let yourself feel sad or angry or guilty without self-judgment. And if you find it hard to get motivated to do all these things, use your loss as motivation. If you’re the victim of a disgusting breakup, well, self-improvement is the best revenge against any ex. Or you’ve lost someone close to you tragically, imagine what they would have wished for you and go out and live it. If you’ve lost something dear to you in your life, or aged out of a time of your life when you felt important and wanted, commit to building something even better for yourself today.
4. If you were stranded on an island and could do whatever you wanted to do—do that. One of the healthiest things you can do after a loss is get back to basics: do something for the simple pleasure of doing it. If no one was around, if you had no obligations on your time or energy at all, what would you spend your time doing? Chances are you aren’t doing much of it. And that’s part of the problem. Get back to it.
5. If you lost an intimate relationship, don’t be afraid to stay single for a while. After losing an intimate relationship, many people’s natural inclination is to immediately fill the void with either another relationship, or by seeking a bunch of attention, affection, and sex. This is a bad idea. As it distracts one from the healthy activities listed above. If you’re on the wrong side of a breakup (or even worse, you lose someone to tragedy), even if the relationship was healthy and secure, you need time to recuperate emotionally. And it’s hard to do that if you’re immediately throwing your heart to the next person who comes around. Stay single a while. Learn to spend time on yourself again. And only re-enter the dating world when you’re genuinely excited to. Not because you feel like you have to.

Eventually, Everything is Lost

Life is a long series of loss. It’s pretty much the only thing guaranteed in our existence. From moment to moment, year to year, we give up and leave behind former selves that we will never recover. We lose family, friends, relationships, jobs, and communities. We lose beliefs,experiences, perspectives, and passions. And ultimately, we will one day lose our existence entirely.

If you think back to a hard time in your life, recognise that to get out of those hard times, you had to accept losses. You had to lose relationships and pursuits, you had to lose a lot of meaning in order to create greater, healthier meaning. In that sense, all growth requires a degree of loss. And all loss incites further growth. The two must occur together.

People like to see growth as this euphoric, joyous thing. But it’s not. Real change brings a mixture of emotions with it—a grief of what you’ve left behind along with a satisfaction at what you’ve become. A soft sadness mixed with a simple joy. With that said, a happy birthday to me and a toast to the man I was and the man that I will be.

Hope you and yours are safe, lets catch up in the comments section of via email.

Photo Credit: Photo by pluetoe from Pexels

“There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison.” – Jane Austen

Should we trust our brain or our feelings? The answer to this question has eluded me in the past few weeks, yet I have realised it is more complicated than I ever thought. I have always fancied myself as someone in control of their feelings until I was confronted with a ‘new feeling’.

Somehow, over the past few decades, it’s become conventional wisdom that we should put our faith in our feelings. That is, if we feel something—especially if we feel it intensely—then it deserves to be seen as valid, or truthful. The adage “trust your feelings” has by now become almost axiomatic. But ultimately, how logical or how safe is it to conclude that if we feel something strongly, we should both believe it and permit it to control our behaviour?

The very essence of cognitive-behavioural therapy and rational emotive behaviour therapy as well is derived from the theory that how we think determines how we feel. But as this theory itself might ask, if our thoughts are exaggerated, distorted or, for that matter, downright delusional—how can we possibly place our faith in any feelings that stem from such irrational thoughts? Are we not in what the ICT world calls a G.I.G.O. type of situation here (i.e., garbage in, garbage out)? For if our thoughts are erroneous, or based on false assumptions, the feelings tied to these thoughts are bound to be equally distorted—and hardly to be trusted.

To give some examples, if we mistakenly interpret a situation as dangerous, the anxiety or panic that we’ll feel however intense will still be groundless, because it’s not reality-based. Or if we irrationally perceive our situation as hopeless despite the fact that several options exist that could save us from our plight the depression we’ll experience will be similarly illogical. Or finally, if we were overindulged as children and grew up with the narcissistic assumption that we deserved to get everything we wanted, then when we’re older and subject to a world that fails to cater to our desires, we’ll probably feel we’re being treated unfairly. And consequently, we’ll experience a great deal of self-righteous anger, even indignation. But since our sense of entitlement was false, to begin with, our keenly felt anger will be without reasonable justification.

In further reviewing why it’s so important to be wary of letting our feelings dictate our behaviour, it’s also crucial to distinguish between emotions not rationally linked to present-day circumstances and what I’ll call true “gut feelings,” indistinguishable from intuition. When, say, a hot woman feels markedly uncomfortable (or “spooked”) in an elevator she’s sharing with a stranger, it’s only prudent that she exits at the next floor. And it needs to be added that her taking such a precaution is guided not so much by the diffuse emotion of anxiety, which might suggest an exaggerated distrust of strangers based on personal history, but by a more instinctual, fear-based response, itself derived from her self preservation faculties. I mean she knows she’s beautiful. As I see it, genuine intuition (as a survival mechanism hard-wired into all of us) can be safely relied upon. It’s inherently trustworthy, whereas our emotions need to be viewed much more cautiously.

Going back to the elevator example, if a woman routinely feels threatened whenever she’s alone with an unfamiliar male, there’s far less reason to think that her fear is intuitive or reality-based. In such a case, what most likely would be setting off her anxiety is some unresolved disturbance, or trauma, from the past—something that left her “sensitised” (or over-reactive) to particular situations in which she couldn’t help but experience herself as out of control. Possibly, she was physically attacked or raped or grew up in a home with a father who, unpredictable and/or authoritarian, regularly intimidated or physically abused her.

Only two emotions control the world, fear and love, and fear is the greatest. Tweet Me

However, the here-and-now experience may be only coincidentally related to the past one. There may be no meaningful connection at all between what just happened to us and what we experienced years ago. But if the present-day circumstance “triggers” us, we’ll still react to it as though it were a recurrence of the original situation. Regressing to an earlier emotional state, at that moment our rational mind is impaired, unable to function logically. In short, in such instances our emotions do not derive from the current circumstance–and are, therefore, not to be trusted.

Just as our thoughts govern our emotions, our emotions, in turn, govern our behaviour. So unless we’re able to do an on-the-spot reality check, we’re in danger of reacting to such present-day “prompts” in a way that may be completely inappropriate and self-defeating. Plainly, we can harm a relationship if in the here-and-now we deal with that person as though he or she were some ghost from our past. It’s as though we’re presented with one set of stimuli and, because of personal biases we’re totally oblivious of, we react as though we’d been presented with an altogether different set of stimuli. Once again, our emotions—however deeply felt—can end up betraying us.

One final example of needing to be careful about “running” with our emotions relates to the blissful experience of falling in love. Which is to say that our falling “madly” in love with someone doesn’t necessarily mean that the person we’re so enamoured of is right for us—i.e., the one. Certainly, in the moment it almost always feels this way, trust me, I know. But since falling in love is more chemical than cognitive, we need to be extremely careful about making an instant commitment because of the power of our feelings. Falling “head over heels” may mean just that: our passion, has thrown us seriously off balance–and we, therefore, need to proceed with considerable caution. In some ways, it’s almost as easy to just fall in love and not feel it but think it, especially if we’re ready for the experience, or the other person is just so attractive to us. Like I said last week, sometimes you just need to be willing to see how deep the rabbit hole is, feelings or not, just be like Nike and just do it.

I believe we need to remind ourselves that a romantic, emotionally laden, attraction may be far more physical than spiritual and that it may not be grounded in our ability to accurately access the other’s deeper nature or personality traits—traits that, finally, we might come to view either as lovable and endearing; or as loathsome, revolting or contemptible (consider, for example, the movie, “The War of the Roses”). Love for one has no formula. You can close your eyes to stuff you don’t want to see but you cannot close your heart to what it wants to feel. All you can do is look at it objectively and make decisions based on what you want. As I said, I was introduced to a new feeling recently, and I for the lack of a better word, love it. Tupac Shakur once said only two emotions control the world, fear and love, and fear is the greatest. Do you agree?

As always, hope you and yours are safe. Share with us your thoughts in the comments sections, would love to hear what you think or what you feel about this post. Let’s Go!!!

Photo Credit: Photo by Wallace Chuck from Pexels

“Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” 
― Voltaire

Doubt leads to more experimentation, more self-discovery, and more tolerance. James Warren Jones was a charismatic minister of a church where he built up a congregation by specifically appealing to minorities, the unemployed, and homeless people. He sometimes called his congregation his “Rainbow Family” due to its racial and class diversity — something highly novel in the US in the 50s and 60s. He also had strong socialist political leanings, calling for extremely progressive governmental policies to try and bring more help to the needy and oppressed. By all appearances, he was an admirable man.

By the 1970s, Jones had become an influential figure in San Francisco politics. His church had thousands of members and they could be mobilized at the drop of a hat to help campaign for candidates. As a result, leftist candidates of the time relied upon Jones to help them win office. He was involved in Harvey Milk’s famous campaign to be the first openly homosexual person elected to public office. And he helped George Moscone become mayor of San Francisco in 1975. He even had some private chats with then-vice-president Walter Mondale and First Lady Rosalynn Carter.

But what all of these people somehow missed was that Jones believed he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. No, seriously.

Jones said this regularly in his sermons, that people should treat him both as their father and as their God, that he was charged with creating a new Garden of Eden because the apocalypse was going to happen any second now. This new Eden would be just up highway 101 a few dozen miles, just turn left at the diner with the hot dog on the sign.

Now, this might surprise you, but towards the end of the 1970s, it became known that Jones was physically and sexually abusing his congregation members. I know — surprise. But fortunately for Jones, angels came to him and told him that actually, that whole new Garden of Eden thing wasn’t supposed to be in Northern California after all. See, they had made a mistake, turned the map sideways, and actually, Jones was supposed to lead his chosen people to the Garden of Eden in nearby… *drumroll* Guyana… which, by coincidence, had no extradition laws with the US.

So Jones headed for Guyana. And brought 1,000 of his favourite church members with him.

In Guyana, Jones promised salvation from the apocalypse that was seriously going to start, like, any second now. His settlement, aptly dubbed “Jonestown,” would be an egalitarian community where everything would be shared equally and everybody would be treated as equals. There would be no fear or violence or any of that horrible stuff that existed in the US. It would be a utopia, as it were. A perfect little plot on earth. And we all know how utopias usually turn out… In the case of Jim Jones, he committed the largest mass murder-suicide that you and I have likely ever heard of. In total, 909 people took their own lives that day, shortly after murdering five others.

And for what? Some whacked-out belief in the apocalypse and end times?

The Dangers Of Super Beliefs

I read of a concept called “Super Beliefs.” Super Beliefs are beliefs that are so big and abstract that they encompass all other beliefs and experiences that could potentially contradict them. As a result, Super Beliefs cannot be proven or disproven, since all experience falls under their umbrella. Confusing right? Let me break it down.

Whether we realise it or not, we all have our own Super Beliefs. They’re incredibly common. And we tend to cling to them as though our lives depended on it.

“Everything happens for a reason,” is a Super Belief. It’s so all-encompassing that it can explain every single thought or idea you have in response to it. Therefore, it’s impossible to ever disprove it or show contrary evidence to it.

“Something is only true if there is evidence to support it,” is another Super Belief. “God has a plan for everyone,” is another. “We are all spiritually connected and one with the universe,” is another.

“We all live in a computer-generated virtual reality and are enslaved by machines,” is another super belief. Any argument proposed against it will simply reinforce it. If I try to point out that there’s no evidence that this is a hyper-realistic form of virtual reality, someone can just say, “Yeah, because the machines programmed it that way.” You either believe it or you don’t. Such are all Super Beliefs.

Super beliefs are so common that they define a lot of our culture. Some believe that people always deserve whatever happens to them, that if they suffer through life it’s because they’re lazy or stupid or just not trying hard enough. Others believe people suffer due to karma — i.e., what goes around comes around. Others believe that people suffer because humans are inherently sinful and God is punishing them for not repenting. These are all common, everyday Super Beliefs that have very real consequences on the social order.

Super Beliefs can be benign (“Everything happens for a reason”), useful, (“All knowledge must be verified and tested to be believed”), benevolent (“The meaning of life is to ease the suffering of all living beings”), or just plain mean (“Death to all non-believers!”). They are the foundation on which you’ve built your whole understanding of the universe and everything in it. As a result, Super Beliefs are often hard to spot because they feel so obviously true to us that we never think to question them.

But as time goes on, you’ll notice your Super Beliefs, and the super beliefs of others, poking their dirty heads up, derailing reasonable conversations, putting a roadblock up to any discourse or progress. And it’s in those moments where Super Beliefs emerge that they must be challenged.

When people do horrible things, they don’t do it because they’re uncertain in themselves or they feel as though they are wrong or damaged in some way. It’s actually the opposite. People who do horrible things do them because they are so sure in their own moral superiority. They are so confident that they are right and others are wrong that they feel justified in imposing their own beliefs on others through force.

Whether we’re talking about Hitler, Mao, genocide in Rwanda, dictatorship on Zimbabwe or honour killing a Pakistani woman for showing her ankles in public, people who do awful things do it because they are certain in their own moral righteousness, and that moral righteousness is usually the product of some Super Belief which cannot be verified or concretely challenged.

The Only True Belief

The only true Super Belief is that no Super Belief is completely true. That is, the only certainty is that nothing is certain.

This is the only “safe” Super Belief as it limits your ability to force your certainty onto others, while simultaneously always leaving you open to new and improved ideas. It keeps you open to new experiences and capable of coping with whatever pain may arise in a realistic and safe way.

Doubting ourselves generates anxiety because it forces us to acknowledge that we may be believing in something stupid that might get us (or others) killed as well. Tweet Me

A lot is said these days about being “sure” of yourself. That you need to have faith in yourself and your ideas. These platitudes are usually regurgitated as a way to encourage people to feel a bit more confident about themselves. You are worried about your work, so you try to muster up some certainty that you really are a cold-calling badass. Or you start to feel uncomfortable with how your relationship is going so you fall back on the old “everything happens for a reason” Super Belief to feel a bit more at ease about the situation. Super Beliefs relieve the anxiety caused by uncertainty. But they do so by creating mental constructs that can lead down dark and dangerous paths.

Doubting ourselves generates anxiety because it forces us to acknowledge that we may be believing in something stupid that might get us (or others) killed as well. But instead of learning to become comfortable with doubt, our culture has instead decided to get rid of the anxiety and be as certain in our half-baked ideas as possible.

Doubt is healthy. Doubt is a virtue. Just like lifting heavy weights breaks down bone and muscle to make them stronger, the same is true with doubt and one’s ideas and beliefs. There is no such thing as faith without doubt. Doubt is necessary to test the faith and make it stronger. There is no confidence without a doubt. Without doubt, there is nothing to persevere against. There is no brilliant idea without doubt. Doubt and criticism and failure is what slowly chisels an OK idea into the brilliant result the world ends up seeing.

Cultivate doubt in your life. Always be unsure. Because being unsure leads to testing and discovering and learning and improving. It leads to dialogue and tolerance and acceptance and all that good happiness crap. There’s talk about COVID 19 vaccines and all, how certain are you they will work? Are you willing to be the first to try one? I didn’t think so.

Doubt makes you smarter. It makes you more resilient. And if done correctly, it should make you more curious. If you doubt, you are more likely to go down the rabbit hole because you are curious to see what’s down there. Yet if you are certain, you are never gonna go down it, and guess what, you will never know what you would’ve experienced.

Doubt today is more important than ever. With ever-dwindling attention available for each issue, with a glut of information and contrary information available. With the ease in which the internet allows us to surround ourselves with only those who agree with us, the ability to hold onto doubt will become a virtue in our 21st-century society. It will distinguish those who are able to reason and synthesise information from those who will lash out and go with the day’s biggest trend. It will differentiate those who can find their own way in a sea of opportunity and haze of information and those who drown in the digital noise.

So when you find your gut sinking because you are in doubt of something or someone, always remember you are in the right space. As always, hope you and yours are safe. Share with us your thoughts in the comments section.

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“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” ― Plato

I have always been driven by music, my favourite being the acoustic guitar. Through the pain of split fingertips and growing tough calluses, I have learned more than music from my guitar. I have learned life. The current guitar I own is my 3rd one, I called her Olivia from Shakespeares Twelfth Night.

Olivia and I spend intimate time together, at least an hour a day. And during these Covid 19 lockdowns, our intimacy has been interesting. I tend to find meaning in the most simple of things, day to day behaviours like playing the guitar. This allows me to play around with the philosophy of life and why we do certain things.

What we choose to do with our time determines the lessons that inform our lives and values. For instance, if you had been a star basketball player in High School, I’m sure you would have learned all sorts of interesting lessons about teamwork, enduring physical pain, trust in teammates, and the clout.

But for me, in college I spent most of my time alone in my room, reading, playing chess and practising harmonic minor scales. That taught me a different subset of life lessons, and those lessons help define who I am today. I was good at sport too, in High School I could sprint, I could play soccer and basketball but my most valuable lessons came from those ‘me time’ moments. Below I share some of these lessons and why they are pivotal today.

1. THERE’S A FINE LINE BETWEEN PASSION AND ESCAPISM.

What we are passionate about is often directly correlated to what our biggest emotional struggles in life have been. Are bodybuilders passionate about bodybuilding? Or do they have deep-seated self-image issues? Are sports fanatics really that crazy about their team, or do they latch onto it because it fills a need for loyalty and camaraderie in their lives? At times it can be difficult to know if our love for an activity is healthy or a form of neuroticism or escapism. Often, it’s both.

Music was my passion and guitar was my escape. It took me many years to realise that. While I enjoy guitar, I’m not in love with it. Music, on the other hand, you’d have to stab me in the ears to ever get me to give it up.

I was new at my college. I had no friends and felt out of place my first year there. It also happened to be the first time in my life that I was forced to confront my social anxiety (or perhaps where my social anxiety began, it’s hard to say). Guitar helped me settle in, it gave me a way out. It was one of those things I found that I was good at and that was also cool. Therefore, I adopted it as my identity.

2. QUANTIFIABLE IMPROVEMENT IS USEFUL AS A TOOL BUT NOT AS A VALUE.

I approached the guitar the way a nerdy kid approaches the Rubik’s Cube: it was something to be solved logically, then perfected. My perception of what made a guitarist “good” was entirely measurable — how fast could one play, was his technique clean, had he mastered various scales and chords — and I soon placed my self-worth on my ability to do this.

Approaching music in this way is a great way to build technical skill and impress people here or there, but it makes for a really terrible musical experience. You spend more time perfecting the way you play than enjoying what you play. I was treating music as a physical and mental exercise rather than an emotional one.

Quantified improvement is a great tool for us to utilise in various areas of life. Even in music, quantifying your improvement in areas such as speed or rhythm is great. But it must be used in support of a greater goal; it cannot be the goal itself.

This is true in life as well — being bigger, faster, stronger, richer, more attractive — these are all nice things and great tools for enhancing our lives. But if they are, themselves, your life goals, then you will eventually become miserable. A friend of mine posted this quote on their social media: “Do not be too busy making a life you forget to live one”

3. YOU ONLY STICK TO A HABIT YOU ENJOY.

The biggest epiphany of my guitar lessons was that willpower is no match for emotional investment.

Many people try to adopt a new diet or start going to the gym or learn a new skill or study a language, only to quickly fail. Unless you are being emotionally rewarded for something, you are eventually not going to continue to do it, no matter how much willpower you have. You have to find a way to make exercise fun. You have to find a way to reward yourself for successful dieting. And you have to feel the benefits of the meditation practice. This is why doing these things in groups is so useful, the rewarding social aspect creates a strong incentive to continue.

For me, the emotional rewards of playing the guitar were far more social than I realised at the time. It allowed me to meet and interact with people I wouldn’t normally interact with. And through these interactions, I learned more about the guitar, myself and life.

4. NO MATTER HOW GREAT YOU ARE, YOU STILL HAVE TO DEPEND ON OTHER PEOPLE.

An unfortunate truth for many of us with delusions of grandeur. In my years playing, I never did find a band that either a) all of the musicians were good or b) all of the musicians wanted to play the same kind of music. It was frustrating. Playing with yourself all day, every day eventually gets, err… boring. Yes.

The irony of my guitar experience came to a head when I discovered that I was terrified of playing with a lot of the other people there (i.e., people as good or better than me). Playing the guitar had been a strategy that allowed me to get my validation needs to be met while circumventing my social anxiety in the process. So believe it or not, other people became key to my development as a guitar player. Getting comfortable playing with others and in front of people gave me the confidence to put myself out there. In life whatever to set out to do. You are going to need key people to work with you and help you deliver the best version of you. Going solo will eventually get boring, and growth is very slow.

5. ULTIMATELY, YOUR EMOTIONAL CONNECTIONS DETERMINE YOUR SUCCESS.

Just as any quantifiable advantage in life is useless unless applied to qualitative well-being. So in music, any quantitative ability on an instrument is useless unless applied to develop an emotional connection with the music and with your audience.

In a band, the drums and bass complement the guitar and vice-versa and none of them play over the top of one another. Ultimately, the song makes some sort of emotional statement that many people are able to relate to. I’m a sucker for Ed Sheeran’s I See Fire. After watching him play it, I realised how he sells out arenas around the world, and nerds like me don’t and never will.

Most people watch guys like him and imitate his surface movements — the scales, the speed, the string-skipping, the chord progression — spending hours developing the necessary skills to play like him and totally missing what actually makes him good: his heart. Yeah, totally cliché but true. How emotionally connected are you to your gift and your purpose? Are you just in it to look good or is it the money?

Everyone has their own gift, but most never succeed at it because their ‘why’ is off. The moment you share your gift with the world without heart is the day you give the world nothing. It needs to mean more than a couple of dollars in the bank. More than a few likes and comments on the gram. So whatever your gift is, give it your you all. Pour yourself out totally and whatever your stage is, leave everything on the floor.

Share with us in the comments section what lessons you have learned from your day to day hobbies and gifts. As always, hope you and yours are safe.

Photo Credit: Photo by Stephen Niemeier from Pexels

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” 
― Lao Tzu

Making sense is about finding clarity so you can move forward with confidence. Max DePree says “The first job of a leader is to define reality.” (The last is to say thank you if you’re wondering.) When you know where you ARE, you are better positioned to decide where you want to go NEXT. Like your GPS, it works on the endpoint in relation to your current position. As people we work hard to know what our current reality is, to then understand it, and then look for the viable options moving forward.

There is no doubt the Coronavirus pandemic has globally affected everything. Yet it is important to see how one can still be really effective. In other words, how to work out fast what reality is like and to make quick adjustments where needed. I belive there are four areas to explore.

1. To be clear about how you understand your purpose, past, present and future.
2. To measure how engaged you are in the current situation.
3. To assess your capability to deliver on change if that is the required strategy.
4. To select the most effective development process and pathway to take.

Understanding, engagement, capability and development – four parts of defining reality. Four stages of making sense. Getting clear on what is really going on is critical to begin this ‘new normal’ journey. Making sense comes from asking ‘what is working’ and ‘what is not working’. This provides you with the ability to see the leverage and pain points side by side. And usually, we go through both those experiences, much of it at the same time. I call this the ‘sweet spot‘.

Karl Weick is known as the father of sensemaking and his work has been used by thought leaders globally. Chapter Two of Sensemaking in Organisations contains what is perhaps Weick’s most cited sentence, the recipe for sensemaking: “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”

The seven ideas of sensemaking are:

• Sensemaking is a matter of identity: it is who we understand ourselves to be in relation to the world around us.
• Sensemaking is retrospective: we shape experience into meaningful patterns according to our memory of experience.
• How and what becomes sensible depends on our socialisation: where we grew up in the world, how we were taught to be in the world, where we are located now in the world, the people with whom we are currently interacting.
• It is a continuous flow; it is ongoing because our interactions with the world and our understandings of the world are constantly changing. You might also think of sensemaking as perpetually emergent meaning and awareness.
• Sensemaking builds on extracted cues that we apprehend from sense and perception. Cognition is the meaningful internal embellishment of these cues. We articulate these embellishments through speaking and writing.
• Sensemaking is less a matter of accuracy and completeness than plausibility and sufficiency. We simply have neither the perceptual nor cognitive resources to know everything exhaustively, so we have to move forward as best as we can. Plausibility and sufficiency enable action-in-context.

So making sense of your current reality is about knowing who you are, where you are and having the most realistic assessment of how it’s going. Good, bad, or ugly, you must “face the brutal facts yet remain optimistic.” (Attribution: Jim Collins) As you lean into the process hold to the following five convictions that will serve your learning and accelerate your growth.

• Be proactive. Go first with curiosity and vulnerability.
• Be humble. We know you’re not perfect and we don’t expect you to be.
• Be calm. Feedback is telling you to do more of something or less of something, it isn’t failure.
• Be responsive. Find the specific things you can leverage and change right now. Do them first.
• Be active. Implement any changes as soon as possible. Leverage your mentor and your network.

When you have clarity on where you are, you can define your future with confidence.

Sensemaking seems to make sense, doesn’t it? I know it is difficult to even dream of the future at present, but we have the right tools to be better. As always, hope you and yours are safe. Let’s build a positive reality together.

Photo Credit: Photo by Luis Quintero from Pexels

“Change happens when good hearts act” – Pam Ahern

Ah, Integrity. A value highly sort after which can be elusive. So what is integrity? Well one way of saying it is – “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.” (attributed to various authors).

The word Integrity embodies a wholeness or a solidarity.  We say that a structure has integrity when all its parts work together. They support and uphold the whole structure. When a part is missing or ceases to function effectively, then the integrity of the whole structure is compromised. An enterprise may likewise have integrity when the individuals and the systems of the enterprise align with the vision.

Yet for many, personal integrity is a place of pain. Many do not know what personal integrity looks like.

Having personal integrity to me is:

• living according to our values, 
• to do what your heart knows to be true,
• living up to your highest good, which is the “whole” of us,
• To make corrections when we find that we have been less than true to ourselves, especially our highest self.

It is also to be open to the possibilities of who you can become, to the higher part of you that desires a more expanded, more fulfilling life. Living with this type of integrity brings a life of freedom. Never compromise your personal or your artistic integrity. Never settle for anything but your absolute best effort – an effort that may be exhausting and frustrating, but that will ultimately serve you in good stead as a creative and as a human being.

Integrity Seeing

It means producing our best work, not motivated by external motives such as profit, rather from the inner desire to produce what is our great work.

In our engagement with other people and with our work, there is a tendency to seek out those with integrity. There is a higher level of trust where integrity is found. When seeking those who exhibit integrity, we often look for:

• One who tells the truth in simple, easily understandable language without manipulation of people or a distortion of the facts, for their own agenda.
• A person who is transparent as to their reasons and actions.
• One who keeps their commitments or communicates early – when a change is necessary.
• A person who accepts responsibility, avoiding the “blame game” or deflecting.
• One who is willing to face tough issues and discuss them honestly, even receiving answers they don’t like.
• One who is willing to become their higher, more noble self, finding their purpose and becoming a better influence.

Living life through your integrity provides a light to the world. This empowers others with the possibility of who they could become – finding their purpose. Just as a stone dropped into a pond creates a ripple effect, so too, living a life of integrity from the heart ripples out to touch others. Ram Dass’s quote; “We’re all just walking each other home“, reminds us that when we support one another’s journey, we can live a more purposed life, and we walk each other home.

When our words and our actions align, in harmony with our higher self. We discover a power in living that frees us from living a smaller life, focused on the little things. And we see more clearly what is really happening, we hear more clearly what is being communicated, whether spoken or conveyed in some other way. We act more thoughtfully and naturally from our true self. Joy in life becomes easier. “Problems” seem smaller, requiring less energy. 

A group also has an integrity. Where there is common vision and joint action in the direction of that vision, there is an integrity in the whole group. But what happens when the individuals or the systems in the group become separate? As we said earlier, integrity embodies a wholeness or solidarity. A separateness or pulling apart weakens the whole group causing it to be less effective.

As we look at public groups including political parties and companies, we quickly decide whether they exhibit integrity and we therefore choose how much we trust them. The integrity is shown in the cohesiveness of their actions, as both, a collective group and as individuals. A place where African politics struggles a lot.

With our personal integrity, we measure how aligned our actions are to our values. We decide how connected we feel to our higher self if we take those actions, or to how diminished we feel if we don’t. When the inner voice or light speaks and we act accordingly, we have acted with integrity.

In the William Shakespeare play, Hamlet, Polonius gave some advice to his departing son Laertes: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” (Spoken by Polonius in Hamlet Act 1, Scene 3 )

We owe it to ourselves and to the world to be our best versions, in private life and in public life. Once you master this it is easier to pour yourself out to the world and embrace your purpose. As always, hope you and yours are well. Please share with us your thoughts in the comments section, we would love to hear from you.

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