Ideas that improve agency
If you have ever loathed being an entrepreneur, see the movie, Up in the Air.
It will straighten many assumptions you have held about job security, loyalty and the legacy you want to leave behind.
Understand that working for someone else, all through your career life is as difficult as starting your own business, only the former choice often delays the difficulty till when one is old and grey.
You might not always agree but who you watch, listen to or spend time with is incredibly indicative of your performance.
If you can’t find inspiration from the people you hang around, ditch them and look for podcasts, films and books that can help you raise your game.
In life, it’s how much of what you know that gets embodied that really matters. This is the power that regulating who or what you let into your social orbit gives.
So many couples have been through a lot during this pandemic. For some, it afforded the realization that staying together might not be viable, and they quit. Great!
For others, particularly with children, they also realized that staying in their current relationships, though painful, might even do more harm to their children, if they left.
True to the title of this post, I want to urge you to stay because of your kids, if you can. Many might argue the unhealthy nature of such a choice but then, I might ask: Do you really love your kids enough to endure an unhappy relationship until they are stable enough to handle a break? Or can you even look for a solution because you love him or her? I am asking you to stay, go to counseling if need be, because of the love you have for your children. For many of us, there is almost nothing we won’t do for our children , trust me.
Very often, we may have to remind ourselves to listen. And I am not talking about hearing.
You hear with your ears but you only listen with your entire being. It’s not just the gift of your presence but of your essence and time.
If you multitask, you don’t listen. Listening is not for multitaskers. Listening requires you put the phone and every other distraction away. It requires being still, lips sealed with your eyes looking at the one speaking.
People are the greatest resource in the world. But people are always in flux, needing constant evolution, even with the way we solve problems.
If you want to solve a problem by building a company, writing a book or creating a perennial selling product, you must find a way to connect your work to answering a social change question.
Answering questions posed by racism, ableism, colonialism, climate change, financial non-inclusion, and many others social issues should undergird how you craft everything. Otherwise, why craft at all?
When relationships end for any reason, people only miss you if they find you to be irreplaceable.
In many ways, the influence that making yourself invaluable to any person or group wields is one of the financial secrets of the age.
If you want to deepen the bond with people, with whom you share a relationship, personal or professional, work on becoming so valuable they find it hard to replace you.
If you live in a part of the world where lockdowns were used to manage the Coronavirus pandemic, you received a gift.
The pandemic put you in a position to learn a lot about yourself. For some, the codependent nature of their relationships became manifest as a result of the forced isolation. They realized they were addicted to someone, not from love but from the need for ‘normalcy.’
But codependency isn’t always about having to depend on someone else unhealthily. Rather, it’s about something in your psyche—maybe an emotional trauma—that needs to heal. This self-awareness that you need help is a gift.
Right decisions. Wrong decisions. Making decisions is more about who you are, than about your concept of right and wrong, or the environment you habituate.
In a nutshell, if work on your self-concept, ‘the ideal you,’ through a daily meditative process that helps you stay true to that ideal, you will almost never make a wrong decision.
Someone, once said, “the only way to make good decisions is by making bad ones.” Wrong. That’s the second best way. If you find congruence within yourself, good decision-making will be effortless. Find congruence.
Life is not a game. It’s living, moment by moment.
There will be challenges, twists and turns but you are the one who determines whether you win or lose.
That’s why you cannot take today for granted. You have to be willing to live it, moment by moment, the best way you can.
If you do everything normal, where’s the excitement in that?
If you let the expectations of others define you, where’s the ‘you’ in that?
If you act like everything is okay on the way to your dreams, you are delusional. You have to act like the anomaly to reach your dreams, to make your team better…to rise to the demands of what’s required.
