Maintain Equilibrium From Within

Dear loving people,

I got a call recently from the Manger of a Bank in Yaounde, Cameroon. He wanted me to come talk to his team. Recently, his team is increasingly getting demotivated and showing signs of individual as well as collective diminishing performance. The situation is already affecting their clients and my client equally told me he had no idea how to go about resolving that.

Well, firstly I told him that is the reason why Living Lectures exists, to offer lasting solutions. Part of the strategy I used in resolving the problem is what I tell every other person working hard at making life much better for themselves and their loved ones. Whether you are at the top of the largest organization in the world or at the bottom of the smallest, you have to amidst all, maintain a balance within and across the different spheres in which you operate and at all levels: balance at the job-site, balance at home, balance between your job and family and you name it.

Euripides says “The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man.”

Now, just imagine that you are juggling five balls. Each of them represent important parts of your job life for example – Motivation, Choices, Performance, Colleagues and Promotion. Four ball are made of glass and only one is made of rubber. We need to recognize that Promotion is a rubber ball. While Motivation, Choices, Performance and Colleagues are very fragile, if you drop one of them, they will be irreversibly damaged or even shattered. This understanding will help to keep the balance in your work life and this analysis can be extrapolated into the other important spheres of your life.

“We can be sure that the greatest hope for maintaining equilibrium in the face of any situation rests within ourselves” says Francis J. Braceland

Let it work for you and not against you.

Have a Good Cry to Your Success

Dear loving people,

In your quest for success and happiness, moments do come when you’ve done all, you’ve put in your best, you’ve tried to be your best for those you love and yet things don’t work as expected, you get so frustrated you just feel like exploding in torrents of tears. Unfortunately from very young ages most of us are told not to cry. We’ve been told it’s a sign of weakness. Most African men are enculturated not to cry especially in the presence of women, you often hear parents tell their children “be a man, don’t cry” and so we effectively add up our troubles by suppressing our natural tears.

Crying is a natural body function that helps relieve stress, anxiety, and other emotional build-ups. Eileen Mayhew admonitions “Let your tears come. Let them water your soul.” You should allow yourself to cry.

Sometimes you are given no choice. Your body overrides any effort to suppress the urge to cry. When you hold back your tears, you only amplify the emotions or stress your body is trying to release through crying. “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.” Writes Charles Dickens in Great Expectations.

A study by the University of Minnesota discovered that the chemicals that build up in your body during emotional stress can be removed in your tears, and unreleased stress can increase your risk for heart attack and damage certain areas of your brain. So your human ability to cry is not only therapeutic, but could even be considered a survival tactic. So have a good cry.

Women have more leeway than men to cry. It’s not quite fair, but it’s true. Women can usually release tears much more easily than men because it’s accepted. Men rarely consider it acceptable for themselves or other men to cry. Most men don't even consider crying an option, but they should put down that armor and allow themselves to cry. Pick a place where you won’t be disturbed, and have a good cry. After a thorough cry you will feel better. A study by the University of South Florida found that almost everyone feels better after a cry, and that personality has a major effect on how often we cry.

Sometimes crying helps to clear the mind, and may even help you think things through a little more clearly than you would if you hold those stressful emotions inside. We all know that emotional decisions tend to be riddled with difficulty.  So, you want to clear your mind in order to refocus on that big project, please create time and have a good cry.

Now! Don’t get me wrong or consider a quick-fix therapy. Crying may not be the answer to everyone’s stress. Recent research suggests however that it's highly effective at encouraging the body to heal, and it improves the mood of 88.8% of those who weep. Researchers suggest that crying is so beneficial that there may be a case for inducing crying in those who find it difficult to let go. Go on, let it out.  Have a good cry to your success.

The Power of Abanda’s Thoughts

Dear loving people,

Thoughts create everything. But here’s the problem. Most people spend their time thinking about what they don’t want, and they’re wondering why it shows up over and over again.

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.” Says Henry David Thoreau

If you have two dogs who fight all the time, and you can only afford to feed one of them, how do you know which one will win? The one you feed! The same is true with our thought patterns. The more you think about negativities and self-deception, the more such thoughts monopolizes your mind, and the harder it will be for you to head towards change or success. The other side of the coin is true too... the more you feast yourself on the truths about live and what it takes to succeed, the more it tears down your monopolized mind and makes it harder for failure to penetrate your system.

Abanda considered himself the most unlucky person on earth. He did everything in his power to success yet nothing positive ever happened to him and so one night, an Angel came to him and told him “Abanda, your cries has been heard above and now I am sent to give you the powers go command and get all you need. Henceforth whatever you want will be given to you so you can fulfill all of your desires”

Believing in what the Angel said, Abanda thought: “I am hungry, so it would be nice to have some good food this moment." When he just thought about this, a table full of different dishes he could just dream about appeared before him. Wow! – Abanda was surprised, - but it can’t be! - he thought again, and the table with dishes disappeared immediately. It would be nice to get it back! - and the dishes appeared again.

He ate a plenty of dishes – he has never eaten such tasty food before. After satisfying his hunger he thought: it would be nice to drink something - and a perfect wine appeared immediately. Lying in the comfort of his sitting room and drinking wine, he started to wonder: What miracles do happen? It just can’t be that everything would be so good - probably some ghosts played a joke on me.

Suddenly the ghosts appeared. They were terrible and looked like he imagined them. Abanda became scared and thought: now they will kill me! And they killed him.

Everyone lives in the world he is deserved. James R Ball says “We cannot achieve more in life than what we believe in our heart of hearts we deserve to have.”

Your thoughts and beliefs are the most powerful force in the universe. Make sure you are cognizant of yours. Once you truly understand that your mind is equipped with this single source of power, you will have found the only true source of infinite power for which nothing is impossible and impossible is nothing. Accessing this source of power starts by looking inwards.

The Problem With Me

Dear loving people,

Increasingly, I come across people who made up their minds to rise to prominence and then they turn around and focus on things that rather destroy their chances of achieving success or they sit by and wish success will happen on its own. You know something? Part of the reason many people don’t make it to the success mark is because we lie to ourselves. We joke most of the time. We don’t dare to face the truth.

Ask me why? For a multiplicity of reasons. Some of us are always making up excuses. Some of us are not disciplined enough to take on the hard work. The rest of us are afraid of success. You may be thinking, “Hey! I’m no liar!” but the thing is, the lies are subtle. Most, if not all of us are guilty of lying to ourselves from time to time.

Imagine you rush home to get things set because you expect important visitors. When you enter your sitting room, you get a pungent smell so, you set to work to neutralize the odor – but it doesn’t go away. You try harder and harder spraying all sorts of air fresheners, but nothing changes. You get frustrated and annoyed and can’t get the air in the room fresh.

Do you know that the problem was never the smell in the room but rather a dead rat under one of the sofas that is the origin of the pungent odor? Your mind is the ‘dead rat’ and your life the ‘pungent odor’. If you smell the disturbing pungent odor in the room, you don’t need to just spray odor neutralizers – but rather get rid of the dead rat that produce it. Don’t go through life thinking you need to neutralize the “pungent odor” (your life) – instead get rid of the ‘dead rat’ (your mind) by changing the way you think.

You tell yourself “I just need a lucky breakthrough.” As you tell yourself this, you visualize success. The problem is that the chances of this lucky breakthrough happening are about the same as winning the lottery. There is another issue here. You are deceiving yourself in thinking that the winners have always had it easy and have never had to struggle. They got lucky and they never had to deal with grinding poverty, unfair competition, and backbreaking hard work. The reality is a lot different. It takes nerve, determination, persistence, and a vision to succeed. The lucky breakthrough may come but waiting around is not going to make that happen.

 

You tell yourself “I must wait for the right moment.” You think that there will be the perfect niche and you will know when to pounce on it to make it into a roaring success. You just have to wait until the time is right and you keep putting things off. Let me tell you, if Charles Jenkins had persisted in that belief we would never have had the television.

 

Napoleon Hill insists that “Procrastination is the bad habit of putting off until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.”

 

When you tell yourself “I shouldn’t struggle.” Remember that your struggles are not your problem it is your response to them that can become a problem. When you struggle, you don’t flow with life, accept, and embrace life as it comes. What if you see your struggles as gifts that give you the optimal opportunities to grow, develop and mature? Eliminate the idea of struggles and problems: Life either presents itself as “blissful experiences or as blissful opportunities to learn”.

Make a decision to tell yourself the plain truth. Face your adversities and dreams squarely and never be afraid of failure even if it were staring at you in the face. “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” says J.K.Rowling