Month: April 2024

Life is actually good, even when it isn’t, but somehow, we think things always go against us and we subconsciously keep looking for affirmation of that. Instead of seeing that today we have another day where we can create our story, we dread getting up in the morning. We complain how busy we are in our jobs, instead of being grateful that we have a job. We complain about our spouse texting us about some meaningless thing and get annoyed at her, when we should be grateful that she wants to communicate. We rather whinge about being held up in traffic by every light turning red, instead of considering that we may have been slowed down to not be in an accident. We focus on all the things that are going against us. We create a space of negativity, enforce limited thinking and by doing so we limit ourselves. We don’t think that life can be different. Instead of pondering what life could be, we paralyse ourselves with limited thinking. We keep repeating the past instead of creating a new future. We keep thinking the same way over and over again and stay in the limitations of our own thinking, reinforcing a life lived by limitations.

When we consider a job, for instance, or what is possible in terms of payment, we think that can only be paid a certain amount, because we talk to others, we do market research, and so on. We don’t consider that maybe our skills are more valuable and as such we can ask for more money, or ask for additional benefits that most people may not have. We may also think that we have keep having this ill-fitted job to pay the mortgage when there actually is a better suited one with more money and better benefits out there. We kill any possibility, or chance, of a different life before it even takes its first breath. Just because it hasn’t been done before, or happened before, does not mean that it is not possible but we rather think that way. Think about professional athletes though. Do you think that the few men in the 1960s who crossed the 100m line in under ten seconds for the first time, since being able to electronically record sprinting time, were thinking that it wasn’t possible? No, of course not. If they thought it wasn’t possible they would not have achieved it, but they didn’t let the past rule the future. They thought it was possible. And ever since then the sprinting time keeps being broken. It doesn’t happen all the time and not every year, but none-the-less it happens, and those that do it don’t let anyone stop them.

The only ones who give up before they even start are the ones who live in the prison they have created for themselves. The prison is made up of bars of limited thoughts. It is those very bars that are holding you back. You have spent many years carefully building this prison by the limitations that you put upon yourself and the thinking that runs in endless loops looking for problems where there are none. But…. you are right. If you think something can’t be done, it won’t be. If you think you can’t win, you won’t win. Let’s also get clear on one thing, it is not a circumstance that is holding you back either, it is you. Your choice of attaching to the circumstance, instead of letting go and moving on, is what keeps you stuck in this mind-fuckery. It is not your partner or your friends either. If they actually discourage you from whatever it is you want to undertake, maybe they are not the right people to hang out with in the first place, but it is up to you.

You may say you have problems though and as such these problems prevent you from doing something else in your life or with your life. You have a job that stresses you out, your co-workers take time off when a critical deadline is due, you think you have just made a mistake in a high-stake deal, for some reason Rosey doesn’t talk to you anymore even though you have been nice to her, Jimmy isn’t texting you quickly enough so maybe he has moved on, your child hasn’t washed their hands before dinner,…. I could write pages upon pages with things we think are problems, when they are actually not. You may have a stressful job, but it is how you manage stress that is important. Think about your co-workers, they don’t seem to care about the time-line, so why do you worry so much about it? Do you think worrying about it will help you get the project done in time? You may have made a mistake, but guess what, we all sometimes make mistakes. Rosey may not want to talk to you, or anyone for that matter, because she has had no sleep all night. Jimmy may be on a phone-detox and as such is not texting you, or anyone else.

Most often the problems that we think we have, are not even real but we have manufactured something in our heads about something or someone. Instead of questioning the validity of those thoughts, we give them space to roam freely in our head and we even get other people involved. We go to others under the pretence that we need to have our problems solved, when in reality we are seeking validation and to get others’ buy-in. And when we have talked to everyone who is willing to listen, we spend more thinking about them or on what possible other problems there are. We start creating this loop of filling our time with thinking about “problems” that we don’t have, talking about them, validating them, to then trying to solve them to make space for the next problem to be solved. We rob ourselves not only of precious sleep, because most of the ‘how to solve a problem’-thinking happens right before we fall asleep, but also of all the time we could spend on working on our dreams. We let our faux problems fester and grow into something so large that we think our world is caving in soon. And by now we actually have a real problem. We have built a prison in our heads with all these problems that aren’t real and we spend our time either creating problems, or solving problems and by doing so create more problems so we can keep ourselves stuck in our prison instead of breaking out.

And even if we are not focused on any problems for once, we talk ourselves out of anything that possibly could be achieved. If you don’t think it possible, it won’t. If you think others only achieve something because they are an outlier, and you are not, then that is your choice. You absolutely can be the outlier but you have to consider removing the ‘im’ from ‘impossible’. You will always be right in your thinking. But if you consider that there is a possibility that it can be done, you will leave no stone unturned to get there. You will do whatever it takes to get there and leave your problems, that aren’t real, behind. You will stop putting limitations on yourself and consider any possibility. And just because it doesn’t happen the first time when you try, doesn’t mean it will never happen.

I will leave you with one final comment to ponder about: In case you think you need to spend time looking for a key, the door to your prison has never been locked, you just need to swing it wide open and step outside into a world filled with endless possibilities.

Time is something we often think about and is frequently mentioned in conversation for one reason or another. We ask what time it is, what time an event starts, what time it finishes, what time we need to be somewhere, etc. We also cite time as one of the most common excuses for why we are not able to get something done. It is either that we don’t have enough of it, or that we have plenty of it. These statements have a different starting point but lead to the same outcome of not getting anything done.

You can tell yourself whatever you want but if you are young and you think you have all this time to pursue your dreams later in life, think again. Whilst probability is small, death has also claimed young lives. Death doesn’t discriminate against age. Death comes when our time is up and there is no way about it. No cheating or escaping it either. The only escaping we undertake almost daily is escaping life. We escape life by spending time on things or with people that do nothing for us, that hold us back instead of lifting us up. It is not other’s people’s fault, but only our own and the choices we make. We might also be scared of what people may think if we choose ourselves over a social function, if we choose getting up early to hit the gym, if we spend time by ourselves, working on ourselves and our gifts. We load ourselves up with useless things to spend our days.

You can also keep lying to yourself and tell yourself that you have no time for nothing, not even yourself. People often say that they have no time to cook healthy food. Guess what? You don’t have to spend two hours every day to cook a five-star meal. You just have to spend ten minutes to cook something that nourishes you. Ten minutes is plenty of time to achieve this. Likewise, people might say that they would like to write a book, but the thought of the time expenditure needed to achieve this seems impossible. People give up before they have even started. But consider this: If you take ten minutes every single day to write something, anything, you probably can write a page a day. In a year, you would have written 365 pages; in essence you have written a book. Maybe it isn’t the fiction book that sits in your heart, but you have written a book about something non-the-less of substantial length.

Whatever it is that you think you don’t have time for, just start with ten minutes. Maybe five even. No one can tell me that they don’t have or can’t take five to ten minutes for themselves. No one can tell me that they can’t find just ten minutes to meditate, to write, to do push-ups, to do whatever. What these people are really saying is that they don’t love themselves enough to take just ten minutes every single day to better themselves. They can’t take ten minutes to start living because it is easier to spend those ten minutes complaining about circumstances. They are too attached to living a life that causes them pain, and ironically the pain seemingly is better than bettering oneself.

It is all about priorities. Sure, life gets busy, but you have to ask yourself, what you are busy with. Investigate what eats up your time. Are you busy pursuing your dreams and building a life worth living or are you busy merely existing and leading a mediocre life. What conversations do you have? Are they meaningless small talk? Are they even with the people that you call your people? Are you spending time doing things to please others? If people are time-fillers to you, you better let them go; for your sake but also theirs. If you let worthless conversations go, let the complaining go, let the gossiping go, let the people that hold you back go, you get all this time back that you thought you never had.

We all have the same 365 days in the year, the same 24 hours in the day. What it comes down to is what you do with that time. If you spend time watching TV shows day in and day out, if you spend time picking fights just to prove that you are right, if you spend time with thinking about problems that are not even real, if you spend time feeling sorry for yourself and your life, you will never have enough time for anything. You will drift further and further away from your path and yourself. But if you go the other way and do the things that are difficult but necessary to get time back in your life, you can build the life that you want instead of being at mercy of life’s randomness.

Life may give you unforeseen circumstances but if you spend your time building a strong mind, a healthy body, and working on your craft, you will not only create a life of your desire, but you will also have a better time dealing with the unexpected and often difficult things that life might throw at you. Time is so precious. You have this one life with limited time, and you only truly have the present moment to effect any change in your life. We can come up with all the excuses why we can’t do anything and being tired is often a reason too but spending those few minutes every day doing something for ourselves, taking ourselves serious and care for ourselves, doing the difficult things, we actually get time back. Our energy will be elevated. Our mood will be better. We will be more focused. We end up feeling less tired and we want to spend more time on things that inspire us. It awakens something within us.

Ask yourself how you spend your days and any moment that you have spare. And don’t be mistaken, taking time to rest is important too, however, know the difference. Be careful of thinking you need rest when you don’t and when you actually need rest. You can only ever be as good to others as you are to yourself, so gift time to yourself to do the hard things that will lead to a life that is easy. You have to take the time to conquer your own bulls*it and excuses, to get time back and lead a life that you desire, no matter how difficult it seems at first. There has to be a sense of urgency because your time may be up sooner than you think and would you not rather use the time that is left, to lead a life you love?

There is so much distraction in this world. Most of which we know about and we acknowledge as distraction but then there are the subtle ones that we don’t recognise as taking away from our own journey. Distraction comes at us from any possible angle. It often finds us exactly when we say enough is enough and we try to draw a line in the sand. It is then, when we are being tested, if we are serious about it. You know the time, when you say you are not going to eat chocolate anymore, all of a sudden there is chocolate everywhere. Someone offers you chocolate on that day who normally wouldn’t, maybe even a stranger, and all your mind thinks about all day is chocolate. And whilst you are not being distracted by eating chocolate, you are by thinking about it and your thoughts are distracted after all.

The same happens when you start distancing yourself from some people that you recognise may not be your people. All of a sudden, they ring you because they have an issue or something is going on. And of course, you don’t want to leave them high and dry in their hour of need. Likewise, suddenly there are the people you have not seen in years who come out of the woodworks. And if it is not them, then there are all these new people making it into your life in very subtle ways. You change jobs and you left your old work colleagues behind and things fizzle out because you really only had work in common. Now that you have all that time on your hands, you start bonding with new colleagues and before you know it become real cozy with them. We are social creatures after all, so this is only to be expected. But are you really friends with them because you truly bond with them over things you share, or is the carpet you walk on in the office the only thing you actually have in common? With some people you absolutely will vibe and you may even find your people there, but equally they may just be another time filler. And only you know the answer to that.

It is the same when you just want to spend time by yourself and doing a lot of self-development. But instead of doing that, you find yourself knee-deep into baking cookies and cakes, enough for half an army. You spent the last five hours baking away instead of reading, writing, meditation, exercising, r whatever else you actually had set out to do. And now that you have more sweets than you have friends, you give cookies and cakes to people that live an hour away or your neighbours that don’t actually care about them and may just throw them into the bin. I am not suggesting that you suck as a baker, but you don’t know what fate your cakes await. Don’t get me wrong, gifting things to people that you care about is not a bad thing but the question is, did you actually need to do it? Did you really want to do it, or was it simply self-sabotage? Was it yet another attempt at taking away time from yourself? You may not want to look at it that way and maybe baking is better than numbing yourself with shows or anything else that you usually use to distract yourself with, but essentially it is the same. Once again, you take precious time away from yourself. You make sure that you spend time doing something that doesn’t actually matter and no one cares about. And let’s be honest, does anyone actually need cake?

The people that suffer from the “helper”-syndrome know distraction all too well but still not recognise it as such. They deeply care for people, for their betterment, and for being there for them. They constantly give of themselves in pursuit of helping others, but in doing so take away from their own life. They distract themselves with the drama of other people, instead of focusing on their own betterment. I am not saying to not be there for others but you have to know the difference between being there for others and possibly ending up as their dumping ground, and being there for yourself. You read that correctly: When are you there for yourself? When will you finally show up for yourself? It is easier to forget about yourself when you help someone else and focus on their problems. But for the empath this is tricky because you can feel their pain and you can see their suffering and you want your loved ones to feel better, and to be better. You even struggle to distance yourself from the stranger and their suffering because you can feel it deeply. It is such a good personality trait to have to care so much for others, but the “helper”- syndrome people sometimes don’t know how to draw a boundary to their own detriment. Unfortunately, you may try to help people that don’t even want your help. And this may sound harsh but is often what actually happens. The other people may just want us to buy into their stories, or they want us to agree with them and why they should be a victim, and they may just use us. When you agree with people on why they should feel a certain way, you help them validate their situation and validate why things are that way instead of evoking a sense of why they should be helping themselves. You may actually end up enabling them by excusing their behaviour.

So instead of trying to help people that either just use you or don’t want to help themselves, why don’t you stop distracting yourself and help yourself. I know it is not as simple as that but there is a difference between caring for someone and carrying someone and most people mistake the former for the latter. You absolutely can care for someone and help them when they genuinely need your help. But you have to know which one is which and you have to stop carrying other people’s problems around and take away from your own life. Everyone has their own journey to sort out and so do you.

Distraction can come in many different ways and is often disguised as something else and in ways we don’t see. It can be simple and subtle and we still miss it. Anything really can be a distraction, but you have to know when something is or isn’t. You have to know when someone genuinely wants and needs your help. You have to know when baking is something you thoroughly enjoy and it balances you, or whether you use it to take away precious time to do other things and work on your business idea. Maybe baking is your gift and the business you want to work on, but maybe it is just distraction. It comes down to examining your life and whether you fill the time that you have with things or people that take away from you. Know the difference and help yourself and your journey. Cut anything that doesn’t serve you and be careful of distraction. It will try to weasel its way back into your life when you least expect it and in the most unexpected ways. Life is so precious and so is time, so love yourself enough to stop taking away from yourself.