We teach people how to treat us, knowingly or unknowingly. We allow people to treat us unfairly because they are our childhood friends, family members or the only friends we have. It is tough setting boundaries for our closest family members and long-time friends because it is not easy but at some point, one has got to draw the line. By setting healthy boundaries, we can have a mutually beneficial relationship, but we fear and don’t want to rock the boat; hence, we enable the drama queens and the chaos kings in our lives. Life is too short to be spending it with energy vampires, even if they are family members; you’ve got to protect your sanity.

Love is a verb, an action word, a behaviour, not a role. Blood is thicker than water, but love is thicker than blood. The older I get, the more I believe less of what anyone says; I only believe your actions. You can say you are my friend, but we can’t confirm that until the chips are down and everyone needs to step up. As Maya Angelou famously said, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time”. Most of us don’t heed the advice of Maya; hence, we give people the benefit of the doubt all the time. In the end, they get the benefit, and we are stuck with the doubt

Equanimity is a state of psychological stability and composure which is undisturbed by the experience of or exposure to emotions, pain, or other phenomena that may cause others to lose the balance of their mind. ¹ Equanimity can be defined as an even-minded mental state or dispositional tendency toward all experiences or objects, regardless of their origin or their affective valence (pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral). It is a mental state or trait that is not easily achieved and typically requires some form of practice. It is an “even-mindedness in the face of every sort of experience, regardless of whether pleasure [or] pain are present or not”. ²

Equanimity is derived from French équanimité, from Latin aequanimitatem (nominative aequanimitas) “evenness of mind, calmness; good-will, kindness,”. ³  Equanimity is being at peace with whatever is in our experience. As French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once quipped. “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

In network security, a firewall ¹ is a device that monitors incoming and outgoing network traffic and decides whether to allow or block specific traffic based on a defined set of security rules. The firewall is a first line of defence that establishes a barrier between secured and controlled internal networks that can be trusted and untrusted from outside networks, such as the Internet. Just as a network requires a firewall to determine the inbound and outbound traffic it allows, we must also create mental firewalls for ourselves. We live in a high-paced world where we are constantly bombarded with a deluge of data, and it is somewhat impossible to keep up, let alone turn the data into information.

Everyone is going through something you know nothing about. It takes someone that is hurt to hurt another person, most hurt is a cry for help by the hurter who is going through pain and the transmission of their pain to other is one of their coping mechanism. It can be very challenging to be at the receiving end of other people’s unhealed traumas. When situations like this occur, as they often will, I try to remember the words of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who quipped in Meditations:

This habit took me a while to figure out, but I am steadily developing a routine around my personal grooming. It is fast becoming one of my favourite daily routines. Grooming (preening) is the art and practice of cleaning and maintaining parts of the body. ¹ Like most people, the first thing I do after waking up is brush my teeth and bathe. After which, I cream my body and comb my heart; that was it for me until recently. After getting some results in my fitness regimen routine through habit stacking, I experimented with going deeper into my grooming using the same approach.

My New approach to personal grooming

• Triggers: Wake up, turn on my Shokz OpenSwim Swimming MP3 – Bone Conduction waterproof MP3 player.
• Immediately start listening to French language learning materials/podcasts/audiobooks.
• Personal grooming routine: Brush teeth, bathe, cream body, comb heart.
• Added grooming routine: Floss teeth, groom beards, shave hair, and apply deodorants plus spray.

Somedays are going to be more challenging than the others. You might be so broke or in debt that checking your bank account has become a chore. You might be feeling shitty because you can’t seem to conquer the addiction or the harmful habit, such as gossiping or complaining about others. You might not like the job you are presently in, or you feel stuck in a toxic relationship. You might be in a codependent relationship wherein you are dependent on others to solve your issues for you. Life can be tricky sometimes; whatever will go wrong will eventually go wrong.

When the going gets tough, we all have a choice to forgive ourselves, bounce bank and keep it moving. Every mess has a message, and everything that might lessen us also has a lesson in it. Whatever you might be going through right now, no matter how tough it seems, you have the agency to turn it around. It is going to be a dog fight, you are going to fall down multiple times, relapse, your emotions are going to get the best of you. You are going to doubt yourself, people are going to doubt you, and the naysayers are going to be loud in your heart, but you have to, at some point, take personal responsibility for your life.

What we often call “overnight success” is a lot of hard work, sleepless nights, roadwork, training, gym reps, swim laps, and relentless pursuit in the dark that just started paying off. Overnight success usually takes ten years or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in a particular field or endeavour. We get rewarded publicly for what we diligently practiced, mastered and refined in the dark. Success is often not a straight path; it takes a lot of focus, dedication, perseverance, self-discipline, consistency, endurance and patience to achieve anything worthwhile. As coach John Wooden once said: “Success is peace of mind that is the direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best  to become the best that you are capable of  becoming.”