“When others hold our pens, we live with a constant gnawing fear of their disapproval. Their feedback is no longer an indictment of our behavior; it is an audit of our worth.
In their insightful book, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, authors Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson et al write about “The Other Side Academy (TOSA) Game” and the concept of retaking one’s pen.
The Other Side Academy
The Other Side Academy is a training school in which students learn pro-social, vocational and life skills allowing them to emerge with a healthy life on “the other side”. Many of those who seek entrance into the Academy are convicts, substance abusers or homeless. TOSA teaches students both fundamental personal management and relationship skills such as keeping one’s promise, accountability, love, charity, and dependability.
“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” – Maria Robinson.
2025 is going to be a year of new beginnings, an opportunity to recaliberate and reset. It is ok to feel stuck, unsure, fall down, lose one’s way but the goal is to always bounce back, re-group and keep pushing. The new year is an opportunity to start afresh, set new goals, re-align commitments and decide to become who you instinctively know you were meant to be. As the saying goes “You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to start to become great”. The bigger the goal, the bigger the struggle. Achieving your goal is not guaranteed but the struggle is guaranteed.
“You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to start to become great”.
On your path to achieving your goal, you are going to stumble. Rest if you have to but don’t settle, or don’t dare give up on your dreams. You are put here specifically to discover your potential and awaken the giant within you. I know it is tough trying to pursue an audacious goal like finding your purpose in a world where you are expected to fit in with the crowd but please, give it shot. We miss all the chances we don’t take, begin anew and unleash your undiscovered potential. The best is yet to come and if you don’t try, you never know. You’ve got this.
“THE OLD MAN SAT DOWN on his favorite bench, settling in with his newspaper for his lunchtime ritual. He was a man of routine and could be found here most any day, enjoying the trees, the children playing, and the sounds of the bustling city around the park.
One day a young man sat down next to him with a paper of his own. The old man moved over a bit to make room, and went back to reading. After a few minutes, however, the new bench partner said, “Excuse me, sir?” “Yes?” the old man answered, looking up with a friendly smile. “Would you happen to have the time?” the younger asked. The old man looked the young man over for a moment, taking in the fact that he was pleasant looking. “No,” he said, then went back to reading his paper. Puzzled, the younger man could not imagine why the older man would not give him the time, having noticed that he was wearing a watch. So, he asked. “Umm, excuse me, sir?” “Yes?” the older one replied.
You don’t have to be great to start but you have to start to be great.
I have always heard of meditation from reading multiple non-fiction books but it is a practice, I hoped to start someday. But that changed in 2020 during the global COVID-19 lockdown; the rest they say is history. The lockdown was an anxious period for me and it was stressful with the uncertainty and rollercoaster of things happening in the world. I started meditating after watching a Lebron James calm advert on how meditation has helped him become a better basketball player and human. I am a Lebron fan and I am also obsessed with studying what makes great people thick. Lebron James has been on top of his game in the NBA for over 22 years and I was curious to get to know the backend that makes his frontend effortless. I started with the Train Your Mind with LeBron James calm session and I have been hooked ever since.
In his inspiring book, The Wealth Money Can’t Buy: The 8 Hidden Habits to Live Your Richest Life, Canadian author Robin Sharma describes a framework he termed “The PENAM Principle,” which is at the core of how we become who we are. PENAM is an acronym for the five forces that form our core beliefs, basic behaviours, daily habits, and the way we view the world. The five forces are our parents, environment, nation, association, and media.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
A young lady went home to visit her mother and told her about her life and how things were so hard for her. She was tired, upset, and annoyed at all these difficulties. Often, she wanted to run away or give up. Her mother listened empathetically, then took the daughter to the kitchen. She filled three pots with water and boiled the water.
She then put a carrot in the first pot, an egg in the second pot, and coffee beans in the third pot. After twenty minutes or so, she turned off the fire and put all three items in separate bowls.
She put these three bowls on the dining table and asked her daughter, “What do you see?”
Intrigued, the daughter replied, “A carrot, an egg, and coffee.”
The Museum of Failure is a touring exhibition that features a collection of failed products and services. It was inspired by its founder and curator, Samuel West, ‘s 2016 visit to the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia. The museum first opened on June 7, 2017, in Helsingborg, Sweden. According to the curator, the museum aims to help people recognize that “we need to accept failure if we want to progress” and encourage companies to learn more from their failures without resorting to “cliches.”
The Museum of Failure is a collection of failed innovations that we can learn from – Samuel West, curator and founder of the Museum of Failure
Buddhist meditation teacher and author Michael Stone developed an acronym-based model for working with strong emotions: SAIN 1—Stop, Allow, Investigate, Non-identification.
S: STOP
It begins with stopping; how to meet the present moment with stillness without adding anything extra? When the tidal waves come, can you stop?
A: Allow or Accept
To allow what’s moving through the body to fully arrive, to really feel it. You can’t allow something into awareness if you can’t stop.
I: investigate.
Check it out. How is this showing up? Where is it showing up in my body? Ask every question, but why? Why is an invitation for the storyteller to get involved a move away from the body into abstraction? How to stay with physical sensations?
N: non-identification.
When you have a stressful emotion show up, and you can stop, know what it is, and be curious about your experience, then you can arrive at the last step, which is to fully become the emotion. The shivering puddle. These steps are not just a way to work with negative emotions but also positive ones. When you’re really excited let the feelings come without identifying with them. Feelings are not I, me, mine. This is a recipe for getting closer and more intimate with experience.
SAIN 2 (in French it means health): Stop, Accept, Investigate, Non-Identification. Stop means recognizing that there’s a mood. Maybe you want to label it. Accept means allowing the mood to be there, instead of pushing it away, or allowing it to overtake you. Investigate means going into the body and seeing where the sensations are. What are the exact physical sensations and where are they? Non-identification is about becoming the energy, but not identifying with the energy. This is a practice that can be done anytime, you don’t have to wait for a tsunami of emotion to strike. In fact, without the preparation and steady practice in working with “smaller” moods, it’s hard to deal with the big swings.
All the best in your quest to get better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
People who are suffering from trauma don’t need advice. They need comfort and support. So say, “I’m sorry” or “This must really be hard for you” or “Can I bring you a pot roast?” Don’t say, “You should hear what happened to me” or “Here’s what I would do if I were you.” And don’t say, “This is really bringing me down.”
The Ring Theory is a concept developed by clinical psychologist Susan Silk and her friend arbitrator Barry Goldman. They suggest an approach that helps with not saying the wrong things when trying to support someone dealing with a crisis or in a stressful situation. They site a perfect example of such an unintended insensitive remark in their article:
When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan’s colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn’t feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague’s response? “This isn’t just about you.”
High-performance coach Brendon Burchard left a corporate consulting job in 2006 because he was not finding fulfilment in the outputs that were being rewarded. He chose to quit and set up his career as a writer, speaker and online trainer. He began creating content to inspire and empower others.
Like a lot of people new to the expert industry, I thought I had to figure out the writing industry, the speaking industry, the online training industry. I made the mistake of going to dozens of conferences to try to figure out each of the industries, without realizing that they all were the same career of being a thought leader and had similar outputs that mattered most.
Brendon made some mistakes starting out such as trying to figure out the industry by attending numerous conferences instead of doing the work and creating quality output. The frustration led to an epiphany which to focus on quality output. He realized that if he was going to become a professional speaker, his PQO would be the number of paid speaking gigs at a certain booking fee.
In his book, Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment, American writer George Leonard describes the learning paths to mastery. He writes: We all aspire to mastery, but the path is always long and sometimes rocky, and it promises no quick and easy payoffs. So we look for other paths, each of which attracts a certain type of person.
SUCCESS makes you fearful, Of losing your place, Of gambling with stature, Of losing your face.
Bracken Darrell is the CEO of VF Corporation, an American global apparel and footwear company. In June 2023, Darrel was appointed CEO of VF Corp, the parent company of Vans sneakers and Timberland boots. Before his appointment, he was CEO of Logitech, a computer peripherals maker. As the CEO of Logitech, he penned a Seuss-like poem titled “The Secret to Success: Avoid It.” wherein he writes about the pitfalls of success.
In a LinkedIn post about the poem, Darrell quipped:
We all seek success, but the actual experience of thinking you’re successful is potentially performance eroding or even dangerous. That’s true for businesses, teams and us as individuals. In extreme cases, others think you are smarter, more creative, and more often right. You aren’t, of course. You’re the same woman or man as before.
Knowing when to quit is as important as having the will to keep pushing when the going gets tough. When you are constantly pushing and challenging yourself beyond your comfort zone, there will be points where you feel you’ve gone beyond your breaking point. Not all quits are created equally, as some quits are needed for your overall well-being, while some quits are just a strategy for your brain to justify your excuses or bullshit. It is not a matter of if it is going to get tough, but would you be able to recalibrate your mind to push through the pain? To be an athlete, you must have a higher pain tolerance than non-athletic minds. It is tough training for endurance sports such as marathons, triathlons, ultramarathons and ironmans.
One of the hallmarks of highly successful people and athletes is going the extra mile. To get the results that the most admired people eventually get, one needs to be somewhat obsessed, dedicated and all in. The top 1% in any society are the people who usually give their all, create their luck, consistently show up daily and embrace the struggle. Knowing the difference between addictions, obsessions, compulsions, and dependencies is very important on the path to becoming successful. I have participated in and finished 15 full marathons in the past two years. I trained consistently to achieve my target goals. Knowing the difference is becoming more critical as there is usually a line between the four terms.
Schema Therapy 1is an integrative model of psychotherapy developed by American psychologist and founder of the Schema Therapy Institute, Jeffrey E. Young that combines proven cognitive and behavioural techniques with other widely practiced therapies. The main goals of Schema Therapy are to help patients strengthen their Healthy Adult mode, weaken their Maladaptive Coping Modes so that they can get back in touch with their core needs and feelings, heal their early maladaptive schemas to break schema-driven life patterns, and eventually to get their core emotional needs met in everyday life.
The 18 Early Maladaptive Schemas are self-defeating, core themes or patterns that we keep repeating throughout our lives.
