In October 2021, I decided to learn to swim, which was one of the best decisions I had ever made. It was hard at first; it took me six months to go to the pool’s deep end, but I was committed to becoming a good swimmer. I practiced for at least 2 hours daily, 1 hour early morning and another hour in the evening. I was a regular feature in my local YMCA, and the live guards gave me many tips and strategies for achieving my goal. I initially started swimming because I wanted to participate in my first triathlon in 2024. Swimming is a form of meditation as I use my time in the pool to contemplate issues I am trying to solve. I usually swim with an underwater MP3 player to listen to French audio materials and music. My swimming time allows me to think and improve my French listening skills. There are many days I don’t want to go swimming, but once I remember that I have a habit of stacking my swimming time, I get ready to go swimming.
c. 1300, “something seen in the imagination or the supernatural,” from Anglo-French visioun, Old French vision “presence, sight; view, look, appearance; dream, supernatural sight” (12c.), from Latin visionem (nominative visio) “act of seeing, sight, thing seen,” noun of action from past participle stem of videre “to see,” from PIE root *weid- “to see.” 1
American author and disability rights advocate Hellen Keller was once asked what was worse than being blind, and she replied: “The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision”. Keller lost her sight and hearing after a series of illnesses when she was 19 months old. She did not let those physical challenges hinder her purpose in life, and by the end of her life, she was named among Time magazine’s 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century due to her accomplishments.
“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision”.
Crafting a vision for your life is one of the most important things you can do for yourself. As the boxing analogy goes, “You cannot hit a target you cannot see.” You cannot take people farther than you have gone; success is an inside job. If you cannot see it, it will be hard to conceive it or even achieve it. As author Napoleon Hill noted in his classic book, As a Man Thinketh, “Whatever Your Mind Can Conceive and Believe, It Can Achieve.” You need a clear vision of where you are going, as it will be your guiding light during the inevitable dark days ahead. On your path to achieving your goals and aspirations, whatever would go wrong would eventually go wrong but with a strong why and a definite purpose, you would overcome all obstacles.
It is better to be safe than sorry means it is better to make good choices in order to get great results than to make bad choices which leads to bad results. As author Jim Rohn often said, “Success is a few good habits repeated every day, Failure is a few bad decisions repeated every day.” According to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, safety is one of the needs we long for the most as it is very important in living a stable life. Our safety needs include personal, health, emotional, psychological, and financial safety. Once these needs have been met we can then move to higher needs. When one feels safe in an environment there is harmony but if safety is not guaranteed, humans naturally seek that safety in another clime.
It is better to stand alone than be surrounded by frenemies, draining friends, a nagging spouse, or sticking around with toxic family members because they are all we have always known. People pleasing and living your life based on optics/what would people say could get you in danger and in unsafe territories. At the core of most of our relationship issues and emotional heartache is the inability to set healthy boundaries. American poet Robert Frost once quipped “Good fences make good neighbors”. Your safety should always be your priority in any circumstance, whether it is dealing with a friend, frenemy, boss, or spouse.
As it is often said in sports: “A good defense is a great offense” and “Defence wins Championships”.
Trusting yourself is one of the skills needed to become a better version of yourself. The greats get rewarded in public for what they diligently practiced in private. To perform optimally in public, you need to trust your training, process and yourself, which requires trusting that you are enough. You don’t need more schooling, more money, more connection, more followers; what you need is to continuously show up daily by doing the hard work required to be successful. Success and Failure are similar in the sense that they are both a result of making the right choice (success) or wrong choices (failure) over a long sustained period of time.
In her 2015 Oprah’s Super Soul Conversations session, Social Scientist and Author Brené Brown spoke about the anatomy of trust. In her talk, she shared a conversation she had with her third-grade daughter about her struggle with a betrayal of trust. She said:
One day, my daughter, Ellen, came home from school. She was in third grade. And the minute we closed the front door, she literally just started sobbing and slid down the door until she was just kind of a heap of crying on the floor. And of course I was … It scared me, and I said, “What’s wrong Ellen? What happened? What happened?”
And she pulled herself together enough to say, “Something really hard happened to me today at school, and I shared it with a couple of my friends during recess. And by the time we got back into the classroom, everyone in my class knew what had happened, and they were laughing and pointing at me and calling me names.” And it was so bad, and the kids were being so disruptive, that her teacher even had to take marbles out of this marble jar.
Trust is built in very small moments. And when we started looking at examples of when people talked about trust in the research, they said things like, “Yeah, I really trust my boss. She even asked me how my mom’s chemotherapy was going.” “I trust my neighbor because if something’s going on with my kid, it doesn’t matter what she’s doing, she’ll come over and help me figure it out.” You know, one of the number one things emerged around trust and small things? People who attend funerals. “This is someone who showed up at my sister’s funeral.”
Trust is choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else. Distrust is what I have shared with you that is important to me is not safe with you. – Charles Feldman
Self-trust 2 is normally the first casualty of failure or mistakes. We stop trusting ourselves when we hurt others, get hurt, feel shame, or question our worth. Use the BRAVING tool to think about self-trust:
B—Did I respect my own boundaries? Was I clear about what’s okay and what’s not okay?
R—Was I reliable? Did I do what I said I was going to do?
A—Did I hold myself accountable?
V—Did I respect the vault and share appropriately?
I—Did I act from my integrity?
N—Did I ask for what I needed? Was I nonjudgmental about needing help?
G—Was I generous toward myself?
We stop trusting ourselves when we hurt others, get hurt, feel shame, or question our worth.
The habit of not trusting 3 yourself has been programmed into you from a young age. This lack of self-trust has made it incredibly challenging for you, as a survivor, to take the necessary steps to protect yourself. This same lack of trust can seem like a slow bleed as you continually wonder whether you have made the right decision, or when you feel unfairly judged and criticized by a society who cannot fathom anyone needing to decide to sever ties with their family. Because you were raised to be and feel insecure, it’s no surprise that you question whether you are too sensitive or too harsh with your boundaries.
Your self-esteem 4 is closely tied to the level of confidence you feel in your own abilities, your credibility, and your values. It plays an important role in how you think others view you. When you have damaged self-esteem, it’s common for you to think that others dislike or even hate you. You are prone to feelings of self-doubt, self-criticism, judgment, shame, and loneliness.
Studies show that the lower your self-esteem, the harder it is for you to connect and the lonelier you feel. Studies also show that self-esteem and trust are closely related. In a 1974 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers Craig W. Ellison and Ira J. Firestone reported that our ability and willingness to trust ourselves and others is affected by our level of self-esteem. We must trust ourselves before we can trust others, and we must accept ourselves before we can ask others to accept us.
The trouble is, if your self-esteem is compromised, so is your ability to trust. And when self-trust is compromised, you start to doubt your instincts, your ideas, your preferences, and your actions. Because the way you show up in the world reflects your relationship with yourself, when self-trust breaks down, so does your trust in those around you. As a result, the world and its many people and circumstances become random, hostile, and unreliable.
When self-trust is compromised, you start to doubt your instincts, your ideas, your preferences, and your actions.
When life becomes stressful, or after we have had a moment of stress-induced reactivity, it can be helpful to touch base with the events that impacted our experiences. Some questions that can help us get a firm hold on our reactivity before we are taken over by it include:
What can I learn about myself from what happened?
What patterns brought me here?
How can I embrace discomfort and grow from it?
How can I learn how to accept criticism without making it absolute truth?
How can I forgive myself and others?
When we have self-trust, we know that the path is still there waiting for us. This is the essence of self-accountability that leads to empowerment.
The more we learn self-accountability, the stronger our faith in our Self will grow. This allows for failure. It allows for flexibility and forgiveness when we inevitably fall off the path. When we have self-trust 5, we know that the path is still there waiting for us. This is the essence of self-accountability that leads to empowerment.
Emotional maturity is not a goal to check off a list, like reaching the next level in a video game (now you’re a fully realized human, you win!). It’s not a magical state. The underlying message is not one of a state of enlightened beingness—it’s one of work and self-forgiveness that will ultimately lead us to a greater togetherness.
Meditation
Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Tolerance
Mindfulness encourages us to challenge our judgments and to view unpleasant experiences as an opportunity to grow our tolerance muscles. In such situations, rather than let irritation mount; we can tap into a sense of steadiness, patience, and compassion.
When we shift away from judgment, we can treat a buzzing phone as we would the sound of a car passing by; it is just a sound that arises and then subsides.
Use every distraction as an object of meditation and they cease to be distractions. – Mingyur Rinpoche.
Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – The Spotlight Effect
We spend a lot of energy worrying about the perception of others but yet more often than not, people don’t pay us nearly as much attention as we think. We are convinced that others are paying attention to every little detail of our behaviour.
We feel like we are under a spotlight, but in reality, even if people do notice us, they rarely judge us. Ego makes us think that because we are the center of our world, we are also the center of everyone else’s world.
Instead, We spend our energy trying to act, pretend and perform in ways that we hope will appeal to others. It is exhausting, and it prevents us from being authentic. The one who notices most is you, and that is the person that you have to please.
Podcast
When Life Gets Hard: 12 Stoic Lessons To Change Your Life Before 2024 | Cal Newport
All the Best in your quest to get Better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
We’ve all got the same amount time: 24 hrs, 1400 minutes and 86,400 seconds in a day. How you spend your time determines the course and direction of your life. Learning to protect your time from time waters and time wasting activivites is one of the hallmarks of highly successful people.
The chairman and CEO of American multinational conglomerate holding company Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffet repeatedly says no to almost any interview request by Journalists. His usual response is that he has said virtually anything he needs to communicate through previous interviews, books, documentaries and media appearances. Buffet reckons that he has calculated the number of days he still has to be alive, and because of that, he is very deliberate about how he spends his limited amount of time left. The 93-year-old Buffett is considered the most consistent value investor in the world, and according to Forbes, he is the fifth richest person in the world with a net worth of $117 Billion as of October 2023. 1
“I AM” is one of the most important words to change your life. One of the daily practices I have cultivated since the COVID-19 pandemic lock-down is writing a gratitude journal daily. One of the five-minute gratitude journal entries is “Today’s Affirmation: I am…” The Daily Affirmation is a simple statement that defines you as you want to be. You prime your brain to build this belief whenever you write the daily affirmation. With consistency, you will begin to create that change from within.
I recently ran a marathon personal best at the 2023 GMS Queen City Marathon in Regina, Saskatchewan, which was my sixth full 42.2 KM marathon in 2023. I reduced my marathon personal best from 3 hours and 44 minutes, which I ran last year at the Beneva Montreal Marathon, to 3 hours and 20 minutes, a drop of 24 minutes. It was one of the most exciting moments in the ten years of my marathon running adventure. Before the Regina Marathon, I had increased my training volume to about 100 KM per week/10 miles per day, and my effort is beginning to pay off. As the Navy seal saying goes: “We play the way we train.” I am trying to qualify for the 2025 Boston Marathon, and I need a time of at least 3:05 minutes to qualify for Boston.
Your conscience shouts, ‘here’s what you should do,’ while your intuition whispers, ‘here’s what you could do.’ Listen to that voice that tells you what you could do. – Steven Spielberg
Intuition is the ability to understand something immediately without needing conscious reasoning. Intuition is often called inner knowing, immediate cognition, gut feeling, sixth sense, or hunch. It is that voice that knows the answer before you even ask the question; it is that inner wisdom that guides and leads you to the right path. Your intuition is usually more critical than your intellect because it knows best. Our intuition is usually silent; it whispers and knows what is right for us to do. Most of us don’t get to listen to our inner voice as the noise from our childhood indoctrination, societal programming, and domestication has crowded our ability to listen to ourselves. Social Media even makes listening and following one’s intuition even more challenging as we are all locked into our tiny bubbles.
Our intuition always speaks to us, but we rarely listen as we usually have drowned out our inner voice due to the noise around us. Listening to your inner voice clearly requires being able to differentiate the signal from noise, prioritizing your life and focusing on what really matters. When you don’t listen to your inner voice, you stay in a toxic relationship or a draining job, fail to set healthy boundaries, and continuously live on autopilot. Trusting your intuition could save your life and save you the stress and drama of engaging with negative people and toxic environments.
There is a universal, intelligent, life force that exists within everyone and everything. It resides within each one of us as a deep wisdom, an inner knowing. We can access this wonderful source of knowledge and wisdom through our intuition, an inner sense that tells us what feels right and true for us at any given moment. – Shakti Gawain
Life is too short to spend with things, associations, and relationships that are not serving you. You are here for a particular purpose; your job is to find out what your purpose here is and have fun doing it. If it is not fun or it stops being fun, you need to re-evaluate why you are engaging in any activity. I am a Manchester United fan, and I used to watch almost every game played by the team; as I have been supporting the team since 1998. With time I began to become emotionally engrossed with the team’s performance. I have a rule: If it stops being fun, I re-evaluate my engagement. For the past 5 years now, I don’t remember watching a full Manchester United game or any soccer game; I would rather watch the highlights.
It is the same approach that I use for anything that I am involved in. If an activity, engagement, relationship, or thing stops having an element of fun, I drop it. I try to get myself involved with a lot of activities and hobbies such as Reading, playing basketball, pickleball, running, tennis, swimming, cycling, and meditating. I have the most fun when am engaged in these activities as I usually habit stack when engaged in them. For example, when I am playing basketball; it is usually the time I use for listening to French podcasts. At the core of almost anything I do is a pursuit of joy, happiness, and fun.
Fun is underrated in our overachieving, stress-filled modern society. Many people idolize hard work and associate having fun with being childish, giving rise to ideas and expressions like “Work hard, play hard,” and “All work and no play,” in which the term play is associated with fun, perhaps irresponsible behavior, and work speaks to our responsibilities as adults.
Having fun is one of the most human things we can do. Fun, laughter, excitement, appreciation, enjoyment—these often exist in close proximity to one another. When we tap into one, we gain access to the others.
And yet, most people go through their days never asking what would be fun for them. It’s almost as if stopping and taking time to have fun would mean delaying more important things or being irresponsible. We might live entire weeks or months without choosing a single activity that is fun for us. In the worst case, we might think that by not having fun, we’re being productive grownups, as though one of the requirements of “adulting” is becoming a dull, non-fun version of ourselves.
“When you realize that having fun is an attitude and that fun is available to you even during your hardest days, you start enjoying your life more. Nothing has to change for this enjoyment to seep into your life, because it’s not the outside world that creates your enjoyment, but rather how you choose to interact with that world.”
In Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary, the creator of Linux Kernel 2, Linus Torvalds, chronicles his journey of creating Linux and distributing it on the internet for free. Linus started a revolution by following his bliss and having fun in the process. The Linux Kernel is used today for. various operating systems, and the Android OS is based on it. Linux today has 42% of the global OS market.
Basically it is short and sweet. It won’t give your life any meaning, but it tells you what’s going to happen. There are three things that have meaning for life. They are the motivational factors for everything in your life––for anything that you do or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is entertainment. Everything in life progresses in that order. And there is nothing after entertainment. So, in a sense, the implication is that the meaning of life is to reach that third stage. And once you’ve reached the third stage, you’re done. But you have to go through the other stages first.
There are three things that have meaning for life. They are the motivational factors for everything in your life––for anything that you do or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is entertainment.
Perfectionism and fun are like oil and water. They don’t mix. Perfectionism thinks fun is a waste of time and holds no value. Unfortunately, most of us tend to feel the same way.
The reason we pursue goals we don’t like is twofold:We think goals have to be miserable.We believe perfectionism when it tells us that fun goals don’t count.
Remember, perfectionism will tell you that fun doesn’t count. Even worse, it will tell you that using rewards or fears as a form of motivation to reach your goal is a crutch. You’re the only one with stupid, fun, weird systems.
The closer you get to finishing, the more interesting everything else in your life becomes. It’s as if you’ve put on distraction goggles. Things you never noticed pop up and dance tantalizingly across your vision.
Meditation
Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt -Seasons
A shift in season can sincerely support the process of release. The earth’s natural change cycle invites people to slow down and pay attention. As the seasons change, we are given an opportunity to practice letting go.
When summer transitions to fall, the trees become a canvas of orange and red, and the leaves slowly shed and float to the ground. We might be inspired to release beliefs that no longer serve us. When winter becomes spring, the ice melts, and the soil is cleared for new seedlings to sprout. We might use this period to clear our minds and declutter our homes, making room for fresh ideas and projects. When the wind blows away debris or the rain washes the street clean, we can mirror the earth’s inherent wisdom by shedding old habits.
As we let go of what has not been working, we create room for what will – new beliefs, new ideas, and new intentions. Contemplate what you are ready to let go of, it maybe an outdated assumption about yourself.
To let go is to release the images and emotions, the grudges and fears, the clingings and disappointments of the past that bind our spirit. – Jack Kornfield.
Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – When to Quit.
Moving on is not necessarily a sign of failure; as we move through life, we are often admonished not to quit, “stick with it”, “never surrender,” and “never give up.” When we are chasing our purpose, we frequently have to push through rejection and failure, which can be incredibly hard. Just as hard as it seems, you shouldn’t quit just because you don’t see success as quickly as you hoped, you shouldn’t quit due to frustration and uncertainty.
Achievement requires commitment and perseverance. Most worthwhile goals take considerable time and effort. There are times to pivot, let go, and choose differently. Quitting, like all things, can be intentional and thoughtful, we don’t have to throw in the towel; instead, we can watch fold and return it.
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Compassion is the sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress and a desire to alleviate it. Compassion’s Latin root is pati, which means to suffer with. Everyone is going through something you know nothing about; show some compassion because it goes a long way to make the person going through a trying time feel better. You never know what your kind words or listening ears could do to soothe someone going through a hard time. Life is going to happen to all of us at some point, and the more you can be compassionate with others, the easier for you to have self-compassion.
We live in a world where we are no longer listening to each other; we are all glued to our phones, and eye-to-eye conversation is becoming a rarity; we would rather text than have conversations. We judge people without really knowing what the full story is; we jump to conclusions, project our fears and insecurity and rarely listen to each other. Being compassionate is an opportunity to learn about
In 2013, I participated in my first full 42.2 KM marathon and finished the race in over five hours. I had stumbled into marathon running, had just lost my closest cousin, and was looking for something to distract me from the grief. It’s been ten years since I ran that race, and I have never looked back. I have run over 20+ marathons in numerous cities, I ran six full marathons in 2022, and I am running across the ten Canadian provinces in 2023 (6 done, 4 to go).
It will be a dog fight, relentless pursuit of your goals, dealing with doubters, consistent practice, grit, brutal focus and perseverance. The greatest battle we have to fight is the battle over self; starving your distractions would require a lot of self-discipline and single-mindedness of purpose. The champions and greats we admire have something in common: they put in a lot of hard work in their craft through sessions, laps, routines, habits, and consistency. Chinese military general, strategist and writer Sun Tzu noted in his book The Art of War:
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Getting to the top is going to require a lot of sacrifice, doing the work, especially when most people are not paying attention. In our social media impatient world, working on yourself for a long time before you take your craft to the next level is becoming more challenging by the day. We focus on networking instead of doing the work on ourselves and want to be an influencer instead of influencing ourselves first. Your resolve to get things done, no matter what you are dealing with, will determine how far you go in life. As motivational speaker Les Brown often said,” Life is a fight for territory, and once you stop fighting for what you want, what you don’t want will automatically take over.“
You are for a reason; until you discover your purpose here on earth, you will remain unfulfilled. The number one work you have is to figure out your goal here, and when you find it out, use that gift to serve humanity and make the world a better place. Late Apple CEO Steve Jobs once observed:
“Life can be so much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”
Your life changes the moment you realize that no one is coming to your rescue and that you can change the course of your life by making good decisions over a long period. Success is never an accident; it is a result of good choices and habits over a long period, and Failure is not usually a coincidence; it is a result of bad decisions and practices sustained over a long period. We get rewarded in public for what we repeatedly practice in the dark. You might think no one is watching you, but people are lurking around, waiting for the crowd to validate your work, and they jump on the trend.
Cultivate good habits to achieve the success of your decision. If you want a healthy body, eat great food and have a consistent movement routine. Control your urges and regulate your addictions, such as phone and internet addiction. If you want a different result in your life, you must make some bold decisions. If you work hard, what is hard will work but if you take shortcut, you will be cut short.
Meditation
Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Gezellig
In our fast-paced world, we want to be active and productive, but to achieve productivity, balance and fulfilment; we need to break from the stress of modern life. Chronic Stress can lead to a whole lot of serious health conditions.
Make time for activities that are fun, relaxing and nurturing. The Dutch word “Gezellig” describes places and experiences that are pleasurable & comforting. Gezellig means cozy, quaint, or nice.
Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Self-Distancing
If you are struggling with a decision, try playing with your proximity to the problem. A little distance may be all that is needed to make the picture clear.
You are not promised tomorrow; today could be your last day. We all know this unconsciously, but we do not live our lives consciously with a sense of urgency. The internet and social media are some of the most excellent attention grabbers of our time; there is so much to do online with tweets, videos, news, learnings, photos, etc. I firmly believe that the internet is one of the greatest innovations of our time, and it has made our lives easier. One of the reasons that most of us spend a lot of time on our screens is not knowing the alternative things to do with our limited time. Our world suffers from a loneliness pandemic; we seem to have more online connections but less communication.
If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much. – Jim Rohn
As the famous saying goes, “He who fails to plan plans to fail.” Success is never an accident, and failure is not always a coincidence. Success is achieved by making good decisions over some time consistently, while Failure comes around when one makes terrible decisions continuously over some time. As former United States President Dwight Eisenhower once quipped, “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” It is not enough to have a plan; one must relentlessly execute it. Before his fight against Evander Holyfield, former heavyweight champion Iron Mike Tyson was asked by a reporter if he was worried about Holyfield’s fight plan. He said: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving. – Albert Einstein
It is not a matter of if but of when: “Whatever would go wrong would eventually wrong.” The key to navigating the challenges and vicissitudes of life is to persevere, endure the trying times and keep it moving. In his 1960 Founder’s Day address speech at Spelman College 1: “Keep Moving from This Mountain,” American minister and activist Martin Luther King Jr. identified four symbolic mountains -relativism, materialism, segregation, and violence- that must be overcome. Martin Luther King Jnr. It implored the audience to persevere and keep moving with faith. He asserted:
If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl; but by all means keep moving.
Keep moving, for it may well be that the greatest song has not yet been sung, the greatest book has not been written, the highest mountain has not been climbed. This is your challenge! Reach out and grab it and make it a part of your life. Reach up beyond cloud-filled skies of oppression and bring out blazing stars of inspira- tion. The basic thing is to keep moving. Move out of these mountains that impede our progress to this new and noble and marvelous land.
It ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and still keep moving for- ward. —Rocky Balboa
