Create-a-new life!

Monday 29 September 2014

Taking control: How emotional intelligence contributes to success!



Emotional intelligence is your ability to understand the underlying feelings behind your emotions and those of other people; thus enabling you to constructively maintain desired goals for interacting with others.

Why is emotional intelligent important?
Emotional intelligence deciphers the degree of a person’s skill in handling hurdles and resilience to restore necessary harmony in the context of social institutions. It is important because conflict is part of groups dynamic and therefore need to be managed in order to shape and maintain ideal objective stance in private or various organized settings.  For instance, the use of emotional intelligence enables an employer to establish potential career pointers in prospective employees through the recruitment and selection process. High grades are attractive for any employer, but emotional attributes matters if such a person would be responsible for handling customers.  Emotional intelligence is a key deciding factor for such positions because an employer wants to retain existing clients and attract new ones.  That could only happen if a person handling customers is able to identify and manages problematic people.

How to recognize emotional intelligence?
The emotional intelligence theory identifies five characteristic:
  1. Self-awareness: Ability to recognize own emotions and their cause by maintaining high consciousness in order to make rational decisions. For an example, knowledge of personal strengths and weaknesses and ability to develop the given talents and spiritual gifts.
  2. Self-regulation: Is an ability to monitor response versus reaction to an environment and ensures objectivity of own or other person’s actions.   When you see your own mistakes and readily learn to correct them, it indicates you ability to grow and maintain your credibility.
  3. Self-motivation: Ability to seek solutions to problems is ideal in both private and corporate settings.  The helpful approach is asking yourself how you can solve a challenge rather that dwell on who caused it or why the problem exists.
  4. Empathy: Ability to recognize the feelings of other and willingness to restore harmony.  It is noting human inefficiencies without being judgemental. 
  5. Effective relationships: Ability to identify contributors of conflict in relationships which includes poor communication of different personal values, perceptions, social roles, personal styles, goals, and allocation or access to resources.
 
Emotional intelligence is associated with exceptional skills in interacting with people and getting the best out of them.  This is ideal because you need to connect with people to learn from them and get their assistance in your chosen fields.  Taking control denotes assessing your level of success in influencing people to respond positively to your ideas, leadership and vision.



Friday 26 September 2014

Taking control: Endless struggle is not part of your plan!



Struggle is unpleasant incidents and challenges that retards expected progression of planned activities.  They reflect your inability to align your thoughts, words and actions.  While struggle is perceived as normal because we do not control everything; it should not characterize the quality of your life.

How to identify struggle!
In order to know when progress and efforts do not tally, you must have a clear written plan and its strategy of how you will achieve your goal. Struggle is not a minor deviations and delays caused by factors beyond your control.  It is clear unexplained inability to produce fruitful results.  It is when the law of cause and effect fail to manifest logical benefits.

Contributing factors of the struggle!
You have been socialized to nurture your physical self.  The society has established social institutions like schools that seek to empower you to learn necessary skills to attain sustainable comfort.  So, why are you experiencing struggle instead of comfort?

  1. Do you have a career? If the answer is yes, then you have a basic tool according to the given norms.
  2. Are you a normal person? A normal person has no physical limitation like a disabled one.  It is expected that you are doing something that aligned to your career and therefore you should be heading towards becoming what you have planned.  If not, it means you are getting unexpected results and beginning to question what it is you are doing wrong.
  3. The missing link! This flesh that has been nurtured and given all necessary support is not you.  You are a spirit, with a soul living in a body! Now, how much do you know about your spirituality?  My guess is, very little! This is what I call a missing link.  How am I supposed to dig my treasure without appropriate tools?  In other words, if I am a spirit and have no idea what it its composition is and how it works, I am not close to operating from my strength.  Other societies are spiritual and their values and beliefs evolve around these and therefore are aware of the power of their spirituality.  For an example, they explain the function of seven non-physical attributes of spirituality called chakras that directly affect relationships, wealth and health.  Christians on the other hand follow Biblical principles to experience prosperity:

a)     Giving: Everything belongs to God and He wants you to give Him ten percent to further His work through believers. He wants you to remember that all creation belongs to Him and He gave you ability to create wealth. Tithing is a concept of maintaining communion with God.
b)     Love God and others: Being in the stated of positive regard attracts circumstances that promote and support your plans for accumulating wealth.
c)      Faith: It a strong belief in what is not seen – that God will comply with His promises because He has good thoughts and plans of good health and prosperity for you.
d)     Application of the law of the cause and effect: Give and it shall be given unto you. If you sow sparingly you will reap sparingly.


Endless struggle calls for your attention to those things that are not seen but manifest clear cues that all is not well in your life.  The global awareness of this concept came with universal law of attraction which says positive thoughts, words and actions equal to success. Knowledge is power! Do your own research and find a missing link that might explain why you are experiencing social and financial struggle in spite of all your efforts.

Monday 22 September 2014

Taking control: What to do when joy and happiness is inaccessible!



Before you knew the meaning of a goal, you had a general view that you wanted to be happy; and that happiness will come as a result of purposely doing something to achieve it.  It is therefore an inborn desire to tirelessly seek until you find it.

General perception of joy and happiness!
Happiness is a positive emotional state and is not necessarily depended on other factors such as money or other material possession.  Joy is a lifestyle of continued state of happiness.  It is an attitude of choosing positive thoughts, words and actions which support and promote positive feelings.  It is for this reason that after the euphoria of fame for instance, the state of unhappiness will rear its ugly face and declare your need for professional help.  This demonstrates that joy and happiness are inclined to inward self determination than being responsive to good things that cause incidental positive emotion. 

What to do to access joy and happiness!
Often you look outside when you feel unhappy.  This is the first mistake which will set you up to fail repeatedly because your happiness and joy comes from within self.  When you do not get this right, you will set out to find something or someone who could make you happy.  If you are unhappy, you will carry your unhappiness with you into any relationship and environment – family, job, fitness club, even the church.  A tendency is to put all blame on the other party; yet you had your emotional issues which are still there regardless of other people’s attempts to meet you halfway by ignoring your controlling or manipulative behavior.  This means you need to know and internalize the truth; that if you carry a bad energy, it will ruin all things you become part of.  So, the remedy lies within you!  Let us consider the following:
1.      The law of love: The law of love is spiritual and says – Love your Creator first and love others as yourself.   It is easy to love your Creator because you can look at things He has given you – life, health, provision of things you need and could not produce without His assistance like high intellect, healthy babies, etc.  It is easy to love yourself; but it is challenging to love others unconditionally.
2.      The significance of loving others:  A law is binding and applies in all circumstances.  For an example; if your mother in-law hates you, you will likely be challenged to love her; and that will violate the law of loving others as yourself. Let me explain; you love yourself all the time – when you have done good things and when you made mistakes because your ego will surely reason it out and water-down your responsibility to love unlovable people who caused the conflict.  When you retaliate for any injustice, it does not tally with loving unconditionally.  In such incidents you are required to revisit the issue and consciously choose to forgive from your heart; meaning feeling joy as you let go hurting emotions. 
3.      Forgiveness leads to happiness and joy: The key to experiencing happiness and joy is forgiving all people who inflicted emotional pain.  It is also one of the key factors of attaining good health and access to wealth. If you read the Bible, God requires that you make peace with your brother before you approach Him about giving thanks and appreciation to Him.  This is hard but it is a law which opens doors for your happiness and joy.

The cost of experiencing joy and happiness is choosing not to harbor any negative emotion even if you have not provoked the other person.  In other words there is no excuse for not forgiving those who hurt you.  Successful maintenance of this virtue denotes spiritual maturity.  It is all about taking control of your life!




Friday 19 September 2014

Taking control: First things first – Do you know who you are?



The process of socialization shapes behavior to conform to societal values and beliefs.  It instills foundational perception of your environment and therefore configures you to see and attain preconceived standards.

First things first!
If you are able to read this article, it means you have passed the phase of close monitoring in which your parents had to approve the content of your non-formal and formal learning.   It is said that an infant accumulates foundational principles from birth to eight years. This simply means if you have been exposed to positive environment, you have positive foundational information which will help you to perceive the world positively.  The same principle applies for negative or non-educational environment.  The remaining gaps are filled through peer education and other social institutions. The essence of this awareness is to challenge you to ask yourself the following questions:  Who am I? Can I describe myself according to how I perceive myself?

The rationale for knowing who you are!
Can you successfully formulate your goal when you do not know who you are? Attempting to know who you are is discovering your given talents and spiritual gifts because they will reveal the purpose for which you exists. It is an awakening to the fact that what you see could be the tip of an iceberg.  Your parents may have raised you but they can never accurately define who you really are! Only you know who you are!  Why? Because you learned to comply with what you were taught even when you felt otherwise about certain rules, values and beliefs.  If you do not revisit this exercise to audit what those values and beliefs are, you cannot live your life nor input refined knowledge into your version of socialization for your own self development.  

Why is evaluation of who you are important?  It enables you to consider whether you are on tract on three aspects of your life:
1.     Relationships: What do you understand by ideal relationships? How do you rate yourself on the scale of 1 to 10?
Tips: Do you relate to people without another voice editing how you should speak, open to other people or even disproving your conduct? Do you feel as if someone is watching you and monitoring your behavior? If this is the case, you need to discover why!
2.     Wealth: Do you know what wealth is and how you feel about attaining it?  How do you rate yourself on the scale of 1 to 10?
Tips: Is accumulating money part of your personal goals? How do you feel about having money and living without any lack? Have you self-educate yourself about getting rich? 
3.     Health: Do you still buy food that you ate as a child? Have you added any knowledge about eating right and maintaining healthy lifestyle?  How do you rate yourself on the scale of 1 to 10?
Tips: If you still eat food that your parents taught you to eat and has not improved anything, it could be that they were diet conscious and very good in life-supporting lifestyle or you have not really thought about improving your health.  Without good health your attempts for good relationships and accumulation of wealth could be futile.


The principle of first things first in this context denotes an awakening of the sense of self; the personalized definition which confirms or edits attributes that define how you perceive yourself.  It is identifying given tools that are meant to assist you to reach your goals.  Your goals are made up of these given unique interests and skills so that your life could be meaningful and satisfying. 

Sunday 14 September 2014

Taking control: Stir your joy by counting your blessings!



Counting your blessings is refusing to see the bottle as half empty, but half full.  It is inculcating the positive attitude towards your past, present and the future. It is always perceiving the big picture of success and expecting to receive that which you seek.

Stirring your joy!
The secret is that your mind does not know the difference of the myth and the reality.  Its task is to work on whatever you allow and focus on and ensure that it happens.  So if you dwell on your unpleasant past, you will surely see a flood of unpleasant circumstances in your life.  When you allow your pleasant thoughts to flood you mind, you will attract pleasant circumstances in your life. If you can bring your past joyful moment of your first date now and experience the joy you felt then, you got the concept!  You will know that you can control what you think about and therefore you are indeed could be the determiner of your joyful life.  This is a decision you must take to change the direction of your present and future life. I use the word ‘stir’ to instill the connotation of you generating positive feelings within you; thus convincing yourself that you can maintain positive attitude and change your life for the better.

Why counting your blessings is important!
When you sit down and consciously think of your past life which contributed to the good part of you, you will realize that you would not be a strong person you are had you been through a blissful life.  In other words rough experiences toughened your resilience to overcome life challenges.  None of the historical heroes and current achievers had a smooth childhood or great parents or uneventful schooling.  They have all been through challenging times to achieve their goals.  The exercise of counting your blessings therefore will enable you to visit your past with the purpose of thanking all the contributors of good and bad experiences.  The idea is to seal your emotional wounds with love and not bitterness or judgment.   Words are indestructible.  When you know this truth, you will understand why God said He will judge you by what you have said.  What you say effectively generates good or bad energy which affects the world.  This is why He gave us guidelines in the Bible about the nature of words that would bring life and not death in Philippians 4:8; “…whatever things are true, …noble, …just, …pure, …lovely, …are of good report, if there is any virtue and anything praiseworthy – meditate on these things.”

Personal benefits of counting your blessings!
Those who count their blessings experience spiritual growth which manifest in their social life.  How? You learn to see good in people who raised you and added value through all social institutions you went through; this is a plus which put a smile on your face and that of your Creator.  Remember that when you decide to generate many smiles, you do yourself a favor of activating a healing mechanism in your body.  What a smart Creator we have! If you choose to be bitter, you surely are on a queue to developing one or more of a life threatening diseases.   Knowledge is power! Do your own study about this truth.


The day you become convinced that your good or bad thoughts, feelings and actions bring life or death; you would have taken purposeful steps towards being the light and the salt of this planet.  Everything is energy and therefore negativity anywhere will surely affect you.  This is another truth you must learn so that you know that your comments do count positively or negatively.  Mankind is to take dominion of this planet by nurturing it and not destroying it.  The starting point is focusing on you to be a positive influence so that jointly we could indeed bring good in this life!  

Friday 12 September 2014

Taking control: Key to ideal relationships, health and accelerated wealth!



The law of the universe reveals that love in its many forms; is a key to ideal relationships.  A lifestyle that is permeated by general positive attitude allows the body to deal with health challenges and empowers you to access wealth.

Love is the main ingredient for ideal relationships.
Love has many positive faces: To me gratitude is the most complex.  It is a deep positive regard for God, self and others.  Basically mankind has little love; whatever reflects peaceful approach to life is foreign to many people.  This is reflected by having a neighbor you avoid conversing with and therefore do not know his/her name. Without other people including family and friends, I wonder if you would have a reason to improve your own love content and other skills to achieve anything. There can be no relationship without love. Hearts are broken due to conditional love wherein both parties fail to regard relationships differently to spicing food according to personal preferences.  Many of us come into a relationship not prepared to change ourselves so that we can share life; we seek to use cover-up tactics to manipulate and control the other party to conform to our perceived ideals.  A relationship so impregnated by skewed intentions soon shows signs of illness.  Relationships experts say the ratio should be noting one blemish to ten positive attributes.  What is your ratio?  Remember you can only change you and not the other party!

Love heals the body and elevates your social stature and spiritual maturity.
Love is a driving positive force behind a peaceable, joyful and ideal healthy lifestyle.  It is incredible how much your spirit, soul and physical body would thrive if you could maintain this principle of your existence.  The Creator says man perishes for lack of knowledge. It is indeed so; for if you really internalize the fact that anger and all its cousins cause cancer and other illnesses, you would seek love like you seek gold.  Negativity breaks relationships, and causes stress which destroys your immune system.  Without this defense, the body wanes and eventually dies.  Mankind is mainly a spirit with a soul living in a body.  As a spirit being (being denotes be-in-God) you come out of Him; this is why He knew you before you were conceived.  Your spiritual makeup is love because He is Love, which is a key to the essence of life – relationships, health and wealth.  This summarizes a very important concept which other people may not full comprehend.  Your spirit self thrives in love; this is why there is always a conflicting feeling of wanting to reach out and demonstrate unconditional love, yet the ego stands in a way and often wins.

Love is a key that open doors to your wealth.
A lot has been discovered since the advent of open discussions and teachings on the universal law.  We would have a differing view had we not heard of millionaires that love plays an important role in accelerating accumulation of wealth.  This has encouraged researchers to find a common attributes of those who are enlightened.  They all encouraged us to love others in order to be in a spiritually favorable place.  They all knew and have experienced the existence of the Higher Power that controls everything we need to survive and enjoy life.  Some may negate this fact because they got their wealth without consciously engaging in positive lifestyle even though they did not recognize the Source I am referring to.  The point is, yes you may be experiencing an ideal relationship and enjoying good life, but there is a spiritual hole; a void that makes you yearn for something that money cannot buy.  That is how important it is to not neglect your spirituality.


Taking control is recognizing your three dimensional existence – spirit, soul and body.  It is seeking the wisdom to ideal life that points to your relationships levels with God first, yourself and others. It is accumulating knowledge about love and how it impacts on your health and wealth.   


Monday 8 September 2014

Taking control: The past is toxic and steals your life!



The past is everything that is not happening now. It pertains to the negative experiences which caused your emotional wounds and halted your social and spiritual growth.

Preview of the source of your present life.
Most people’s negative experiences are the larger part of the pie and therefore have few incidents of positive events that worth recalling.  Generally, you have accumulated this much because of the socialization process from infancy until you left home for higher education, left to live by yourself or got married.  It was so because during that period, various parties imparted values and beliefs into your life, thus influencing your perception of the world.  In other words you became what was taught and remained ignorant of all things your mentors did not know.  For an example, did your parents know about the importance of growing spiritually? Were you taught spirituality concepts such as chakras and the impact of energy imbalance? Do you recall hearing your parents discuss universal laws and how they impact on prosperity? All these indicate that you are what have been imparted in you through informal and formal education.   The bulk of non-formal education that would enable you to answer these questions and apply them in socializing your own children is your responsibility.

The principle of detoxifying your present life!
If you agree with me that you have been configured by both good and bad programmers, it is prudent to take cognizance of this situation through conscious auditing of your social and spiritual programs and content.  It is clear that you can only do this if you have some form of awareness of what is ideal in relation to what you want to achieve in life.  In other words, this inquiry will occur only if you have critically analyzed your progress towards your goals and how you are doing on three aspects that drive you to set goals – relationships, health and wealth.  This is what I refer to as the process of detoxification of your present life.  It is an ideal exercise which will enable you to recognize and weed out bad habits by consciously choosing to apply empowering principles. The key question if you have a weight problem would be; how can I improve my self image?  You do not want to recall negative names that described you by your family members or school mates. Empty yourself of any negative description of your present self; simply seek positive motives that add value to your life.  Adopt empowering descriptive words such as I am beautiful, powerful, loving and hard working person.

Detoxification of the present self makes room for an ideal one.  It is a conscious decision to mould yourself according to how you perceive your future. Most importantly, it seeks to empower you to take responsibility over your limitations by developing teachable attitude.  Blaming your failures on anybody is disempowering yourself to take control over your life.  

  

Thursday 4 September 2014

Taking control: Love and faith prepare the heart to surrender!



Love is one law through which we must all learn to conform to and trust the Creator to reveal their power to maintain connectivity with Him.  Faith that He knows what is best for us; ushers us into transcending peace and holistic wellness.

Love and faith defined.
Love is the positive energy that defines your spirituality; the completeness which characterize the source from which mankind comes from.  Faith is unfathomable trust and enabling mechanism that is necessary to maintain connectivity and divinity of our higher self.  Love and faith therefore co-exist to maintain access to the powerful and all knowing Creator, whose name is Love.

The concept of surrendering.
Surrendering is yielding to what is through the power of being fully present to the reality.  It is a spiritual technique that enables a person not to apply resistance because that which you resist, you attract.  This then says you maintain your power over negative circumstances through conscious application of the principle of acceptance of your environment. This does not mean allowing the negative energy to invade your inner self. It simply says you must learn to observe negativity without attaching your emotions; thus maintaining your power over such circumstances.

How love and faith apply to overcoming challenges!
Maintaining love is a personal decision.  This means not allowing anything to steal your ability to function in love and applying it in all situations. Yes, it is possible if you learn to be conscious of your driving motives.  For an example, have you caught yourself reacting to a situation?  How did you realize that you reacted and not responded to the situation? Consider the following: You are in a doctor’s waiting room with other patients, all quietly reading something. Suddenly someone pushes a door open and starts talking about the current political scandal.  You can:
a)   React by annoyingly hush that person and start lecturing him to keep quite.  The tendency is to go on to display your grievance for respecting other people’s right for maintaining their peaceful state. 
b)   Alternatively, you can respond to disturbance by looking at this person with conditional compassion:
*      He is not seriously ill and feels like talking.
*      He is not cultured and do not know how to handle public places.
*      He is not mentally well, so he could have done better!
c)    Responding denotes simply keeping your cool and not allowing any disturbance to steal your peaceful state of being (which means be- in- God).

The first two items are reactions of differing degree: The first is a clear negative reaction that shows absence of the consciousness and self control.  Reaction equates you and associates you to the scene at hand; thus reducing your ability to maintain your peace and self control.  The second is still negative reaction. The difference is that you are silently disturbed and are reacting by being judgmental.  The last state of calmness reveals consciousness which surrender to the change of environment without allowing your peaceful emotions to be altered by outside factors.  You are able to maintain peace because it is your functioning principle. It is choosing to control your thoughts for you are the only one who has access to them.

Taking control means ability to maintain your power of surrendering to circumstances through being alert to monitor the nature of your thoughts.  Ego wants to be in control by applying forceful approach to maintain its ideal environment; anything contrary tends to flip into negativity. The principle of applying unconditional love to yourself first then to others will elevate your sustainable access and connectivity to your Creator from whom your peacefulness is guaranteed.





  



Monday 1 September 2014

Taking control: Can you attain a perfect life in the imperfect world?


Perfectionism is a personality trait characterized by constant seeking of moral or spiritual perfection. It is the tendency to set excessively high standards, culminating in being critical of anything perceived as less than hundred percent. 

The struggle of correcting imperfect world!
Perfectionists could strife and attain their highest potential and at the same time could destroy their self-worth when such goals are unattainable.  Nobody would normally like to live in a disorganized environment.  Ideally we all appreciate good things and strife to do our best to get them.  The difference is that normal people know and are aware of imperfection in humanity and therefore would accommodate less perfect performance from others. Perfectionists on the other hand want all or nothing; hence are prone to mental disorder including depression, anxieties and eating disorder.  Consider for a moment how a perfectionist would seek a mate!  You can imagine the challenge of finding a mate who matches the set specification?  What this actually means is that, a perfectionist has a tendency to be manipulative.  He would control women they fancy to see the world the way they do!  For an example, a perfectionist would use positive manipulation such as convincing his date to eat at a certain restaurants of his choice because of the high standard of service.  He would be the one suggesting the best everything, thus covering the controlling behavior with supposedly the best intention for seeking the high standard.  If you are an empathic person, you would prefer friendliness over cold and efficient service.

I have always noted with interest the accuracy the Creator informed us of accepting imperfection in others.  For an example, Jesus who is said to be a perfect human being because He was a Son of God, was born in a stable and had relatives who were less than ideal socially and spiritually.  When He started His ministry, He nominated the less educated people; empowered them to implement the new spiritual dispensation.  He transformed the then cream of the society by eating and interacting with less honorable because he accommodated imperfection in humanity.   My point is; can you really enjoy this life if you seek perfection?  Remember, other people were raised in places of fewer rules about personal hygiene and orderly environment.  Perfectionists suffer and struggle for seeking to control that which is beyond them. 

Is there hope to lower the stress for perfectionists?
Perfectionists are idealist; they refuse the practicality of the imperfect world.  They seek that which is rare and therefore are forever under stress; looking for the minority of their group.  Consider the challenges they endure:
  1. They are not satisfied with their best results.  Something deeper inside is not enough and therefore they cannot experience the joy of their good work.  They always say; I could have done better!
  2. They see half empty class not half-full class.  They see mistakes and miss out on goodness which is always in the mistakes.  This could hamper them from learning from mistakes.  People that fear failure could let opportunities pass by; hence increase the number of those whose depression landed them in mental institutions.
  3. Their principle of attaining better than the actual achievement drives them to extreme.  For an example, those in entertainment industry flip over to bad habits such as extreme diets or plastic surgery to correct their bodies’ blemishes.  Often such extreme measures do not support physical body wellness. 

Transforming self is not impossible; it is deciding to review the present behavior and finding the common ground to make this life worth living.  Would you want to be in the company of someone who is critical about everything you do? I like orderliness, but I have learnt not to buy living room chairs that would not allow me to stretch my legs over them.  I have also let go fluffing my cushions before going to bed as a ritual. Oh! What a relief?