What type of thinker are you?

I have identified three possible groups of thinkers that you can find in the environment in which you live, work or socialise:

The first group is made up of competitive thinkers. In this group, it is winner takes all. They call them win/lose thinkers. Some people call them zero sum thinkers.

The second group is made up of cooperative thinkers. In this group, everyone is a winner. They call them win/win thinkers. Some people call them positive thinkers.

The third group is made up of dysfunctional thinkers. In this group, there are no winners but only losers. They call them lose/lose thinkers.  Some people call them MAD thinkers (mutual assured destruction). Others simply call them negative thinkers.
What other groups of thinkers can you think of?

Whatever group of thinkers you happen to find yourself living, working or socialising with at any point in your life, it is a remarkable sense of your spiritual maturity to be always guided by a higher thinking consciousness that results in the consideration of the effect of your actions or inaction on others.

Have a great weekend.

Three categories of strugglers

There are three categories of strugglers that I can think of:

Those struggling to be who they want to be.
Those struggling to be who they want others to think they are.
Those struggling to be who others think they should be

What category of strugglers do you belong to?

Delayed versus Immediate Gratification

One of the fundamental differences between people that think rich and those that think poor, they say, is the idea of “delayed” versus ”immediate” gratification. Both are attitudes. One thinks of instant rewards. The other thinks of future benefits. Which one are you?

Living with Tolerance

“In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.” Dalai Lama

The best action to take against any action or behaviour of an enemy is non-action. Another word for this is silence, which, as the old saying goes, is the best answer to a fool. Some people would call non-action or silence as a sign of cowardice or simply a mark of naivety. I call it a mark of personal enlightenment, a sign of measured self-awareness and an indication of self-mastery. Some people call it a mark of calculated tolerance. I call it a mark of the highest level of your spiritual maturity. It is your most powerful weapon against any enemy action or behaviour.

To be tolerant is to understand whom you were, who you are now and whom you want to be in the future.  It means you have learnt what you are today from what you were yesterday. It means you have a rich vision of what you want to be tomorrow. This position has given you the ability to manage your response to situations around you in ways that brings the best of you to the surface. Each act of tolerance you demonstrate teaches you and others something special about your true nature.

When someone intentionally does something to hurt you but you show no sign of hurtful feeling whatsoever against that person, you have successfully returned the negative effect of his or her action back to the sender. Consequently, the person brings torture upon him or herself. That is what I call self-inflicted injury.

To achieve self-mastery, you have to learn to be a keen observer of events around you from the smallest things happening within your own household to all the major events taking place around the world. Within your family setting, you can start to practice tolerance by learning to understand and accept your own contributions in any row between you and your spouse, you and your children, you and other members of your extended family including you and your in-laws. You may not be able to change their minds in any argument, but you can change your own mind. Once you are able to achieve that, you are one-step towards having a happy and peaceful relationship with them. This is what I call a win/win relationship. In a dispute situation, some of them might say it is because you have surrendered to them. I say it is because you have learned to understand yourself better and also because you have gained a better knowledge of their way of thinking.

Within your work environment, you can begin to practice non-action and become a more tolerant person when you learn to let go of your opinion of yourself, when you learn to allow others to express their opinion even when you disagree.  It is a mark of an educated mind. Even when an individual expresses an opinion that seems to undermine your own or makes you appear stupid, practice responding with silence. To an enlightened observer, your silent non-response shows whose opinion is more superior without having to defend your position.

To be tolerant is to know how to measure your response to events around you. It is to know that no one can hurt you without your permission. It is to understand self before others. It is learning to agree to disagree. It is to know that the good people in your life are God’s own unique way of apologising for the bad ones. It is knowing that being tolerant of the bad people in your life is a magnet for attracting to your life more good people. It is to know that God uses the good people to compensate you for the bad ones. It is to know that you have nothing to lose from tolerating bad people. It is to know that you have everything to gain because all the bad people in your life are your teachers.

 

When Passion leads To Success

"People who succeed tend to find goal in the distant future and then chase it through thick and thin. People who flit from one interest to another are much, much less likely to excel at any of them. School asks students to be good at a range of subjects, but life asks people to find one passion that they will follow forever."  Extracted from The Social Animal, the Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement by  David Brooks.

Listening to God in Silence

“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass – grow in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.” Mother Teresa

Where do you go to find God? How often do you go there to meet him? What is your feeling like each time you go there? Peaceful? Excited? Afraid? Relaxed?  Happy? In what kind of environment do you like to meet God?  Noisy but boisterous? Serene and meditative. What do you want to be seeing when you are listening to God? Objects of saintly nature? Plane and undiluted? Do you talk to God more than you listen to Him?

You can meet God anywhere anytime.  He is the God of the silence as well as the God of noise.  He is the God of everything that is natural. But to hear God, you need the moments of silence. You need to be in the quiet. You need the space and time. Space +Time + Quiet = God. Some people find it hard to maintain some moments of silence. God is not in a hurry. He can wait as long as it takes you to find the space and moment of silence. The art of finding the space and moment of silence is a learnable skill. With loads of distraction here and there all the time, it can be hard for most of us to hear God. It is easy to talk to Him than to listen to and actually hear him.

For me, I have learned to meet and recognise God even in everything I do. I see God in the food I eat, in the water I drink, in my children, in my wife. I see God in the television programme I watch every day, in the car I drive, in the air I breathe in and out, in the shirt I put on and in just everything that is good or bad. I see God in everything I do from the moment I wake up in the morning until the time I retire to my bed in the night.

You can start to listen to and hear what God is saying to you by learning to listen more and talking less. When you are eating, you meditate on God’s providential power for humankind and remember those who have nothing to eat. When you put on your clothes, you meditate on God’s divine protection over you and you remember those who are naked. When you are drinking water from the tap, you medicate over God’s blessings and remember those who thirst for even a drop. When you have your children around you, you do not take them for granted. You meditate over the gifts and remember those who are still asking God for the fruit of the womb. When you retire to your bed in the night, you meditate over the provision of your shelter and remember the homeless. When you open your mind’s eyes, you will see God in just anything all around you. God tried to use those objects or subjects to speak to you. He only wants you to be silence and notice. That is the only way you can hear Him.
 

The story of Life and Living

The biblical story of God started with success and ended with success. Between success and success there were stories of failures.  The story of life therefore is about our successes and also our failures.  It is about the stories of how we manage to overcome our failures and our ability and courage to pass on the lessons we learn from them to others. 

To be ahead of your colleagues

To be ahead of your colleagues is to understand what your employer expects of you on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis and to be pro-actively thinking about how to achieve the best outcomes in the most cost effective way.

What is a Relationship TRUST Fund?

What is a Relationship TRUST Fund? What are you investing in the fund? How much are you prepared to deposit into or withdraw from the fund on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis in order to achieve what you want in the relationship? For help on how to clarify what you really want to achieve in a relationship, click on www.mamcoaching.com/register  or simply e-mail your initial enquiry to info@mamcoaching.com

Beliefs and DNA

In his book titled Excuses Begone, Dr Wayne Dyer stated that a new scientific research, championed by Bruce Lipton, has confirmed that beliefs can override DNA. If only you could override just one habit with a new belief, what would be: (1) the habit and (2) the new belief?

Creative Understanding

They say we can live together is a matter of understanding. To be understood means first to understand. If you could only understand one thing about your partner, your friend, your colleague or a close member of your family, what would it be?

Social and Physical Mobility

On the need for human mobility, the 8th Self-Marketing Mix, Susan Sontag, an American feminist,  author and literary theorist  has this to say: “One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depend on encouraging people to defy limits.”