There are times when we need someone to call us out so we stop making excuses and put our priorities in order. As a coach I’m going to offer this advice…
Start positioning yourself today and decide what you are thinking about!
Don’t be afraid to test and try new things. Look for an easier, quicker and smarter way to do things using your innate creativity and innovative thinking. To see changes, you first need to believe in yourself that you can do anything when you put your mind to it!
You need to commit to the decisions that you are making to see the changes that you want. Have you finished what you said you would do today?
Check out today’s Mimika TV episode Innovation & Creativity. Listen in and be inspired.
TRANSCRIPT
Innovation & Creativity
Welcome to the Unstick Your Mind podcast on Mimika TV. Get ready to get unstuck, align with your true purpose and unlock your God given potential.
Back in South Africa, when I was trained, my first job was actually in TV production and I was a TV broadcaster for a few years. And then I got into the production side and into photography in the creative side. So for me, I’ve always been about creating something out of nothing. And maybe it’s a South African in me because back in the day in the eighties, growing up during apartheid, we didn’t have access to overseas. We couldn’t get import or exporting the products. We had to just be inventive and we had to make things out of nothing. And to me that’s always exciting is to be able to imagine something and to dream about something and to create something. I mean, today, all the innovations around us have been created from someone’s thoughts. Someone came up with an idea or needed to scratch a niche or found something that was missing or felt like could do something better or just felt there wasn’t, nobody was servicing that need.
And that’s what I love about entrepreneurship, is the ability that you could do and create anything and especially here in the USA, like of course I have a lot of friends and followers who aren’t all around the world. And one thing America does well is encourage people to be able to dream big and to achieve whatever they put their minds to. Now on the the other side though we are a little spoiled, because we have things easy, high speed internet. We all have access to a lot of technology, rest of the world, not always as available but there are many opportunities. And I think if we just get ourselves to think right about the opportunities and just to think, okay, what do I need to do? How do I need to shift my thinking?
And you can position yourself to change your status quo that in 30 days, 90 days in a year’s time, you can be in a very different position, but it all starts with today and deciding how to think about. Well, being an entrepreneur, I’m always coming up with some new ideas and I’m definitely one of those luminaries who likes to see things before they come into fruition. So for me, about three years ago, when I really got into coaching, I went back to school and got certified and I’ve actually been doing a neuroscience diploma as well. So I’m like getting my 45 year old brain back to like, oh, okay, I’ve got to submit these things. But it’s been fun. I just love the idea that it doesn’t matter how old you are. You can achieve what you want to achieve.
So I’m kind of my own Guinea pig. So as I test to try things, I then try to figure out another easier, quicker, faster way to do stuff. And really what my big goal is, I would love to be able to create a whole network, a global network of other mindset trainers using my signature program that I’ve developed and just to help people, because my view is, I believe we should live with mental wholeness. Now we have mental health and we talk about mental health a lot. And I now will say, I’m not a psychologist. I’m not a therapist. I haven’t been clinically trained, but I do believe there’s a part of all of us that wants more from life. But sometimes we need a little bit of a kick up the pants.
Sometimes we need someone to help us call us off our own excuses and help us put in positions. So that’s why I’d like to talk about what I do is. I’m your personal trainer for your mind. So just like when you go to the gym, everybody wants to look fit and healthy and lose weight, but no one wants to put the work in, but here’s the thing. So when you put the work in and you do the sweat and you push against the weight and they’re against the resistance and you realize it’s strengthening you and you keep doing that on repetition, then you realize, you look back and you go, wow, I’ve actually achieved some. And so my whole mission and is I want to birth a movement of being able to change people’s mindsets about you don’t have to wait to be sick, to deal with your mental health, you shouldn’t have to just say, well, now that I’m ill, now I need to take medication. It’s like, how can we look it from a wholeness perspective.
When we talk about diets, I mean, this diet, the Atkins diet, the keto diet, everyone’s like, I want to lose weight by what I’m eating. We go to the gym. We spend so much time and effort in considering our physical health, but we don’t put a lot of wholeness mindset into our mind. Like how do we look after our mind, how are we hydrating? Are we sleeping well? Are we taking good supplements? Are we eating properly? Not just for weight loss, but for actual cognitive health. So that’s really where my goal is and what my plan is for the coming years is to really build that out and to transition and change the way the world thinks about mental wellness. Your brain uses 20% of the oxygen of your body.
So that’s a lot if you think about it and if we are not oxygenating our brain, which means hydration, drinking water, like sometimes you’re like I have a headache. So what we do is we grab the Advil, we go and take a pill, a painkiller, instead of thinking about why do I have a headache? Always first call as why do I feel like this? Why do I think like this? And oftentimes we are not really aware and our body is always talking to us. Pain is good. Pain is telling you something. Anxiety is not a condition. It’s your body talking to you, but what’s unfortunately happened in society is that if you’re not feeling good all the time, then of a sudden you feel like something’s wrong. Well, no anxiety is like, if we didn’t have pain receptors, we could really hurt ourselves. People would be killing themselves if they didn’t understand the severity of what pain receptors do.
Innovation & Creativity
So your body is always talking to you. When you say you have butterflies in your stomach when you’re nervous or you have a gut feeling about something or you don’t get of a good vibe, like you get the hairs at the back of your neck, stand up when something creeps you out, that is all your body, your physiological body really coming in connection with what your mind and your intuition, which is really your spirit. So my form of training, isn’t just about the physiological part of your brain. We have our mind which is how we think but we also have our brain, which is our physical, the physical brain matter in our mind, in our skull that needs attention, that needs water and it needs nutrition and sleep. But we also need to consider things like habits and that’s part of the training that I do is take people through this process. So re-imagining and looking at what hurts and harms you and what’s good for you and habits is a big thing.
But the biggest problem they always have is that people are not thinking about what they’re thinking about. They’re just going with the flow and unfortunately we’ve become a society of feelings, meaning we are driven by how we feel. I don’t feel confident. I don’t feel motivated. I don’t feel happy, so I’m not going to do it, but listen, honey, your feelings are the last thing to catch up. You need to decide, I want to do this. If I want to lose weight, I’m making a mental decision and a commitment to myself. Doesn’t matter how I feel whether I’m tired or I feel like I want to grab the cookie, not the running shoes. If you’ve made a decision and a commitment to yourself, that’s when change happens. That is the difference between people. I’m also very much into studying this whole athletic mindset, like what is the difference between high performing athlete and high achievers. There isn’t anything different between them and them and us, between you, me and them is that they’ve made a decision not to give up.
They’ve made a decision to push through. They’ve made a decision that even when they are so tired and they want to throw up, they get up and they do it again and they do it again. And they do it again. They’ve decided that they are not going to not going to fail and even failure is a whole another thing. I don’t even consider it failure, it’s experiments as far as I’m concerned. It is you’re just experimenting a different way of doing things. But again, that’s why I say, if you decide about something and even the psychiatry talks about it, you have to make the decision and then your feelings will catch up eventually, but we are so driven by our feelings and if you think about it, your feelings are like a two year old having a tantrum.
Now, if you any parents out there, if you’ve ever dealt with a two year old having a tantrum, you know what to deal with them. You put them or yourself in trauma, because you cannot reason with the two year old having a hissy fit, because inherently the part of our brain that is our primitive brain is wired to avoid discomfort. So you just think about it. The two old doesn’t want to go have a nap. The two year old wants to eat its candy. The two year old wants to stay up late, but we know as parents that we need to make better decisions for our children. So the same thing, if we can understand that their primitive brain is always going to want to take us back to being that petulant child, if we can say no, I’m in control of my brain. I’m the adult here.
I get to decide that we need to go to bed early. So switch off the Netflix. I get to decide that no more sugar after 6:00 PM, otherwise I can’t go to sleep. We get to be the mature one in this relationship with ourself, but we’ve often become so like we just flow, go with the flow. We allow the two year old to shout louder and we allow her or him to just make a like bulldoze our decisions. And eventually then what happens is we end up feeling guilty or resentful or unhappy or anxious or depressed. We ended up in that situation. Now, of course, I’ll say this isn’t about, there are some instances where you need clinical help and as I said, this is not medical advice.
Innovation & Creativity
I have to disclaim that sometimes we do need more in invasive and more clinical training and clinical help. So I definitely would advise if you feel any serious issues of mental health, definitely seek out a professional. But what I’m referring about is making those decisions and those choices to where you are able to shift your world through the choices and your own power, your own self power, because we all have choice.
That’s one thing in life that makes us human, is the power of choice and we get to choose. We don’t need to let the two year old drive our day. We don’t need to let her have a hissy fit and go, oh my God, it is going be terrible day. And, oh my God, it’s like, then all of a sudden you start becoming a self fulfilling prophecy if you start thinking it’s going to be an awful day. Well, then what happens is confirmation bias happens. And then you start confirming your own negative words. So words is another thing. Thoughts are another thing, habits as well. But all of that, is what makes us human. It’s the human condition. And that’s what makes me excited about it is we really giving people an alternative way of looking at things, instead of saying, nothing’s wrong, you aren’t broken, it’s fixable.
We can help you. There are tools and there are ways if you’re willing to look at it and putting in the work, but you know, society is microwaved this app for here, an app for that. Everything wants to be overnight. Unfortunately, there isn’t any easy button. There is, sorry to say, if we were looking for a quick fix, definitely isn’t it. This is not how it works, because that’ll eventually leave you disappointed. But again, it just really comes down to your thoughts and making that decision today that I’m going to make my tomorrow different, by the choices and my self power and saying no more. I’m not putting up with this anymore. I want something new. I want something different. Like, Einstein has that quote that says doing the same thing over and over is called insanity. So if you want a different result, you need to do something, take the steps, follow a process and see results. Because I’m very big about results.
I’m not going to [inaudible 00:11:43] and just tell you, yeah, just, think positive. No, that’s not how life works. You actually have to put feet to the ground. There is some actual things you have to do physically and intentionally that don’t come through wishing because wishing ain’t a strategy and I’m always open to hearing what other people’s viewpoint is. Because I can guarantee you that if you have an idea for something, somebody else has probably already thought about it or has come at it at a different angle and I’m very much a big believer in collaboration. I don’t get jealous if someone else has got a similarity, I’m like, Ooh, well then maybe if we put our two heads together, we can create something greater because two heads are better than one, right?
This is a way to connect into network and to get the message out there because I believe the more of us that can really step up and put our hearts on our sleeve and say, this is what I believe, this is how I feel. I can serve people. Then I think the world is going to be a much better place. But really what neuroscience is catching up with what a lot of things in the Bible have talked about, renewing your mind, take your thoughts captive which basically means, think about what you’re thinking about, but having a faith element like I really believe that even for people that are non Christians, we all have to have an element of faith in ourselves and the process and in what we are doing in order to get up in the morning.
Because if you don’t believe in yourself, you won’t show up, you won’t take the opportunity. You will discount yourself and think, oh well that’s not for me. That’s good for her, but it’s never for me. And especially with the woman I work with, women are really bad at this, it’s like, oh, that sounds great but I don’t think I’m good enough or I’m old enough or I’m young enough or I’m ready enough, whatever enough. And without that self-belief, you’re not going to believe enough to motivate yourself, to actually take the action. And here’s the thing is confidence is not a feeling. It’s a decision. So you’re going to decide I’m going to do this and I’m going to pursue confidence where we unfortunately think we wait to feel confident, but it’s the other way around. Confidence happens after you take the act. So for me, I’m like, my whole philosophy is that you need that faith in yourself and of course you need a faith in the higher power because I truly believe in God.
Innovation & Creativity
Everyone, a lot of people like to refer to as the universe, but I’d like to give God the credit where creditors do because it’s the God of the universe. Some people agree with me which is fine. And those who don’t, that’s fine. But I firmly believe and I’ve seen this happen that when you can transition your thought process into believing in something bigger than yourself, you take your eyes off yourself and you start to achieve things bigger. You start to see the world as much bigger and the opportunities instead of within the little four walls of your own ability, because I have an inherent problem with self-help because there’s the word self and ourselves are limited. We don’t always know what we don’t know. That’s why we pursue education while we pursue knowledge because there’s always going to be somebody else who’s quickest, smart, richer, whatever more than me.
But if I can realize that my contribution is valuable and that by coming together with others and having that faith, the greatest scheme of things and that God has our back, that he has designed things for a purpose. You were born for a purpose, on purpose for a time such as now, then you can really shift into that, I believe I’m here for a reason and you start to shift into that purpose thinking and then all the things will fall to place. Then you realize when things get tough, you are ready and you are willing to be able to put up with the hard stuff because when you have a greater purpose in mind, that is the best motivation that you need. We’re going through training. If you’ve ever watched Wonder Woman, she has a bigger purpose, right? She knows she’s, she’s born for a purpose. You see what I’m going with this? And she’s willing to go through the training and she realizes she has to get stronger. There comes a time when she knows she’s ready, but she’s not ready until she’s ready, but we have to put the work in.
So that’s definitely my favorite movie and my favorite character. So commitment can come in various shapes, very many shapes and forms, but commitment to yourself is a really intrinsic and important part of the process. Because if you keep giving up on yourself, you’ll never see follow through. And what happens is you end up in resentment and hope to food. You eventually just get so disappointed and you get broken hearted. But at the end of the day, you need to ask yourself why. And I would even say, ask yourself why three times and actual in fact, Toyota, the man who developed the Toyota cars, they have a thing where in order to get down to when they are making innovations is to ask the question why seven times, because it will really get down to your motivation and your deep reasoning. Because a lot of the time we follow what our conscious thoughts are. But our subconscious is actually so much more powerful that a lot of the time, when you feel like, oh, this just feels awful.
There’s something about this person that I don’t trust or they’ve gotten that intuition like we are made up of spirit, mind, and body. And oftentimes we like to put them in different boxes, right. But commitment comes when you are aligning yourself with your heart’s yearning, which is your spirit saying, I really want to do this or I really don’t feel comfortable doing this with your reasoning. Because how many times have you made a decision, then you talked yourself out of it, right? I’m sure a lot of us are like, that sounds great, oh, but I don’t know if I could do that. And like eventually what happens? You make excuses and then you live in regrets and I’m like, I want to get to heaven one day and go, I did it. I used it. I used everything you gave me. I have the battle scars and the ruins, but I’m like I had made it. I want to use everything that God gave me and be able to bring a whole lot of people with me through this process because that’s what commitment is.
It’s again a set decision. You have to decide like, who are you going to honor? Are you going to honor that sort of petulant child or the negativity and oftentimes it comes back to our childhood, especially if you’ve had a history of trauma and trauma can be in different shapes of form. I mean being bullied or having a broken childhood or about a broken family or whatever. I mean, I believe every human has been through some form of trauma that you’ve had to deal with. But unfortunately a lot of us don’t know how to move past that. And maybe because of previous seasons or previous mirroring or modeling of behaviors from parents we stop believing in that and we stop showing up for ourself and then commitment vain.
Innovation & Creativity
And it’s great, it’s like, we coming up to a New Year and we say, okay, I have a New Year’s resolution and then this is what I’m going to do. You know how long people keep the New Year’s resolutions four days, four days and they then life comes at them like, oh this is too hot. And then what happens is, you get behind or the pounds are not going as quick as you want. And then all of a sudden they’re, oh, I’m so far behind. I may as well just ignore it now. Oh, I may as well eat the whole box of cookies. I may as well just give up. There’s no point in even trying. No, it doesn’t matter how far or how bad or how severe it is. There’s always hope, but you have to make the decision.
Am I choosing me or am I choosing my circumstance? Am I going to decide to choose to be that miserable person who feels terrible about their weight or is not happier in the job or not happy in the relationship or am I going to decide because no one can decide for you, but you. You’re in control of you. You’ve got to take you wherever you go. That if you’re miserable and you’re grumpy and you’re angry, you can blame everybody else as much as you like, but you still live with you. And if, unless you make the decision to change, as I said, in any kind of intervention type thing, even the AAAs, the reason what they say when they train people to say, hi, my name is, and I’m a alcoholic is the awareness in it. This is what it was, but things are changing and I’m making the decision that this is not going to be the rest of my life. I’m going to change things.
And that’s the difference between us and animals is we get to choose like, hello, we actually get the opportunity and we are living in the 21st century. We are more spoilt. We have more opportunities. We have more comforts, more access to things. There really is no excuse. We are not living in mud huts. And we are not living in even a hundred years ago with with lack of healthcare and yeah, there asked a lot of people living in the world like that. But for the most part, we don’t really have an excuse. We’ve got opportunities. So are we squandering them? Are we going to use? The choice is up to you, right. Well, the difference between a growth and fixed mindset, again, is really down to the choice. Do I want to change or do I want to stay the same? And here’s the other thing is people who don’t want to change, you can’t change someone else’s mind.
They have to come to a realization and oftentimes the shift happens where either something traumatic happens or some major life change or something happens to shift the status quo because when things are in a routine and there’s no reason to grow, most people don’t really experience this kind of shift and change in having to readjust and rethink and get back to the drawing board. I mean, I’m an immigrant and I’ve immigrated twice. So I’ve had this happen twice and actually three times in my life. So that’s idea of being resilient, but we’ve all been forced to have more resilient mindset, like, okay, these are things that are out of my control that I cannot control. So there’s no point in stressing about stuff I can’t control. What is in my control, like what can I do about this? And then you can make the change. But there are people who are just happy to be in a fixed mindset who are either driven by fear and don’t want to change.
And the sad news is you can’t change that. You can’t change them. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. So as much as you’d wish it and you’d want it and pray for it and hope and dream, if they, that person doesn’t come to that realization themselves, there’s nothing you and I can do, which is sad. And a lot of people do die in that fixed mindset, never achieving their goals, never achieving their true potential, which is why I’m on the mission to do what I do, is to get people out of the gutter, out of that stuckness, get them moving, give them a little bit of a kick up the pants because sometimes people or often people need accountability and they need a little bit of, okay, a little bit of “let’s get going” by actually showing it that it has been done before and that’s doable and you can do it. Like I have never met anybody who not fixable.
Innovation & Creativity
There isn’t anybody that I’ve ever met, who cannot change, but they have to want, how badly do you want it. And it doesn’t have to be a bad change. It could be a good thing. It’s like graduating from college and starting a job or immigrating a country or getting married or your kids leaving home. And now you’re an empty nester or getting a divorce or losing a loved one or, I mean, any major life shift that changes this status quo because we go a long life and we go through groundhogs day and we repeat groundhogs day, day over day. But then when something happens and the weather changes and all of a sudden the comfort is gone. Like the rug gets pulled out. Unfortunately, most people’s reaction is to feel like a victim and they feel like the world is falling down and the sky is falling, like chicken little will cry, but yes, and things happen and it’s sad and it’s horrible but, at the same time, I think we can’t avoid these issues. We have to go through them.
That’s why we call it breakthrough. You can’t like break around or break under, you have to break through. But the point of that is that you are breaking through resistance. You are breaking and breaking an old way to create something new. And when you do, like, I always believe growth is like an elastic band. That the more you stretch it, the more capacity it has, but it tends to not go back to its old ways. Like once you’ve grown and stretched yourself, you don’t necessarily go back to the way you were before, because now you’ve learned something new, you’ve grown in a new way. You have more maturity. You have more wisdom. You have more insight and life becomes so much more fun when you have more resilient attitude. You are like, I can handle this. I have had things happen to me and I’m like really, is that the worst that could happen? Because if that’s the worst that could happen, I know I can continue with tomorrow.
So just the encouragement for those who are listening, that no matter how hard or how difficult or how awful it feels, where you’re at, there’s always a silver lining in this, the morning always comes. You just need to put, dig your heels in and say, I’m not giving up. I know the light’s coming. The darkness is going to fade. I just need to really decide to make the choice, to stick with it and to seek out the help that you need when you need it. Because I think a lot of us have felt very isolated over this last couple of years and feeling like we have to be heroes and to ourselves or are not asking for help.
And I think that vulnerability is key to really reaching out and saying to someone, I’m really struggling with this. Can you help me? And people inherently are good. I really believe, if you have an issue and you want to help somebody, people are not going to say, no, I’m not going to help you. Maybe if you feel the grinch, but I haven’t made any grinches. Well, just think about it. If you had through a party, right and you gave out the invitations, not everybody’s going to want to come to the party, but if you make it sound, you like people drive par and see the guys outside, having so much fun and they’re having a barbecue and the balloons and the cake and the music, and everyone’s laughing and dancing. You are having a fun enough time. Believe me, people are going to want to join your party.
So don’t be a party pooper. Don’t be a [inaudible 00:25:32] on everybody, and like, oh, that’s so bad. Well, I am so suck. No one wants to be at that party. That’s called a pity party. And it’s usually just one person who goes to those and that’s the person who’s throwing the party. I want to have a really fun party where everyone feels like I want to be part of that energy. I want to come and get involved and meet people. So you’ve got to be the life of the party, you’ve got to provide or show what it’s like to live in that positivity, live in that light and just be a magnet to making people feel like they’re welcome and that they can be themselves and they can connect and they can make friendships and they can eat cake and they can have fun.
So, as I said, it’s just when you are being the best version of you and of course it’s not going to happen all the time. But if you are at least working towards being the best version of you, people cannot help, but follow you like the pied piper, because you are emitting the energy and the life and the positivity and the joy, it’s magnetic. People cannot help, but look at you when you are joyful. And when you can find joy even in the hard things, that’s what gratitude is. We hear about this a lot gratitude and from a neuroscience perspective, your brain actually needs to shift into gratitude in order to grow because you can’t be grumpy and grateful at the same time. It’s actually an impossibility. So if you’re feeling really grumpy, start to think about how you can be grateful for what the little things you have, because if gratitude grows, your positivity grows through gratitude. So the more, like mamma used to say, count your blessings, right? Count them on your hand and until you run out of fingers and toes and you keep going. And I think if we can just get back to that instead of the comparison and the judgment and the division. If we can start to realize we are more alike than we are different. We realize that everybody’s going through something hard. And I have something of value that whether it’s a kind word or a text or hey, I was thinking about you just a little bit of encouragement and reaching out to people. I think it’s going to make the world a whole better place. If we just willing to step out of our comfort zones and put ourselves out there. The world and our own attitudes and happiness will thank us.
Are you ready to change your brain to change your life? Discover how to break limiting beliefs, stop self-sabotage, and unlock your full potential by rewiring your brain, using neuroscience coaching and faith-based principles. Come and join my coaching program, Unstick Your Mind today.
Come and join my coaching program Unstick Your Mind today!
