THE BLAME GAME

The blame game is a situation where one party blames others for something bad or unfortunate rather than attempting to seek a solution. 
Accusations exchanged among people who refuse to accept sole responsibility for some undesirable event

ILLUSTRATIONS

Husband and wife fighting over burned chicken stew.

A wife blames her husband for not doing anything in the house. She  argues with him because he comes back from work, seats on the couch and turns the TV, then open his Sunday Newspaper and read. 

While she is cooking, she is also washing dishes and packing up the house and watching the kids are playing outside the house. Later there’s a heavy dark smell of burned meat in the house... The wife blames it on the husband for sitting and not helping. He blames the wife for being careless. Later that evening he decides to go out to take a walk and stumbles over some wood and dead leaves in the road and falls and hurt his elbows. He started shouting at his neighbours for growing too many trees that keep the street dirty.  

Now, I wonder how manny people think he is right....

 A young woman is raped at a party...

·        The Society blames her dress code,

•           Others blames her timing of going to the party,
•      The village blames the mother for not teaching the child good manners, the mother blames her husband for being absent all the time, if he was home she would have not walked out to seek validation from other people. The daughter blames herself for wearing a shirt dress... Its just a big spider web that society needs to untangle. The society loses value in the eyes of others. The police can’t be fully trusted because they blame the victims, the child can’t trust own decisions because of the experience.

The good and the bad

When things go right, we look inside

When things go bad, we look outside (most of the time)

For example, imagine taking a driver’s test. If you just pass, then you will likely make it an internal reason – I studied hard, I’m actually a good driver naturally. But if you just fail the same test, suddenly there is an external reason – the weather was bad, it wasn’t the car I usually drive, I didn’t get enough sleep.

Why do we blame people (when people blame others)

1.    It’s used as a defence mechanism: usually could be a form of denial, self-protection or shifting responsibility from self to others.

2.    To protect our ego: .Others can use blaming others as a way to protect their self-worth or self esteem. So you blame others so that you don’t lose your assumed dignity before people or to look better against accepting your own faults and flaws. It you blame someone, it puts you in the superior seat, making you feel more important and ‘good’ person as opposed to their ‘bad’.

3.   It’s as easy tool to use when under attack and feeling defeated. You blame others to compensate for your weakness or lack of preparedness

4.    its easy to blame others than accept responsibility 

5.    People lie. You can blame others because it’s easy to tell a lie than to admit the truth.  If you stop lying you could have a more fulfilling relationship 

What if I use cop out to self-blaming to avoid being too hard on themselves

·         The brain only knows the reality you create.

·         You must be careful not to create a brain tattoo of a bad person in you while you are not.

·         When things don’t work out well, of you fail and start to say “i'm a bad person, i'm dumb, I am not capable, I am ugly, etc… the brain records that… the more you do that or repeat it, the more real it become.

•     The challenge is that first, your wrong perception of what went wrong due to your “fault” becomes a reality of your own, not others. Such that when people come to pick you up from that fall, it will be hard because the you almost fall twice or more from one incident,
•       The second challenge is that you begin to live as a victim of that failed incident
•      The third thing is that you begin to lose your confidence and your self-esteem. When you want to do something similar to what you blamed yourself for, your brain will remind you of the brain tattoo: that you were once or twice responsible for error in the same spot… what makes you think you can’t repeat it?

·         In short: escaping into blame mode limits you

·         But escaping into correction mode empowers you.

Will we ever have a situation where we are not looking at anyone or anything to blame at all?

Who should take the blame? Does it matter who you blame?

·         Taking blame is pointing a finger…

·         The moment you chose to “blame someone” you automatically remove yourself from the equation and immediately develop a negative attitude towards it or even be reluctant to participate in correcting it.

·         Taking responsibility is accounting not only for the wrong, the failure or the problem, but taking a leading role in finding and implementing corrective or improvement measures.

So, the correct question is not who should take the blame? That’s a negative question altogether, but who should account for correction and prevention of the errors? That is an empowering question.

How easy can it be for one to escape the blame game syndrome?

I like the fact that you call it a syndrome, because I think it’s a disorder

But for you to be able to escape the blame game, you need to understand some things in life.

I read a story about two rabbits: let me share this with you:

Once upon a time there were two rabbits who were the best of friends. They were so close that even their families used to come next in priority after their friendship.

They used to play together, fight of other rabbits together and eat together.

One, unfortunate day one of the friends gets caught by a Wild Dog. All the other friend could do was watch from a far distance as his best friend is eaten alive.

He felt strange, He was scared, he felt sad, he was helpless; he was overwhelmed, He wanted to die, He wanted to live, He was confused, He was utterly devastated.

Let’s say it was you in that situation, what you would do:

1.    Take responsibility for your life. Failure to accept responsibility is failing to lead. Responsibility means ability to respond (Respond-Ability)

a.    Be aware of what is going on (both your internal or thought processes) and the external (influences)

b.    Accept the consequences. Many people are ready and eager to get praises and cretid for good things and forget that things can go wrong. Can go hoo haa. Be ready for it.

c.    Resolve to improve. If its business failure, raise up and do better, if its relationship failure, raise up and be the one to love more and give more, if its personal failure, raise up and take charge of building a better person.

2.    Seek help from  outside

3.    The big part is here: know and understand the things you can change and the things that are outside of your control.

Why do people blame themselves

Effects of blaming of finger pointing

1.    In society that is full of violent behaviors, it can actually end up protecting the perpetrators. Our society is built in such a way that a victim of abuse, rape, negligence is not empowered to talk about the things that hurt them.

2.    Research shows that victim blame has serious consequences for the mental health and recovery of survivors, and has been shown to predict depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress. Victims are less likely to seek further assistance if they have experienced a negative reaction following disclosure, heightening their distress.  (Robert Muller, Psychology Today). He further writes that Common reactions include blame, anger, and disbelief, and can even extend to the refusal of assistance for victims seeking help. Such attitudes can be seen among police, physicians, and counsellors who may treat sexual assault victims with considerable scepticism, discouraging them from speaking up.

TIPS:

Can it be solved:

Somehow yes:

Societal perspective:

1.    Society needs to learn Positive accountability: this means to thoughtfully akbowledge an error, your own or another person’s and continue to seek ways to repair it if necessary

2.    Confidence in people: this could be more often with parents showing confidence in their children or Spouses showing confidence in one another. Or teachers showing confidence in their learners. One of the biggest source of immoral behavior is Brocken family. Sometimes because the family did not show positive reinforcement on their children or support their children in their dreams. A child who is told is good eneough is likely to perfume well at school. But a child who is blamed for bad things happening to others is likely to lose his confidence and then blame others.

Personal level:

1.    Develop self confidence. Have faith in yourself

2.    Learn to take responsibility. It’s the only way you can be able to correct errors and rechalenage failed attempts

3.    Seek help: sometimes blaming others can cause your brain to shut down from attempting positive turns. You may end up thinking everyone is against you.  Look at the Appartheit for example: we have talked so much about it that we end up seeing every other color as negative.

4.    Learn to focus on a future or the future that you can impact of possitvu influence not a past you cannot change.

5.    Focus on positive things than negative things

6.    Take responsibility: failure to

THE MICROWAVE MENTALITY

A microwave as we all know is  an electric cooking hardware. It is said that it cooks food much faster than conventional cooking methods such as using stoves, grillers, etc. you can cook popcorns much faster and nicer on a microwave than other methods…

People who are in a hurry for eating, can get something out of the freezer and defrost it within few minutes and have it cooked quickly than having to let it melt or defrost in water…. That’s our people today… everything is needed fast. People do not have time to wait.

The microwave mentality is the attitude or belief that everything should happen instantly or without delay. The following descriptions explain this mentality:

• It is when one wants everything in life to happen within the blink of an eye without regard for natural process of growth. 
• On an adverse expression, a person with microwave mentality is a woman who does not want to fall pregnant but want to be called a mother of a child and have one. 
• It’s the desire to be a millionaire without the regard of the process of learning the discipline of building an investment portfolio or business or any form of income stream.
• There are many examples that one can give, but at the end of the day, having a microwave mentality is believing that everything is taking too long to long to happen such that you’d bribe to get your way up to the next level in business, or to get a degree or marks of a particular subject. 
• A person with this mentality is one who wants everything done as though life is like getting everything on drive through. You know, like the way want instant everything these days: instant food, instant pap, instant coffee. We also want instant weight loss using LIPO SUCTION and dangerous drugs, instant wealth like winning Loto and many other things without putting effort at all.

Don’t take this wrong

We want things to be done much faster and more efficiently, but without compromising the quality of a having quality people. Quality is not instant. It has to be matured. If you love wine, or stake, you will learn that the best wines are the old wines, the older it gets, the better. But people are different, the slower it gets, the more we don’t like it. as a matter of fact people would want to get married and find themselves having babies without having to go through the nine months of emotional imbalances so that they keep their looks.

I read a statement by a Harvard Psychologist, Daniel Gilbert. He said, “if we gave lottery losers each 30 seconds on TV or radio to announce not “I won!” but “I lost”, it would take almost 9 years to get through the losers of one draw”. Meaning it takes so many millions losers to make one a millionaire through lottery. So you get to hear of one lotto winner after a million losses. Life is like that… it take a million other things to get one good thing done. Sometimes you just need to hang in there.

For example: any one who can run fast would like to be like Caster Semenya on the tracks, or like the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt but if you ask them how they get to achieve their results…. You will crunch. it takes Bolt less than 10 seconds to win an Olymbic Gold medal in the 100m race, but it takes him hours or hard training and months of patience and endurance to build a muscle to run for 10 seconds. 

Why Microwave mentality

There are reasons to this as well. There are many reasons why people behave like this, some are hard to explain in a short space.

• Cognitive capacity. High IQ (intelligence) is linked with future thinking or tendencies. People who can delay instant gratification for a future dated and more pleasurable result often have an executive brain, which is linked with high intelligence. Even children with high IQ are more able to shift their focus from instant rewards than those that are not. On the contrary, low IQ is associated with instant gratification; mostly food gratification and short term pleasure, and also associated with financial hardship.
• Imagination. Inability to invasion a more secure and comfortable future. This usually leads to avoidance of short term pain and replace it with short term pleasure without the knowledge or proper assessment of possible long term suffering
• Feeling of helplessness. If you grew up an a family where people could not deliver in their promises and made you feel victim or vulnerable, you tend to want to take every opportunity to benefit yourself first without wasting any time. This is because you grow up to become very uncertain about whether the people of situation around you will benefit you in the long term or not, so you grab the first possible opportunity to get a reward. There is a negative twist to this one: it can make one to completely depend on someone who is ,more capable of providing gratification all the time and robs you of developing yourself to be independent.

What is wrong with this

The desire for instant gratification has many effects

• It affects the quality of any results that you get. Rome was not build over night. Good things come to those who wait(not those who watch, but those who are patient enough to spend their time adding value to their product by patiently crafting and redesigning).
• It can lead to some form of greed and parasitic tendencies. Such as wanting to attach yourself to someone not to gain the lessons from them, but to eat of their success without your labour. You will see that it was greed and selfish ambitions in that when the host (the blesser, in which ever way you can define it) has lost all or is down on his or her knees, the parasite goes to look for another hostt.
• It robs you of good lessons that time offers:  desire for instant gratification will make you avoid anything that takes time to show results, therefore you will miss the opportunity to learn how to be patient, how to grow something from ground, the discipline and of maturing your own products. Time builds character. You may have heard the statement “wealth skips a generation”: the first generation learns the systems and principles of building things to success, the one who inherits things find them standing and does not know loss, then he can easily squander it and loses all without ability to rise up.
• It also robs you of learning the ability to bounce back. Herman Mashaba, the founder of the old hair product Black Like Me, in the early 90 lost his factory in Pretoria over fire. He was manufacturing over 120 different products for local and international clients. When it burned down, he lost all. Worked hard over 18 months to rebuild the business. If he was looking for instant gratification, he would have collapsed and died of heart attach or stress over the loss. But because building the business from ground up taught him virtue, he survived.
• Financial crisis: Buy now pay later. Instant gratification one of the causes of debt. People want to buy the things they cannot afford with the money they do not have.  Later can lead to gambling, drugs, etc.

      How do you step out of this

• Develop a futuristic thinking. I learned this from my wife. Very focused. Once she set her mind on a goal far ahead, he pushes in all ways to get to it.
• Increase your pain threshold. Instant gratification is also a result of a strong desire to avoid pain. 
• Learn the art of patience. I can explain this enough.
• Learn to count the cost. Often time, instant gratification is paid for by future earnings.

Tips on attaining wealth in a reasonable space

• I don’t think that exist. We all are different. Things will always happen in different times for different people. It is therefore very safe to never think of wealth or personal development in that way. progress happens slowly, allow it to happen as you learn. however, the rate of success  for you, what ever that success, it will depend on your level of mental grow. 
• How long it stays with you will require a lot of things, including the above. 
• Read biographies and apply the principles. A biography can take you through a success story that was build over 50 years. So you can learn 50 year long principles in 5 weeks. But you will have to apply them over time.
• Get mentor-ship or a coach from successful people who sustained their success. That way, you avoid making silly mistakes.

HOW TO MAKE THE BEST OF YOUR LIFE

by Nhlanhla G. Mafarafara

info@farazcreationz.co.za

Life and living is a project and you must work responsibly to get the best results and impact out of your living. If you want to change your way of life, you need to change your way of thinking. If you want to change your thinking, change what you feed your mind. If you want to change what you feed your mind, change your environment. If you want to change your environment, change your attitude. 

·      You experience life according to your internal disposition.

·     Most of the time we experience life as we are, not as things are. Our circumstances around us follows the way we think. If there is nothing in your mind, you become like the environment.  But if your mind is loaded, your environment takes the shape of what’s in your mind.

What does it mean to make the best of your life?

·     It means to find the one thing or few things that make your life awesome and employ your energy towards making it reality. At the end of the day, you will be able to achieve the do the following

• To live a life of significance 
• To make yourself indispensable 
• To live a fulfilling life
• To live  a productive life, and 
• To live a life that leaves a legacy beyond yoursel

What does it include?

It includes your health, your relationships, your career life, your talent management and anything that is of particular significance to you.

Questions to ask before introspection

1.    How does your life look like in 2-5 years? Often times the answers involves a big confusion smile, followed by blinking and silence. The majority of people have no clue what their lives are heading towards. People assume that life progress automatically. That’s a lie. Life progresses by choice. 

2.   What is your biggest area of gifting and what are you doing to industrialise it to manifest it? do you know that if we all worked in the area of our gifting and passion, there probably would be no worry about remuneration and bonuses, because our gifts, when best employed in the right space, they open the door of opportunity for better reward.

WHY IS IT Important?

The following are the reasons why you need to decide to make something worth out of your life:

• To lead a meaningful life
• To be at your best performance
• To enjoy the fruits of your gift and labour
• To be productive in your area of significance. It does not help to run a race and win in the area that’s not your purpose and be told you are number one, but it’s not where you were allocated to perform, therefore it does not count.
• To live a purpose driven life
• To live a life of constant growth
• To be able to leave a legacy for your next generation

Critical steps to make the best of your life

So how do you begin the process of making the best of your life? 

The following key lessons are taken from my book,STEP TO THE NEXT LEVEL

                1. Have a sense of identity. Don’t stumble into life.

a.    Know who you are

b.    Know what you want

c.    Know what you are capable of doing and what you are not. If you know what you are not capable of doing, you will know the areas that need to be developed.

d.    Know your gift and learn to industrialise it (a subject for another day).Dr Mike Murdock says "a gift that is not recognised cannot be celebrated. And a gift that is not celebrated cannot be rewarded."

e.    Develop a sense of competence:  what is that one area that you are good at? That thing that people will call you for.  That one thing that companies will call you and be willing to pay for it? Identify it, develop it and sell it

f.     Zig Zagler says: "You cannot be a wondering generality," you must develop yourself into a "meaningful specific" person.

2. Have a sense of destiny.

a.    Dr Myles Monroe said that "the poorest man on earth is not a man without money, but a man with no vision." Do you know that you do not become and remain a millionaire by stumbling into millions? You become a millionaire by constantly thinking as a millionaire. As you do that, your mind attracts things that materialise your vision.

b.    A sense of destiny is built on the hope and faith that whatever you desire will eventually come to pass.

c.    Know where you are going.

d.    How do you build a sense of destiny

                                          i.    Define what you want to achieve, and why you want it.

                                        ii.    Develop an action plan (how to achieve the plan)

                                       iii.    Define your resources

              3. Know your WHY?

a.    After identifying where you want to go in life, know why you want to be there.

b.    Your mind will always try to oppose anything new that you want to do. You see, when you conceive a new goal, your mind will get excited, sometimes without knowing why? The brain gets excited when new ideas drop by, but get frustrated when new experiences come? Your brain can stretch to anything you want, but will consider any new experience to be a painful thing, and therefore develop multiple reasons why you should not do it. If you follow this thinking, you will spend each day frustrated with the thought of “WHAT IF THINGS DON’T WORK” instead of being excited by the thought of “WHAT IF IT WORKS”

c.    Write down five reasons why you deserve what you want? FIVE positive reasons whys you deserve it? This should indicate the benefits or positive impact of achieving this dream or achieving the goal. 

d.    What meaningful value will achieving this goal bring to you? Read these things daily until they make sense

4. Have a sense of determination

a.    Determination is the quality that makes you to continue trying to achieve something even if its difficult.

b.    Determination is a positive emotional feeling that makes you persevere towards a goal even if obstacles appear

c.    Be relentless. focus on the goal that you want to achieve and refuse to bend your attitude and desires to wards something if a lessor standard, quality and benefit. 

5.  Learn to cease the moment. Learn the value of time. 

a. Bishop Jeremiah the Hermit said something profound on this subject. He said "because by wasting time, we cannot acquire anything; e cannot have anything. By losing time, we lose everything. We can even lose ourselves.

b.    Learn to cease an opportunity in the season of opportunity.

What causes people to live average life (things to avoid)

I think its important to first emphasise the fact that we all have a gift. Some are hard skills, others are soft skills. We all have some form of gifting. What we do with the gift becomes the determinant of whether we go above average or below average.

Some people don’t endeavour to determine their gift. And they don’t assess or examine their life. an unexamined life Is not work living. I will explain this in a moment

Things to avoid on your way to a better life

1. Fear of taking new action.

  

a.    Fear will keep you from acting in your dream because you will feel like things won’t work, people will ridicule you, etc

b.    There are two forms of courage that we all need to develop and understand. as to which one dominate our lives, its our choice.

                                          i.    Courage to begin. You see many dreams die before they are born. There have been many dreams aborted than those that were given birth to. As a matter of fact, God is looking for people who will give birth to His creative ideas on earth. People who will be courageous to fight the mediocre talk from people around them and resist rejection. One friend of mine, when I asked him about his audacious business decisions, he said I refuse fear. Because fear is as real as I make it to be.

                                       iii.    Courage to endure. There are two things that you will need to learn to endure, you decide which one is important to you: endure to live a failed life or endure the pain of temporal challenges while you build your dream.

 2.  Failure to examine your life

a.    Some people are satisfied with living a life that appears as though successful, while in reality they are not.

b.    I have developed eleven questions which I used to examine my life. This came after I met a guy in Pretoria who invited me to invest a whole lot of money into a project he was doing. When he invited me, he looked at me and sow potential for me to have that kind of money. It was so intimating at the time. I chickened out. And then he called me and said “until you deal with that chicken mind, you will never achieve anything”.

c.    So I went to examine my life. I asked myself 21 critical questions. Let me share a few with you. I believe they will help you.

                                          i.    In what areas of my life have experienced great success?

                                        ii.    In what areas of my life have I experienced great failure?

                                       iii.    What am I the most enthusiastic about?

                                       iv.    What have been the cause(s) of my failures and successes?

                                        v.    What was my initial plan in this area?

                                       vi.    In what areas do I want to be most successful?

                                      vii.    What is my next level?

3. Embracing excuses

a.    Excuses are the crutches of the uncommitted (Jantezen Franklin), they walk with them and use them as a form of attaining independence, which never happens.

b.    Its easy to make excuses, however, some of the excuses could cost us more than just money, they may cost your health which money cannot buy.

c.    Some people defeat themselves. They kill their dreams and destroy their lives by making excuses before attempting anything new.

                      i.    They have reasons why things cannot be done: I don’t have money, it is impossible

                                        ii.  They have a reason why they do not deserve things: I’m not smart enough, I’m not good enough. No one can make you inferior without your concern (Eleanor Roosevelt)

                                       iii.    Why there could be rejected: those people are ruthless. They chew people and spit them like gum

                                       iv.    Why they did not make it

                                        v.    How things may fall apart: What if the plan is not solid enough

                                       vi.    How they are not ready for certain things

d.    The majority of these things are just fabricated reasons for not acting progressively to improve today’s circumstances and to build their dreams.

e.    I call excuses building a dream bridge using spaghetti and grass; it easily breaks and keeps you in one place.

     4. Procrastination

Procrastination is the mastery of the poor and a thief of destiny.

     5. Developing an army of lower class persons

a.    Unprogressive people do not associate with people with higher IQ and EQ than themselves. They prefer people who can be subjects to their low mentalities or seemingly good ideas of low quality.

b.    They prefer to keep a company of people who cannot challenge them or question

c.    Ever heard a statement “if you are in a group of two or more people and you always agree on the same things, then one of you is not thinking”

     6. Don’t argue for limitation

a.    BUT

                                 i.     A simple word for excuses and validation of our inadequacies that sometimes do not exist

                                 ii.    If you argue for limitations, you get to keep them.

TOP SIX TIPS TO MAKE THE BEST OF YOUR LIFE

1. Know who you are and what you want. Then go after it as though your life depends on it. 
2. Constantly seek to develop yourself: your mind, your attitude, your personality, your character and your skill. 
3. Associate with people much better than you for sharpening, not for competition. They help to keep inspiration.
4. Give your best at all you do. Lucille Ball said “ I’d rather regret the things I've done than to regret the things I haven’t done.”
5. Have fun doing what you are doing. 
6. Have a relationship with God