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
- Know who you are and what you want. Then go after it as though your life depends on it.
- Constantly seek to develop yourself: your mind, your attitude, your personality, your character and your skill.
- Associate with people much better than you for sharpening, not for competition. They help to keep inspiration.
- 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.”
- Have fun doing what you are doing.
- Have a relationship with God
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