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Health & Wellness, Leadership

The Most Interesting Lesson I Received from a BOIL!

For most of my professional career, I have been fascinated with the human body and how it works. Even before I started working as a chiropractor, I was intrigued by how we work and what we can do.

I have had various illnesses, food poisoning, aches and pains, a surgery, acne and more. I still have something pop up, pardon the pun, every now and then. Life does not come without the necessary feedback you require in order to grow and evolve. It can come in the form of physiological challenges but it can also come in other forms too. Some of these might include; relationship struggles, financial debt, the loss of loved ones, social isolation and so many others.

The point I am making is that you cannot grow without having markers, like these, to keep you on course.

This leads me to the reason for writing this. For the past week I have experienced my first boil. Some of you may know what that is. Some of you may have heard about boils from the bible. It was one of the ten plagues in Egypt. Those of you who haven’t, allow me to illuminate you. If you have a weak stomach, this may push you over the edge but in order to serve the purpose of explaining the lesson, some depth of detail needs to be explored.

I’ve spent the past week researching this ‘thing’ I have. I have looked on Google, asked a friend, looked in a health book that I own and looked on Google again. I discovered that people who get boils are carriers of a type of staphylococcal bacteria. This was a slight blow to my ego, when I discovered this, as I wondered to myself – ‘Is this just the beginning?’ Will I be a boil creating person for the rest of my life?

After adjusting from my initial shock that I’m harbouring a harmful bacteria, I wanted to know exactly what was going on with my body. As you can probably tell, I’m quite curious. So, my exploration took me deeper into the cavernous realms of my little friend. It seems that this bacteria can travel down a hair follicle or enter into the skin through various other means and start wreaking havoc. Once it has invaded, an infection starts to develop. What that means is, I developed what some people refer to as a blind pimple. You know the ones that hurt like hell but you can’t do anything about? The ones where you just have to grin and bare it? Well that’s where it all began. Little did I know, that this blind pimple would become something else. A whole new adventure in my life.

You might be wondering, at this point, what the lesson is in all of this. Bare with me. I’m getting there.

After a couple of days of my research, finally figuring out what I have and grinning and baring it, I decided to take my first bit of action. Out of pure frustration and irritation with my body, and against my own moral code, I went to the pharmacy to buy some Dettol and Polysporin – the ‘anti’ bacterial avengers. I came home, ran a hot bath, poured in 4 capfuls of Dettol and let things come to head, so to speak. The Polysporin was there, just in case all hell broke lose and I needed to do clean up.

That wasn’t as effective as I wanted it to be, so I then asked myself two very useful questions. How is this demon boil serving me and what would be the downsides be if it didn’t take up residence on my arse? I thought to myself – “there is no way this thing is helping me. It’s causing me pain and discomfort. How can something that creates so much irritation be helpful?” After about 2 hours, I managed to get through answering these questions. Magically, my emotional charge dissipated and I started feeling grateful for my new resident. It had taught me something that I’d be thinking about for a while, but hadn’t taken action on yet. More on that soon.

Once I had completed this exercise I set for myself, I then ramped up the treatments. I had two more Dettol baths and, after some research and chatting to a genius healer, it was time for the next step. Just so you know, before I went down this path, I tried Chamomile tea bags and tomatoes.

I discovered that onions are one of the most amazing healers around so I grabbed one, chopped it until no more chopping could be done, added some salt to it, placed it on a wound pad and wrapped it on tight. The instructions were to leave it on for two hours. My wife wasn’t too excited with this decision of mine. I stunk! For those of you out there who have ever thought of giving yourself some space from someone in your life, stick an onion on you and you’ll be good to go.

The onion solution was tried and tested twice and it certainly started to bring things to a head. The lesson revealed itself on the second trial. I was lying on the couch, reading an inspiring book about becoming an entrepreneur, when I fell asleep and almost went into a meditative state. I lay there wondering what this boil represented about my life, symbolically, and what everything I was doing to reduce it, meant to me on my journey.

In life, when we’re striving to achieve what we want, things can take time to come to a head. In fact, it often takes a lot longer than we expect it to. We sit there hating the process, feeling frustrated and irritated by the challenges we’re faced with and all we want to do is rush things along. As most of you may know, pushing yourself further than you can handle tends to bring about unsightly results. We land up feeling even more discomfort than we did before, we get stopped in our tracks and are forced by some feedback system to slow down and take one step at a time.

My lesson had these elements embedded within it but it also indicated something else that we all go through. When we take the time to open ourselves up, go on our journey and share who we are with the world, we can sometimes get caught in a trap where we introvert again and hold ourselves back. Usually this happens when we feel guilty about something we’re doing or have done or maybe because we’re judging our actions and intentions. At this stage of my journey, I did that. As a consequence, I grew a new best friend to alert me.
The challenge with allowing myself to get to this point, is that the process of revealing who I am and sharing myself again has been a painful endeavor. Boils, like acne or many other skin challenges have an undertone of anger. Depending on how much you hold yourself back, will depend on how angry and aggressive your feedback will be. Mine was a Mount Vesuvius type of response. When you consciously hold yourself back, you will land up developing the A,B,C,D’s of negativity. Anger and aggression, blame and betrayal, criticism and challenge and despondency, despair and depression.

So, the lesson of having a boil is – be who you are and don’t hide yourself away, no matter what comes your way. Otherwise you’ll create a new best friend just like I did.

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Entrepreneurship, Leadership

A Personal Investment is the Wisest One You Can Make

When it comes to discovering who you are, figuring out your purpose or even trying to manage your life in business, in your finances or even in your relationships, one of the greatest investments you can ever make, is in yourself. That’s not to say that it’s the only investment you can make in your life, in order to achieve what you want, but it is certainly the wisest and most powerful investment at your disposal.

So the question is, how do you make such an investment into yourself? Is it monetary? Is it receiving more education? Is it expanding your social network or making stronger connections with your family and loved ones? Or could it be that it’s time to head off to the gym, see your naturopath, chiropractor or acupuncturist for a physical re-evaluation? Well, the answer to these questions depends solely on where you’re currently at on your journey in life. If you’re in debt, for example, and all the other areas of your life seem or appear to be in order for now, what could you do to reduce that debt? Most people would focus on the debt, how much they owe, how devastating it is, how it’s ‘preventing’ them from living their lives to the fullest and how it’s the root of all evil in their world. This a common misperception that the majority of people have, who land themselves up in debt. In this example, there are many lessons to learn from this experience and a number of ways to make a personal investment to alter the outer challenges that you may be facing.

To continue along this track, debt is the universes way of helping you learn more about who you are. From your perspective, it may appear like a mountain, standing in your way, yet it was one that you unconsciously chose to create. It is an assistant, something you recruited to help you understand the value of money, fair exchange and the value of who you are as a human being. It’s something that the universe has always had in play in the world, from the beginning of time as we know it. When there have been droughts around the world, specific countries have responded by preserving their water supply or creating alternative solutions to preserve the long term viability of the countries water resources. There is a reason why the planet behaves in this manner and why we, as human beings, do the exact same thing. It’s one of the Laws of Conservation. There is always a balance and everything is designed to wake us up to the hidden order of the universe or the authenticity of who we are and our inspired mission.

You may still be wondering how making a personal investment into yourself is going to help you solve your debts or manage your relationships more effectively or even transform the trajectory of your career. Well, it’s all very simple, yet as we all know, nothing is only ever simple. This is the beauty of every action we take and every moment we experience. There is always another side – an opposing force. That force is designed to keep us in check.

Think about this for a moment, when you make an investment in your business or in your children’s lives or in your relationship with your wife or partner, what’s your reason for doing so? Why do you do it? What are you aiming to get back as a return? Well, in business, it might be a promotion or a salary increase or a bonus or even a new partnership to help your business expand. In your children’s lives, it might be to develop their minds, activate their creative potential or even give them the opportunity of achieving what they’d love to do with their lives. In your relationship with your wife or partner, it may be so that you can have time for yourself when you get home, a stronger physical or emotional connection or because your partner is an asset on your journey. Investments are always made to increase the growth potential of whatever it is that you’ve chosen to invest in. That’s why we make investments – to help our asset value increase, as well as assist the area or people we’ve invested in, to grow in value too. One of the places that we forget to invest in, however, is predominantly within ourselves. From our perception, there’s no guarantee of a return, it’s a risky investment and it may not pan out the way we expect it too.

We don’t place a high enough value on ourselves to pursue an investment strategy. The doubts or lack of belief we have accumulated about ourselves, over time, are one of the major reasons for this lack of action. We’re also scared and sometimes, even feel guilty or shameful about doing so. How are your self motivated or inspired pursuits going to truly serve you? How are they actually going to assist or serve the people in your lives? If we don’t take the time to truly answer these questions and probe deeper we may, in effect, miss out on some of the greatest opportunities in our lives.

One of, or in my opinion, the wisest investments you will ever make in your entire life is in you. The reason why I’d suggest such a crazy and outlandish notion is as follows. You are in control of every action or reaction that occurs in your day to day life. You are in control of your debt as much as you’re in control of your wealth. You are in control, to a degree, of how your relationship grows or dissolves. You are in control of whether you create an illness or dis-ease in your body or whether you introduce wellness into it. You are at the epicenter of every major crisis or challenge that befalls you, whether that be on a personal level, professional level, social level, family level, physical level, spiritual level, mental level or financial level. In order to truly create change in your life, focussing on the challenge in front of you, will only create more of what you’re trying to avoid. However, when you make a conscious decision to look inside of yourself and take the time to work out who you are, what you are about, what inspires you and what’s truly most meaningful to you, you will uncover the solutions to every single crisis that you experience in life. Instead of you perceiving your experiences only as challenges, you will uncover the many blessings and opportunities that they have to offer, at the same time.

Personal investing is the key to personal growth. It is the advice I offer anyone who comes across my path. The potential value, personal investing holds, is limitless. There is no boundary to how much you can create within your life by taking this necessary and wise action step into the future. In essence, it’s the key to business and financial success. It is the key to social and family upheavals. It is the ‘cure’, as some would see it or label it, to the many physical challenges that have been part of our lives. No other investment is as important as this one. We are often told not to be selfish, not to focus on who we are and even to compromise or sacrifice what’s important to us for others. Instead we are told that we should give to others, that we need to be kind and not cruel, that we have to support people when they’re victimising themselves, instead of challenging them to grow and ultimately, that we ought to be humble because arrogance is a terrible way to respond to people. In saying that, I do believe it is important to be able to give, to be kind, to be selfless, to offer support and lend a hand and present ourselves with an equal dose of humility, but not at the expense of who we are. That one-sided approach to life will inevitably create and attract the very challenges, debts, illnesses and crises that we wish to avoid.

You are the most valuable person in your life. When you begin to truly realise that, understand that, appreciate that, respect that, recognise the value in that and own it, you will create the space to open yourself up to the world around you. In doing so you will give the world around you an opportunity to invest back into you, to the degree you’ve achieved it within yourself. So, keep this in mind. When you’ve invested that much time, energy and money in yourself and you’ve empowered yourself in all the areas of your life, you will then stand on the shoulders of giants. You will reach heights that you may have once thought or believed to be impossible or just a dream.

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Leadership

Follow Your Souls Calling

I often get asked by people, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘What am I supposed to do with my life? Can you help me figure out what that is?’ I reply by saying that what you’re supposed to do with your life is what you love to do. It’s that simple. It’s never what other people want you to do. Usually, those same people look at me or hear me and wonder how can they do that? Some of them have families with children, some of them have debts to pay, some have other commitments and they see that answer as something that becomes incredibly overwhelming.

I’ve come to learn in my life, that every single human being on this planet has a calling and this calling or purpose is governed by their soul or their inner being. No matter how hard we try to avoid that directive, we can’t really stray from it because we’re intrinsically destined to fulfill it. It is something that we innately love to do. We spend time, energy and money to make it a reality in our lives. We are disciplined, reliable and focussed when it comes to applying ourselves towards it. Our thoughts and conversations are consumed by it. There is no part of our lives where we can escape it.

When I get asked this question and I give my response, that is the solution. That is the answer to the question on most people’s minds. If we took the time to look at what our lives actually demonstrate; not what we want them to demonstrate, but what they actually do demonstrate, then we’d uncover some incredible clues as to what’s most important to us. Something else that I find quite useful is to look back in time, usually in the earlier years of our lives, and remember those activities that we constantly engaged in. What did we do? What were our reasons for doing it? Why did we love it so much? More clues, more answers and more revelation.

As you may know by now, Be Who You Wanna Be International is focussed on empowering children to fulfil their potential. So, when it comes to empowering young children and, even, teenagers, it would be wise to observe what it is that they love doing. It would be a useful exercise to pay attention to the areas of their lives where they show the greatest degree of dedication. What I’ve come to discover, is that the fastest way to achieve anything you want in life is to follow your souls calling. The more you focus on what that is, once you give yourself the opportunity of seeing it, you will increase your level of fulfilment, self-worth and the possibilities for you to achieve what you want out of life.

Watch, observe, pay attention to and listen to what your kids are inspired by. You will learn more about them by doing so and it may actually open you up to your own inner visions, dreams and mission. They have what it takes to be the next Einstein, Jobs, Branson or Mandela. Create the space for them to do so, assist them to dedicate themselves to their souls calling and watch the magic happen.

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