Motivational Mondays – 24/08/20

Hello fine readers and welcome back to my Motivational Mondays Post – The only newsletter to start your week with a snap, crackle and pop!

Following a 4:3:2:1 approach, it contains 4 exceptional thoughts from me (ha), 3 admittedly better quotes from others, and 2 things I’ve been reading and/or listening to this week that have helped me grow (in a non sexual manner)!

As always I’ve finished with 1 silly story to lighten your Monday blues… 

Love to all X

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4 x Thoughts From Me:

Don’t pay much attention to your past. The lessons you’ve learnt will be applied at the appropriate moments provided you remain present. If you spend your time looking backward you’re in danger of missing those moments. Then you’ll find history repeating itself. Stay present with one eye on the future. Leave the past where it is.

If you complain you suffer twice. If you blame you deny yourself the opportunity to learn. If you give up both of those habits you’ll go far. 

I do believe if you can find the thing you love – if it happens to pay the bills as well – then you’ve landed a winning lottery ticket. This is the advice that everyone pedals as a possible reality but the truth is many of our passions simply don’t pay the bills. Writing for me is about the why – not about trying to get clickbait or make money. If I tried turning it into a profession I think I’d give it up fairly quickly. I don’t believe there is anything wrong with a half decent job while spending your spare time doing the things that you love instead. This is a more realistic and achievable goal. So long as you make the time to pursue your passion, it doesn’t have to be the thing that pays the bills!

It’s difficult to love other people if you don’t love yourself. It’s difficult to love yourself if you don’t love other people. It works both ways. Ask yourself which you have most trouble with and work on it.

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3 x Quotes From Others:

“Good luck is when opportunity meets preparation. While bad luck is when lack of preparation meets reality.”– Eliyahu Goldratt

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot… Grief is just love with no place to go.” – Jamie Anderson

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.”- Truman Capote

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2 x Things That Helped Me Grow

1 – This fascinating Intelligence Squared podcast episode about The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied. “Race, class, gender. These are the categories that are commonly thought to define our lives. But Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson argues that ultimately the determining factor in societies is a more powerful, unspoken system of divisions: caste.”

MY PERSONAL NOTES AND QUOTES:

• What is caste?An arbitrary graded ranking of human value in a society – where a person’s characteristics determines standing, respect, access to resources, assumptions of beauty and intelligence, whether benefit of the doubt is given etc. – In the United States the metric born out of the slave trade for our caste system is/has been race. We live under the shadow of this metric to this day. 
• Teacher in Iowa experimented with children in her class by assigning caste system based on the colour of their eyes. Anyone with brown eyes was deemed inferior and not allowed the same privileges. They were not allowed to interact with others. Brown eyed children were bullied immediately. They would say oh that’s because he/she is “a brown eyed” if they made a mistake or performed poorly. They actually ended up scoring lower in tests because they believed they were inferior. Something that was undeniably a neutral trait was instantaneously taken to mean something else by these children, simply because that’s what they were told!
• Hitler spoke of his admiration for ‘America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass deaths.’ The Nazis admired the Americans for their caste system – they sent researchers to the United States to understand how they were able to subjugate and subordinate African Americans. Helped to form the Nuremberg laws. 
• The tragedy of caste systems: We make assumptions based on what we can see. Yet you might know nothing about a person but because of the caste system under which you’ve been raised, your assumptions are automatic.
• (In response to receiving racial prejudice) “I don’t take offence. I believe this is simply a problem of the coding we have received as humans from an arbitrary caste system based on race.” 
• The beauty of focusing on the system and structures is you can remove the emotions that get in the way of seeing things clearly. You can understand it’s not necessarily the persons fault for the assumptions she or he has made. 
• The coding is so deeply imbedded that it operates despite all evidence to the contrary. 
• One of the things modern Germany has done so well in is educating its own population. They have turned all the places of previous horror into memorials and centres of education. 
• “Whatever is there won’t go away just because you won’t look at it. Actually it’ll only get worse.”
• If you don’t know you can’t act. Nothing can be expected of you if you do not know. The question is what do you do when you do become aware? You have to be able to see a problem to solve a problem.

2 – This excellent BBC article The ‘Batman Effect’: How having an alter ego empowers you by David Robson (author of The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things). We’ve all heard the mantra ‘fake it till you make it’ – well this article explores how adopting an alter ego – such as batman – can help you overcome your anxieties and achieve your goals. Well worth the read! 3 quotes from the article below.

“Although the embodiment of a fictional persona may seem like a gimmick for pop stars, new research suggests there may be some real psychological benefits to the strategy. Adopting an alter ego is an extreme form of ‘self-distancing’, which involves taking a step back from our immediate feelings to allow us to view a situation more dispassionately.”

“In one study, participants were asked to think about a challenging event in the future, such as an important exam, in one of two different ways. The group in the “immersed” condition were told to picture it from the inside, as if they were in the middle of the situation, whereas those in the “distanced” condition were asked to picture it from afar – as if they were a fly on the wall. The differences were striking, with those taking the distanced viewpoint feeling much less anxious about the event, compared to the immersed group. The self-distancing also encouraged greater feelings of self-efficacy – the sense that they could pro-actively cope with the situation and achieve their goal.”

“The researchers had suspected that the alter ego would be a more extreme form of self-distancing, and the results showed exactly that. While the children thinking in the third person spent about 10% more of the total available time on the task that those thinking in the first person, it was the children inhabiting their alter egos who stuck it out for the longest of all. Overall, they spent 13% more of the total available time on the task than those thinking in the third person (and 23% more than those thinking about their behaviour in the first person).”

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1 x Silly Thing To Make You Smile:

My son came up to me today while I was meditating exclaiming, “Mama’s brushing her tit.”

I shot up!

“Excuse me?,” I said, thinking I must have misheard him.

“Mama’s brushing her tit,” he repeated.

Oh my, I thought. He shouldn’t be looking at that.

“Where is she?,” I asked.

“Mama in bathroom,” he replied.

I poked my head through the open door. Sure enough there was mummy, brushing her teeth!

I was both disappointed and relieved at the same time.

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Till next week…

Have a Happy Monday Everybody!

P.S. Don’t forget to exercise your silly muscle this week!

One bonus question for you all:

What have you been brushing this week? 

(Thank you all so much for reading. If you have any suggestions, thoughts or ideas about today’s weekly post I’d love to hear from you in the comments at the bottom.)

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PREVIOUS MONDAY POSTS:

Motivational Mondays – 17/08/20

Motivational Mondays – 10/08/20

Motivational Mondays – 03/08/20

Motivational Mondays – 27/07/20

Motivational Mondays – 20/07/20

Motivational Mondays – 13/07/20

Motivational Mondays – 06/07/20