WITH MEANING & FULFILMENT
What do you do in a world that demands your submission just so you can stay alive? What do you do when your job and your paycheck demand that you keep doing more, and more and more? How can you stop in a culture that thrives on you exploiting yourself completely?
This is how: You change the culture.
Most of us are living in fear of our darker emotions. And why wouldn’t we, when our culture and media are telling us that our ideal state is one of constantly being happy and productive? And if we aren’t, then hey, here’s a solution to help you BECOME constantly happy and productive.
How many times have you heard people say, isn't it amazing how many beautiful, capable, single women there are in the world? Perhaps the question we should be asking is —
I was always daddy’s little girl. Or so I wanted to believe.
We are being called towards progress. Our own progress, individual and societal. Will we answer the call? Will you?
Or, why it matters that you find your greatness.
If there’s one thing that flattens the playing field amongst all humans, it’s time. We each have one life to live, to give, to dream, to learn, to grow, to overcome where we are and get to where we are going.
Perfectionism is an artificially created disease of constant doing. A delusion that we as humans have a godlike purpose to create a world that doesn’t already exist. An obsessive belief that we are here to fix something that isn’t broken.
I know you’re probably busy working or getting to the end of your day, but I invite you to take a few minutes to slack off, and read this. Go ahead, slack off for 8 minutes.
Today, as I was scratching my cat behind his ears, I realised that the expression of love is simply care — offering care in a way that helps, nurtures or pleasures someone. Which means that if I do things that don't help, nurture or pleasure my own self, then I am not acting out of love for myself.
We are stuck in a vicious cycle in society.
We don’t let ourselves be vulnerable to each other because we don’t trust each other to not hurt us. And we don’t trust each other because we don’t trust ourselves to take care of ourselves.
The first time I gave myself the gift of 10 days silent meditation, I came undone. I went in to simply test my own self discipline — but while there, I experienced the dissolution of everything that I believed to be real. The very physical reality of my own body, but also my sense of my own identity, all revealed itself to be a very convincing illusion.
Ultimately, when you’re depressed, you are mourning your past. You are reliving some part of your life, and all of the emotions that came with it. You are mourning what has already happened, and your inability to change it.
It has been a year of community and consideration. A year of contemplation and connection.
My commitment has been to myself, yet along the way I have collected infinitely valuable wisdom from the beautiful wise souls I met along the way. With humble gratitude, I dedicate this year in review to each one of you, you know who you are.
Something’s been on my mind this year. Something dark and heavy. It’s been crushing my skull down into the ground with its painful, menacing force, threatening to flood my sight with darkness, my mind with hopelessness, and wrap its cold slithering fingers around my throat tight until it squeezes the life out of me.
I believe we have the potential to evolve to our higher consciousness as beings — if we just find the courage to go through our emotions, fears, ecstasies and desires, instead of around them.
What does it really mean to be human?
What makes a coach really good, or even great? Maybe it’s experience as a designer. Especially in branding and identity. A good coach knows how to listen for what matters to you, and reflect it back to you in a way that makes your heart feel a deep-seated recognition of yourself, jumping out of your seat to say, “Yes, exactly! That’s me! You got me. That’s what I want."
I strove for perfection all my life. I was still just half my (tiny) mom’s height when she was already telling me it didn’t have to be perfect, and it was okay the way it was, and I argued and insisted that it absolutely had to be perfect and she just didn’t understand. Why are moms always annoyingly right?
But if I didn’t learn the lesson from her, recently, an unlikely teacher appeared to drive the point home after all: the technology in my life.
Imagine businesses and organisations became places for such conscious development of humanity. Places of play. Of true, open-ended creativity. Of real fulfilment, meaning and purpose. This world is already on its way, and it's time we prepare ourselves for it.
They create and define the culture we live in, what we choose to value and how we measure ourselves up in society: art, design and branding. What if we are overlooking their potential to influence social behaviour enough to not just make business richer, but to solve some of the world’s most critical problems too?
This isn’t the world we were promised when we were growing up.Because really, we weren’t unhappy back then, when we had a lot less.
