I am grateful to have had a pretty good life for the most part. Yes, I definitely had some very dark days growing up and yes horrible things happened but I would like to consider them to be apart of my turning point. The last 5 years, have been the most amazing and the biggest personal growth I've experienced in all areas of my life on so many levels. It was hitting rock bottom and being a mum that made me finally make the decision to begin to step into the life I have always dreamed of. I wanted my daughter to always pursue whatever she loves in life without hesitation, limiting beliefs, fear of judgment because she saw me do it. That was my epiphany in life and I finally realised my purpose and why and it became my driving force to succeed. I have passionately, obsessively and consistently worked on becoming the woman God destined me to be. So in this week's Blog, I wanted to share my top 4 tools that I religiously live by that helped me grow exponentially.
TAKE ACTION
Taking Action is more effective than dreaming and trying to execute a perfect plan. When you take action, you have a blueprint or a personal guide that you can follow moving forward. You will be able to gain skills and learn all the experiences that it takes to grow and achieve your goal. I got started on things that didn’t really look good at first but I knew I just had to begin somewhere. My first business was Life Artistry and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Two years later, I started up Maia Dreams as a sole Trader. Over three and a half years later, we finally transitioned into Maia Dreams Limited. This has been a 6 year learning Journey. If I had waited until I had a perfect website, the perfect programmes, the perfect logo, the perfect pitch, the perfect graphics and plan, I would not be where I am today. There are many things I do that could always be better but for me, taking action creates the momentum that I need so I can learn, improve and grow. Taking action offers me the experiences I need to have clarity on what my next steps should be.
BE CONSISTENT
Being consistent is the fastest way to help me grow after taking action. Unless I take action, how can I be consistent? Being consistent has allowed me to lay out my own path. In life, there are times we aim to achieve our goal but when we get to the stage where things become really difficult, we tend to give up. I’m glad I learnt that if I keep going no matter how hard the struggle is, I will get closer to reaching my goals. I developed a programme called Confident Me in 2009 and have been delivering this programme until today. I can tell you that I have wanted to give up so many times. I have been rejected, undervalued and judged. At times, it has been a lonely road where I was confused and unsure of my next step. But I continued my dedication to learn more than anyone else about this work and I never gave up. I have consistently worked on further developing it, finding the right team to support me, learn how to deliver something of value and grow the programme. If you stay consistent, you will eventually improve in so many ways from how you do it, the time it takes, the skills you gain, the lessons you learn. If you give up before you build traction and momentum, you have nothing to gain but a dream locked in your mind.
MONITOR YOUR THOUGHTS
I am a passionate and emotional being who has a thousand thoughts a minute. Which is why my last solo show was actually called ‘A thousand thoughts a minute’. My mind is always on overdrive if I don't reign in my thoughts. But I have learnt to consistently check in with myself, monitor my thoughts and emotions. Science says that we have anywhere between 6,000 to 120,000 thoughts a day. What that means is we have a lot of thoughts a day. If we don’t monitor them and have an idea of what we are thinking about then we are allowing a lot of thoughts to go unchecked. For example if we are saying to ourselves I am dumb 50 to 2000 times a day, after a week that is 350 to 14,000 times. After a month that is 10,850 to 62,000 times and after a year you have said it 124,600 to 712,000 times to yourself. What if we are saying we are beautiful a 100 times a day? What is the impact on our mindset if we are telling ourselves we are dumb or we are beautiful that many times? Doing that consistently and for that duration creates a habit that can become your set of beliefs. A simple indication of what we are thinking about is if you are not feeling good then you are likely not thinking good thoughts. If you are not thinking good thoughts then, you are likely not feeling good. Another way to identify what you constantly think about is your beliefs. If you believe you are beautiful, amazing or ugly then that is what you have been saying regularly. So I have to monitor my thoughts and emotions constantly to ensure that I am not letting them contradict what I want in life.
TAKE OWNERSHIP
Taking ownership of my life has been powerful and empowering. My past is my biggest lesson where I gauge what I want and what I don't want in my life right now. Some things that happened to me as a child were so unfair, traumatizing which made me lack faith in myself. I had to learn to identify some of my weaknesses, my old patterns of thinking and learn new tools to teach myself. It began with taking ownership of everything that happened in my life, the good, the bad and everything in between. And instead of blaming others for my past or for where I was in life, I decided to take ownership and responsibility so I can begin to build a better, happier, more successful life for me and my daughter.
The only way we can achieve our goals in life and live our dreams is by building it one brick at a time. But before we can do that, we have to have a plan, prepare the land, lay the foundation before that can even happen. Sometimes, in our quest for instant gratification, we become unwilling to put in the hard work. I am grateful to have taken action, stayed consistent, encouraged and pushed myself to keep going when it got hard and took ownership of building a better life for me and my daughter. I can honestly say that I absolutely love my life, who I am and who I surround myself with. It is a journey of ups and downs but these tools helped me stay on track when the going got tough. Nothing we really want in our loves is easy but more often that not, they're always worth the journey.
Photography Credit: Charlotte Anderson
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