I was raised by parents who made it a point that whenever one of us left the house they looked “well put”. They would always say “when you walk out of this door you’re representing your family name, represent us well mntanam awukhuliswanga ziindlavini (Last part translation- my child you weren’t raised by hooligans)”.
It took me a while to actually realise that they weren’t just being pernickety about my fashion sense but were inadvertently prepping me for the real world. They mentally trained me about the importance of looking elegant and graceful while paddling for dear life under the stresses that come with Adulthood.
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Firstly, I believe that anything that’s towards personal growth starts with loving yourself. To be graceful you need to start with learning to be gracious with yourself and with learning how to love yourself. Moving through life gracefully requires that you be self-fulfilled and the road to self-fulfillment can be very lonely and painful which is where the graciousness comes in. You’re constantly revisiting your traumas because the only way to fully understand yourself is by exploring all parts of you; the good and the bad. To avoid losing yourself you need to be gentle and kind when doing this.
HOW TO GRACEFULLY PADDLE THROUGH LIFE
- 1. BREATHE
I cannot express how taking deep breaths helps with calming and grounding yourself when faced with challenges. What usually happens when we faced with challenging moments is that our heart races, our blood pumps fast and our breath becomes quick and shallow. The best way to handle this is to stabilise our breath by taking a deep breath and/ or breathing slow. Helps you keep a level head too.
Ask yourself:
* How can I calm myself right now?
* Do I want to flee or fight? Why?
* Take deep breaths.
- 2. CHECK YOUR THOUGHTS
I’m a huge believer in that our thoughts shape our reality. As an ex-negative-serial-thinker, I can assure you that once you invest enough time in learning how to check what your thoughts are about and when negative you interject them with positive ones, the mind does that automatically for you on days when you feel it a little bit hard to do so. I have days when I can’t adult and the only thing that I feel like doing is rotting in bed replaying that I’m not good enough or not worthy and because of the amount of work I’ve put in myself, my mind deals with these for me automatically now. I always catch myself and quickly the positive thoughts would rush in like “No! I am worthy regardless of whatever I’ve gone through. I’m working on me, always.” And it’s been an amazing experience to have my mind do this automatically now.
Ask yourself:
* What am I thinking about?
* Why?
* How are these thoughts making me feel?
* If negative: How can I change them?
* If positive: How can I use them to fuel me?
- 3. LEARN HOW TO DEAL WITH REJECTION ASAP
I really want to cover this fully on a different blog post that I am still doing research for but, to give a summary of how you can do this. Firstly, understand that there’s NOTHING wrong with you! Read that again and again and again. Secondly, understand that there’s nothing wrong with the person that rejected you either. The truth is people do what they want, with whom they want and when they want to. A great part of handling rejection is in how you look at being rejected. Instead of feeling or thinking like it means you’re lacking, take it as “the universe is redirecting me to something better.” Continuously believing that the Universe is always working in your favour, allows you to cultivate a more healthy approach towards rejection and attract more opportunities towards you.
Ask yourself:
* Why is this rejection hurting me so bad?
* What can I do to get over the feeling?
* What could this be redirecting me to?
- 4. LEARN TO TRUST THE PROCESS
Trusting the process is really an exercise on strengthening your faith basically, which again ties back to what I said about believing that the Universe is always trying to see you win. Once you hop into this energy of things always working out for you, you attract that very same energy back. You see the world and everything else that happens in it as a sign or a means in helping you paddle through life gracefully. I did a whole blog post on what “trusting the process” means and you can read that here.
Ask yourself:
* Why am I stressing/panicking/scared/anxious?
* How can I lessen what’s making me feel like this?
* What other ways/things can I do to help me mitigate this feeling in future?
- 5. HAVE LESS TO NO EXPECTATIONS
Let’s be honest, the reason why most are miserable in the world’s simply because their lives or things in their lives aren’t going the way they want. As humans we always have expectations, if we do something we want something back. It’s in our nature and though to some extent having expectations is good for us, we overdo it by setting toxic and unrealistic expectations for ourselves that are based on what we see around us and NOT what would work best for us. We base our expectations on comparison, we compare what others have with what we have and then drench ourselves with expectations of reaching the same level as these people and if we don’t succeed we crumble. JUST STOP! Learn to do things that benefit YOU! With having healthy expectations.
Ask yourself:
* What do I expect from myself?
* How will this benefit my future self?
* How can I enhance this to make it more attainable for myself?
- 6. And last but certainly not least; CULTIVATE RESILIENCE
It’s been pretty interesting to observe how people perceive resilience as something that can be ‘had’, like it’s this esotoric trait that only the blessed posses because I mean we ALL have the ability to BE resilient. In fact, I love this definition of what Resilience is from the The Centre for Science of Human Resilience which says that Resilienece is “The capacity and process of enduring, overcoming, and being strengthened by life stressors and experiences of adversity.” I love how they define it more like a process which you can develop overtime. A practice if you may.
Ask yourself:
* What steps can I take to help me with this situation?
* What healthy coping mechanisms can I develop?
* How can I get mentally better at handling tough situations?
And before I go, I love this quote by Michael Caine.
And also, seasons greetings to you and yours.
And Remember; you’re worthy, always!