"A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials"

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials. – Seneca. Like these raw stones, we need a little friction to become our best. Don't look at the trials before you as obstacles, consider them as a training ground, and improve!

It would be nice if life gave us one challenging situation at a time to deal with. Unfortunately, challenging situations normally roam around and attack in groups. It is often difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel because there are many different things going on at once. The bad news is that life is filled with many challenging situations. As long as we live, we will be confronted with them. The good news is that there is life during and after every challenging situation.

What we need to realize is that challenging situations are designed to bring discouragement, frustration and misery. Otherwise, they won’t be challenging. Resolve ahead of time that the purpose of certain situations is to challenge our happiness and perseverance. Once we’ve come to terms with this reality, we can choose joy and peace, even though they come bearing quite the opposite.

Focus on solutions rather than situations. When we focus on our problems, we give them strength and feed their growth. When we focus on problems, our problems take us where they want us to go. Generally, this is a place of despair, depression, uncertainty, and dead-ends. When we follow our problems, we tend to see our glass as half empty.

When we focus on solutions, we take control. By focusing on solutions, we can start the process of steering our lives in the direction we want to go. When we focus on solutions, our lives are more productive because our goal is to exhaust all our options. This change in perspective causes us to see a glass that is half full.

When we focus on solutions, we become aware of what we have at our disposal, and we are more inclined to seize new opportunities. In most cases, we have more than we need. Living a solution-oriented lifestyle allows us to use all our resources, including our intellect, as we navigate life. Moreover, it allows us to dwell in gratitude for our provisions. When dealing with bothersome circumstances, a grateful heart goes a long way. When we realize all that we have at our disposal, it should make us dwell in a place of gratitude, indefinitely.

As crazy as this might sound, challenging circumstances serve the purpose of teaching us how to enjoy the moment. Life is a series of highs and lows, but we can’t allow our lows to snatch our joy and dictate our feelings. Learn to enjoy every moment of every day despite what life presents. The more we practice, the better we will be at enjoying the moment. Focusing on solutions keeps our thoughts in the moment, and what we can accomplish in the now.

Challenging circumstances provide us with a story we can use to empower, motivate and inspire others. However, we can only inspire others with our story if we continuously choose positive energy. By doing so, we will become a living point of reference. Our testimony will be that it is possible to cope when things fall apart.

Overcoming challenges is a profound testimony to those we encounter. Human beings are programmed to connect with each other, and one way to connect is through stories of how we have overcome. Many times we think we’re pioneering a problem that no one else has ever encountered. Testimonies offer hope when it seems as though all hope is gone. Hope is all we need to conquer fear, and hope is all we need to envision the light at the end of the tunnel.

So, embrace life, including the lows, because they help us to better appreciate the highs.

Technology is rapidly growing at an increased rate with every passing year. Computers are storing more memory, the internet is becoming faster and more widespread, graphics are getting ever more realistic, and robots are even being made to do tedious tasks of which we don’t want to do.

Modern society often appears to be a competition and a race to achieve the greatest technological advances possible, and everything that is nature-made is beginning to seem quaint and even primitive. Yet there is nothing at all basic about anything that nature makes. It seems ironic too that ideas for new cutting-edge technology are based on what nature can do.

Firstly, nature created life and everything we need to survive. Beginning with us humans, every organ in our body is made and positioned perfectly in order for us to live. Every single detail has been attended to, right down to our microscopic cells and DNA. Our brain is also at least a hundred times more advanced than the most powerful computer to date. In fact, we’re still not able to understand even a quarter of what nature has made our brains do.

Personally, my favorite era of human history was the time of cavemen, because us humans were simply who we naturally are. We took full advantage of our existence and every bodily function we possess. All of our instincts from that time remain with us today because while technology is advancing, our bodies are the same as they were all those years ago. I’m so fascinated by our primitive history that covering each instinct of ours would fill the length of several blogs.

I certainly must say that nature’s creation of our defensive actions is absolutely incredible. In the likelihood of danger, adrenaline is sent through our body prior to us even having full awareness of the situation consciously. Our body becomes temporarily stronger to either fight or run for our life.

It’s amazing how every animal and insect’s lifestyle is accommodated by different bodily functions. Most nocturnal animals have much more advanced eyes than humans do so that they can hunt in the dark. They generally also have razor sharp hearing so that they can hear anything as soft as the heartbeat of an enemy up to a mile away. Plants too are much more sophisticated than what most of us give them credit for. Nectar is exposed so that bees can scatter pollen (any being’s ability to reproduce is truly incredible), and most flowers are able to close their petals when there’s less sunlight so that they’re protected during the night. Something else that is incredible is the ways in which nature has adapted our own human bodies, as well as those of plants and animals, to suit Earth’s weather and climate.

The environment extends beyond Earth as well, into the deepest mysteries of the universe. Mentioning all of them would also fill the length of several blogs. Though I must mention here that it’s amazing how time itself can be changed by sources of gravity far more extreme than what we experience on Earth.

It’s perfectly understandable that various religions believe that there are divine creators who keep our lives on this planet in order. The concept of this perfect chemistry of nature being mere coincidence is very difficult for many of us to understand. Owing to that, my personal belief is that there is a divine creator of life. Yet each and every person I know (including myself) has their own beliefs.

Perfection indicates a state where no improvement is possible. It is the ceiling of what can be or is in the realm of possibility to be achieved. It’s the pinnacle. A full stop. This is certainly possible when it comes to emotions – where we define an emotional moment as the best it could ever get…or as perfect. A perfect kiss, a perfect gesture, a perfect embrace, etc., are relevant. There are no external benchmarks for one’s own emotions and feelings, which means they can be considered accurate statements and sentiments.

he most painful experiences in life may come with an eventual upside, by promoting the ability to appreciate life’s small pleasures, scientists have said.

A new study suggests that people who have gone through divorce and coped with the death of a loved one, are better equipped to enjoy the little things in everyday life in the long-run.

A total of 14,986 adults were studied to see whether their exposure to life’s hardships affected their ability to enjoy positive experiences.

If you think about why we feel the need to be perfect in the first place, it all goes back to self-worth. If we have a strong desire to be perfect then we may use the idea of perfection as a way to validate ourselves as worthy and valuable human beings.In psychology, perfectionism is a personality trait characterized by “a person's striving for flawlessness and setting excessively high performance standards, accompanied by overly critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others' evaluations.”Can any business be at this state? Let’s reflect on that for a moment. It would be a state where:

• Shareholders have achieved the highest value possible
• There is no room for further innovation
• Employees and customers are as happy as they can be
• Revenues and profits are as best as they can be…at a pinnacle…

If any business chose to define a moment like this in its existence, then that is the point from where their business would start dying. There is nowhere up from that point forward!

The same can be said for any professional entity – be it operations, sales, R&D, etc.

On the other hand, excellence is a state of current brilliance, but it can be improved upon.

In 1991, Carl Lewis defined excellence in 100m racing by clocking in at 9.86 seconds. In 2009 Usain Bolt’s world record run was clocked at 9.58 seconds. There were 8 other world records between 1991 and 2009…all redefining excellence in the 100m race. Note that there will never be a perfect 100m race – there will always be excellence that will await betterment.

Take any example of innovation and evolution such as automobiles, space travel, aircraft, phones, computers, fashion, etc…excellence is achieved and then changes continually.

ways to achieve excellence

1. Being the best you can be

No matter what the field be, by each team member being the best that they can be, as a collective the team will be at its best – as a result achieving their best!

2. Benchmark against the best

It is not enough just being your best. Benchmark against the best in the same faculty in order to determine what the aspirational stretch is.

3. Continuous Improvement is the name of the game

What was excellent yesterday can be improved upon today. Even by improving by 1%, the definition of excellence would be redefined.

4. Desire to innovate

Comfort in the status quo never leads to improvements. The desire to innovate fuels challenging the status quo and making changes happen.

5. Purposeful leadership

It takes a strong organizational purpose that creates the demand for excellence in order for it to breed within the environment. Leaders of the organization are responsible for providing and permeating such a purpose within the organization.

As a leader, I would much rather focus my team on a real and tangible aspiration – achieving excellence through being the best you can be and doing the best that can be done!

So, next time you mention a desire for something to be perfect at work, and it is not an emotional statement, correct yourself. You are actually seeking excellence.

A Blessing in Disguise?

Whenever something goes wrong in my life; which does happen occasionally despite being the "super life coach", my friends always tell me that it might be "a blessing in disguise", this has happened fairly often recently so much so that I was prompted to look up the origin of this expression. What I found was this quote by Oscar Wilde "What seems to us bitter trials are often blessings in disguise", beautifully written.

Protection from Ba-stet

A blessing is referring to your deities favor and protection, so a blessing in disguise would mean that you are no longer favored or protected, at least at first glance; but perhaps some good will come out of this. It sounds pretty bad, like some sort of punishment from the almighty but you are going to be blessed in the end. How you feel about this of course really depends on how bad the "punishment" was and how quickly you can recover.

One of my favorite expressions is; "you cannot change the past, you can only change the future". As humans we can learn from experience but we must kiss the past goodbye and move on to better things. You can definitely change your future and you can make sure that you do not make the same mistakes again; this perfect quote attributed to Albert Einstein,"Insanity: doing the same thing over again and expecting different results". It may have taken a genuis to think of this but it is so true!

Keep Calm

There is hope in this message; when bad things have occurred whether or not they were punishment from on high, bad luck or a repetition of past mistakes; it's time to just learn, change and move on to a better and brighter future, enlightened by past experiences and renewed by the new challenges ahead.

To endure is not enough. We all face hardships in our lives, and to simply go through them without complaining is not enough to constitute a life well lived. One must pursue hardships, aim high enough to experience the greatest trials, face fears so great that an average man would crumble.

Don’t pat yourself on the back because you’ve endured some kind of trial. Realize, in order to live well and to flourish, you need trials to forge the manly virtues and qualities that grand goals depend on.

Go into the dark corners of the world. Attempt what others are afraid to do. Endure when most would quit and give up. Persist longer, strive harder, get up earlier, work harder, and do all of the things that are becoming unpopular in our modern politically correct society.

In short, seek our trials because they make you the man you want to become. It’s trials that will help you become a winner.

So in conclusion, technological advances are somewhat good. Yet what we often find ourselves taking for granted, or dismissing as basic, is far greater than any man-made device could ever hope of being.