Category: Grow

Awareness

Posted on by Antoinette Njombua-Fombad

Being self-aware is about knowing where you are in     relation to who you are, and why you are there, accepting your imperfections and strengths. 

Ask yourself:

Who am I as an individual?

What are my strengths, opportunities, and obstacles?

Am I at my personal and professional capacity?

Do my goals and values align with my strengths and skills?

What is holding me back and what are the deeper roots of these barriers?

It is impossible to be your best self when you are not aware of who your current self is.”

Having a developed sense of self-awareness, allows you to

  • know and understand your feelings, emotions, and desires. 
  • know what you value and why.
  • Helps you separate your personal and professional roles when needed. 
  • Keeps you aware of issues of bias and self-interest.
  • Understand how to control, correct, or compensate for any shortcomings.

One major factor that prevents people from becoming self-aware is Fear.

  • Fear of having to accept things about ourselves we are uncomfortable with.
  • Fear of knowing that we might need to change certain things about ourselves we aren’t ready to face. 
  • Fear of how change might affect our relationships and our lives in general. 

But recognize that being self-aware is one of the most freeing states to be in. You are free from overdependence on how the world wants to receive you, so you truly live how the world should accept you. Accepting yourself for who and all that you are at any given moment, will improve your chances of understanding your capacity to adequately work toward finding your solutions and building your relationships.          

What Helps? Practicing —->

✅ Mindfulness, by focusing with your full attention on any given moment without judgment, to help you connect yourself and your surroundings. 

✅ Self-reflection, by minimizing mindless personal and external distractions, and looking inward, focusing on your current thoughts, emotions, and consciousness. 

✅ Internal validation, by avoiding a dependence of approval from the outside, but rather from your independent internal meaning.

Awareness is a main foundation that influences how we pursue our goals, build solid trusting relationships, control our destinies, and enable positive change. 

Be Glorious!

Posted on by Antoinette Njombua-Fombad

You don’t necessarily need a PhD to fulfill your purpose. But you can, and WILL, definitely be a PhD after journeying to and through it.

We are all uniquely great and atypically gifted with many talents in this life. With intended nurturing, they become a part of our nature. We grow to recognize them, and become naturally identifiable by them. Understandably, the pressures and stressful influences of life often create barriers in the way of owning and experiencing them in their truest forms. Whatever it is, don’t take it for granted. Respect it, and use it to elevate your life in any and every way, for it is one of the things that make you superhuman.

Core values

Our core values are significantly influenced by our immediate environments, play a major role in the choices we make, and the directions we take. As adults, we have earned both rational and emotional maturity to reassess our core values, keeping what serves us most, while adding or editing others to form values more suited to who we have become. Entering this realm of your life means you have the freedom of choosing to alter your future.

Your body and mind might resist, but your spirit will not allow it. Trust your intuition, have faith in your capabilities, and as paradoxical as it may sound, be ready to feel authentically uncomfortable.  Just like every system is built, your energy will gradually shift you in appropriate doses to sync your innate abilities with your state of mind. You will inventory everything you have learned as far back as before it became muscle memory to you. There is a reason it comes naturally to you, it is evolved, ripened and ready to freely co-exist as a part of who you are.

Realistic goals

If you still need a little time, plan on realistic goals, persevere, remain passionate and resilient, it may take a month or lifetime, but it is the start of something impactful.

Fully embrace it, find your balance, allow your mind and body the time needed to adapt and transition, and free your spirit to the endless possibilities of the journey ahead. Now release your will to your purpose, and start building your dream. There is no losing here, either way it is a win-win. Remember that you have already experienced falling and rising, and journeyed through different variations of this dream. You have just been comfortable ordinarily relating to it, even though you undoubtedly know it is something that makes you extraordinary.

Heck, if not for anything else, do it for the joy of it. Own it, don’t let it own you from afar, or by any other means. Owning it is not being prideful, it is simply appreciating it. You are gifted, so you are ahead and are already inspiring even without knowing. If it moves you to share it, study it, understand it, down to it’s molecular nature within your capacity. Nurture it, and give it in it’s elevated form. No pressure, it isn’t going anywhere because it is a part of who you are, it is a part of your story. 

Grow

Feedback or setbacks are meant to stimulate deeper connections and elevate it even more, not discourage it. You are your best expert, and have to trust your opinion above any. So, as critical as our world might be, be vulnerable and brave to venture, having faith in the reason for your purpose and the difference it makes in your life, and the lives of others. Knowing that you are truly living a life not free of fear, doubt, or pain, but full of authenticity, wholeheartedness, and meaningfulness. 

You don’t need to change who you are, YOU are the primal prerequisite and have everything needed to feel, live and breathe your evolution. It is a gift from the universe so actively affirm it to conspire assisting your WILL, and center you to fully connect with it.

So I urge you to give yourself a chance, and strap on for the ride of your life towards a PhD in yourself, AND something else.

Be Glorious! 

 

Human Connection

Posted on by Antoinette Njombua-Fombad

From a young age, human interaction and connection has been a very organic experience for me. I am what was labeled the very bold and daring girl child, if you go to an all girl’s boarding school, or happen to be raised in a biased African culture. As I got older, this affected my balance and living my purpose as a human, daughter, sister, wife, mother, aunt, and friend became challenging. I even punished myself with isolation but would feel the opposite of the effect I so desperately imagined would allow me to fit in, and it sucked for my spirit.

To many, I may be a people person, but I remain a citizen of humanity to all. Life experiences, emotional maturity, and spiritual growth over many years helped me understand why I was created this way. My life story has had its curves, but I mostly remember it being full of so many interconnected, teachable, favorable, and positive moments.

My nature has taught me that it is rare to walk up to someone in good faith, or with enthusiasm and not receive positive energy. That you can only understand someone better if you give them the opportunity, and that it is hard to hate someone up close. Energy has to move and flow, and one bad transfer can cause ripple effects so extensive it changes you.

The benefits of good energy and the abundance of love, guidance, and acceptance that one receives means more to give back. We are partly nurtured by the magnitude of energy we receive from our immediate environments, an external influence affecting our physiological, emotional, mental and spiritual growth.

The ability to understand and inspire human connection is a gift, and I embrace and own it. It has enriched me with an extensive library, and provided me with the appreciation of what it means to inspire. Remember the purpose of giving extends your blessings to enhance not only others, but yourself, even when it is not reciprocated. For when we open our heart, mind and spirit to truly touch another’s spirit, that by itself is a gift to our spirit.

I have understood that loving and giving consciously, is equally as important as doing so unconsciously. That every human interaction and connection is unique, and provide us with opportunities to grow. Take every human interaction as a lesson, connect and learn something different, feel something unexpected, add to your library of human connection, and reciprocate honestly and authentically as best as you can.

Open your heart when connecting with people, and you automatically live em-pathetically. Energy is the unspoken language that feeds the spirit, give and receive consciously.

Happiness

Posted on by Antoinette Njombua-Fombad

While playing the card game “Our Moments” today, my card read:

‘What does being successful mean to you?’

As a society, success has many meanings, especially linked to environmental factors. We create so much pressure for ourselves and, especially, unconsciously on the younger generation.

I took a deep breath, waiting to hear what my family had to say.

My 14-year-old says: ‘Success is going to the High school Grand Nationals Band competition last year, it was the best experience of my life so far’.

Her five-year-old brother said: ‘Success is sharing’. I literally beamed inside. For my 11-year-old, ‘success is passing gifted class exams,’ and my seven-year-old said ‘success is being kind’. Then my partner seals it, just as I imagined, with, ‘success is happiness’.

Indeed, success to me is HAPPINESS.

Happiness from WITHIN ourselves before incorporating that from without.

It is knowing that life will constantly change, and we can be glorious and smart, and kind, and sharing and hardworking. And when we are sad, and vulnerable, and insecure, and selfish, and unkind, we will remember that happiness is constantly present and thriving within us.

This, surprisingly, is what we need to source the power necessary to learn from our mistakes, forgive ourselves, and acknowledge that our negative energy is there to motivate shifting our vibration back to Happy ones.

Happiness is a state of consciousness influenced by everything that adds to our growth journey. Knowing this means understanding the value of all your collective experiences, hence fortifying your ability to live through them as purposefully and benevolently as you were created to.