English comedian, actor, writer and activist Russell Brand is a man of extremes with a loquacious and flamboyant lifestyle. Brand struggled with drugs, sex, alcohol, food, fame and online shopping addiction for several years. In Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions, he writes about his journey of recovery using the twelve-step program of Alcohol Anonymous framework and principles.
Initial Resistance to 12-step program
Brand was initially resistant to the 12-step addiction program, but upon further examination of the principles he found out that self-centred, egotistical thinking is the defining attribute of the addictive condition. Self-centredness is a tricky thing; it encompasses more than just vanity. It’s not just Fonzie, looking at himself in self-satisfied wonder and flexing his little tush, no.
I can attest personally that the 12 Steps work with severe addiction issues. If you have them, you should engage with the appropriate 12 Step support group.
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving. – Albert Einstein
It is not a matter of if but of when: “Whatever would go wrong would eventually wrong.” The key to navigating the challenges and vicissitudes of life is to persevere, endure the trying times and keep it moving. In his 1960 Founder’s Day address speech at Spelman College 1: “Keep Moving from This Mountain,” American minister and activist Martin Luther King Jr. identified four symbolic mountains -relativism, materialism, segregation, and violence- that must be overcome. Martin Luther King Jnr. It implored the audience to persevere and keep moving with faith. He asserted:
If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl; but by all means keep moving.
Keep moving, for it may well be that the greatest song has not yet been sung, the greatest book has not been written, the highest mountain has not been climbed. This is your challenge! Reach out and grab it and make it a part of your life. Reach up beyond cloud-filled skies of oppression and bring out blazing stars of inspira- tion. The basic thing is to keep moving. Move out of these mountains that impede our progress to this new and noble and marvelous land.
It ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and still keep moving for- ward. —Rocky Balboa
Your mum was right; she probably admonished you with one of these statements: “Don’t hang around the wrong crowd,” and “If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.” This is one of the few things that most parents get right: being able to spot and advise their children against hanging around wrong influences. They know this because they know what hanging around bad influences did to them and the consequences of not setting healthy boundaries against bad associations. Keeping fake and toxic people around you could get you killed, as they do not have your best interest at heart. For most of us, because of the fear of loneliness, we hang on to energy drainers, dream killers, frenemies disguised as siblings, parents, childhood friends and colleagues.
Life will happen to us all at some point, whether getting fired, having our hearts broken, being betrayed by trusted family and friends, dealing with a toxic relationship or being frustrated with a situation, among other challenges we all face. Whatever would go wrong would eventually go wrong at the least expected time. It is not a matter of how things will go; it is a matter of when. We cannot control the weather, but we can control how we go into any weather. As the Scandinavians would say, “There is nothing like bad weather; what we have is bad clothing.” The challenge for most of us is that we constantly try to control everything in our lives. Instead of changing ourselves, we try to change others; instead of wearing appropriate clothing, we complain about the weather; instead of getting better, we get bitter. Instead of looking into the mirror, we look outside the window by blaming others.
“There is nothing like bad weather; what we have is bad clothing.” – Scandinavian Proverb
In Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut, psychologist and toxic-family survivor Sherrie Campbell, Ph.D. argues that surviving our toxic and dysfunctional family units requires cutting ties forever for a while or forever. Campbell provides strategies for embracing the decision with pride, validation and faith in oneself. She provides tools for creating boundaries, coping with judgment, and overcoming self-doubt.
The GMS Queen City Marathon in Regina, Saskatchewan, was my sixth full marathon in 2023 as part of my ten Canadian Marathon Running Challenge. I reduced my personal best (3:44), which I ran at the Beneva Montreal Marathon in 2022, by 24 minutes to a time of 3:20. I ran my first sub-four-hour marathon at the 2022 Beneva Montreal Marathon and have since been running sub-four marathon times.
Running a personal best felt good as I have been putting in the hard work by increasing my mileage, averaging 100 KM per week in the past 6-8 weeks. My new personal best of 3:20 proves that hard work pays off. I am getting closer to some of my marathon running goals: Qualify for the 2025 Boston Marathon (3:05) and run a sub-3 hours times. I know how to achieve these goals; I need to trust the process and keep showing up daily.
At the core of most of our relationship issues is everyone wanting to be understood before understanding the other person. As the saying goes, “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” We all want to be heard, understood and seen. One of our most significant cravings as humans is the need to be understood and not be misunderstood, especially by the people closest to us. In our age of social media, we hardly listen to one another, we tweet a lot but little with is been transmitted, we hear but we don’t listen, we don’t seek to understand one another and that is the reason for most of the chaos we have in the world.
American talk show host Oprah Winfrey is often considered one of the most influential women in the world and at the heart of her influence is her ability to get people talking and sharing from their heart. She tries to listen to emphatically to her giest be they celebrities or ordinary people. Oprah ran her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, for 25 years, from 1986 to 2011. In the Show Finale of The Oprah Winfrey Show on 25 May 2011, Oprah made a statement that underscores the truism that we all seek understanding. Oprah commented:
In The Value of Debt in Building Wealth, bestselling author Thomas J. Anderson writes about strategically using debt to build wealth in the long run. Anderson notes that Debt is a powerful tool that corporate financial officers have understood since capitalism was born. Savvy use of debt provides liquidity and flexibility, allowing smart companies to jump on opportunities and ride out emergencies.
Debt is neither good nor bad. It is simply a magnifier. If you choose investments that deliver higher returns than the after-tax cost of your debt, then debt adds value. If you choose investments that return less than the after-tax cost of your debt, then debt destroys value.
“The single biggest determining factor in your rate of return and in being on track for retirement is your debt, debt structure, and the choices you make with respect to debt. Do not underestimate the power of building up assets early and paying down debt later.”
I am an empath to the core, and I tend to see people as who they can become and not what they are presently. One of the challenges of seeing the best in people all the time is that, at some point, they begin to take it for granted, misuse the privilege or not understand my motive. One of my core personal philosophies is to give what I want. When I want money, I give it out; when I need encouragement, I inspire others; and when I want strength, I stay to give others strength. One of the hardest things to do in life is to try to change people. Leadership author John C. Maxwell observed that there are three catalysts for change: People change when they hurt enough that they have to change. People change when they learn enough that they want to change. People change when they receive enough that they are able to change.
People change when they hurt enough that they have to change. People change when they learn enough that they want to change. People change when they receive enough that they are able to change. – John C. Maxwell
Resilience is the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties. The word Resilience is derived from the present participle of the Latin verb resilire, meaning “to jump back” or “to recoil.”, from re- “back” + salire “to jump, leap”. In physical sciences, the meaning “elasticity, power of returning to original shape after compression, etc.” 1
If we are willing to walk fearlessly and tenderly into the crucible of a painful ending, we will find gifts waiting for us there that we never could have seen had we continued clinging to the safety of the familiar. – CRAIG HAMILTON
All great leaders have skin in the game- they show, hardly tell, and they go on the journey with their followers. They lead by example; the only stock they have is their company shares, they walk their talk, and they don’t tell people to do what they are unwilling to do themself. In business parlance, Skin in the Game refers to owners, executives, or principals having a significant stake in the shares of the company they manage. 1 With skin in the game, you are committed to your long-term goal, before you build a team to help achieve your dream; showing the ways you have skin in the game is a great way to attract great talent.
“Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”
New York Times bestseller and author of one of my favourite books, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain, writes about bittersweetness in her book Bittersweet (Oprah’s Book Club): How Sorrow and Longing Make Us, The book’s central theme is that there is no happiness in life without sadness, no one lives a sorrow free life, it is not a matter of whether that the tough times would come around; it is more about how we handle it. We all have a choice to either get better or get bitter, learn the lessons or let it lessen us, get the message or stay stuck with the mess.
Book’s Theme
The book is about the melancholic direction which Cain calls the “Bittersweet”: a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. “Days of honey, days of onion,” as an Arabic proverb puts it. The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again. Yet to fully inhabit these dualities—the dark as well as the light—is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them. And transcending them is the ultimate point. The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.
The idea of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love—is the heart of the book.
The Pursuit of Happiness
Americans prioritize happiness so much that we wrote the pursuit of it into our founding documents, then proceeded to write over thirty thousand books on the subject, as per a recent Amazon search. We’re taught from a very young age to scorn our own tears (“Crybaby!”), then to censure our sorrow for the rest of our lives.
Longing
Longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it. The word longing derives from the Old English langian, meaning “to grow long,” and the German langen—to reach, to extend. The word yearning is linguistically associated with hunger and thirst, but also desire. In Hebrew, it comes from the same root as the word for passion.
Our Longing is the gateway to belonging.
The place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly—care enough to act. This is why, in Homer’s Odyssey, it was homesickness that drove Odysseus to take his epic journey, which starts with him weeping on a beach for his native Ithaca. This is why, in most every children’s story you’ve ever loved, from Harry Potter to Pippi Longstocking, the protagonist is an orphan. Only once the parents die, transforming into objects of yearning, do the children have their adventures and claim their hidden birthrights. These tales resonate because we’re all subject to illness and aging, breakups and bereavement, plagues and wars. And the message of all these stories, the secret that our poets and philosophers have been trying to tell us for centuries, is that our longing is the great gateway to belonging.
Bittersweetness
At their worst, bittersweet types despair that the perfect and beautiful world is forever out of reach. But at their best, they try to summon it into being. Bittersweetness is the hidden source of our moon shots, masterpieces, and love stories. It’s because of longing that we play moonlight sonatas and build rockets to Mars. It’s because of longing that Romeo loved Juliet, that Shakespeare wrote their story, that we still perform it centuries later.
All the best in your quest to get better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
One of the favourite tools of toxic people, narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths is love bombing. These individuals would bombard you with affection, gifts, attention and “love” during the early days of your relationship, but the honey phase does not last that long. Identifying love bomb can be tricky, especially when you have not experienced it before, or if you are an empath, it is even harder to spot. We can experience love bombing in any relationship, whether a sibling, spouse, friend, acquaintance, or frenemy. Most relationships do not start as toxic; the toxicity gets revealed when their true character is unveiled with time. I try to heed the words of American Poet Maya Angelou, who once said, “When people show you who they are, believe them.” Love Bombing seems like normal behaviour, but extreme idealizing is a red flag of things to come. If it is too good to be true, it is probably not for real.
In Atlas of the heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience, Bene Brown describes the various emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human – including the language that allows us to make sense of what we experience. She sought to open up the language portal – a universe where we can share the stories of our bravest and most heartbreaking moments with each other in a way that builds connection.
