We had an interesting Talkshop yesterday with great talks from the speakers. The contributions were also good and this combo made for robust discourse as I predicted.
So I have to incorporate it into my weekly series to ensure we don’t miss the important takeaways therein.
Chika Nwankwo kicked it off in with a talk that lasted about 10 minutes. He harped on 4 major points.
1. Make up your mind: Achieving success through self-development starts with the mind. You have to make up your mind first.
2. Socialise: Look up to others and have mentors. Socialise and interact to learn from others. For instance, a writer can follow her favourite authors and engage their content. Read Biographies and stories about them.
3. Spirituality: You must have a superior being/thing you rever. Commune with that superior and stay the course as your conscience directs. Religiosity is different from spirituality. Religion is good or bad depending on the individual who reflects that religion. If you are a bad person then you will surely bring your badness to your religion and vice versa. But you don’t have to be religious to practice spirituality because as a human, you are already a spiritual being. So look inward and build your spirituality.
4. Emotion: It’s ok to get emotional but you have to draw the line between passion and emotion. Emotion can be fleet and fluctuate but passion is usually enduring so work on your emotion and build on your passion.
Uche Ugwu then spoke for even longer and identified many points while adding to some earlier enumerated by the previous speaker.
- Success defined: Success means many things to different people and none is wrong but the perception of success can be subjective or objective. Subjective is that which benefits the person while objective impacts on others.
- Networking: Your network is your network as they say so you must be willing to lose yourself in others to find yourself. Strive to cultivate genuine friendships that will improve your sense of belonging and purpose. But still networking isn’t just about the things we enjoy and being in our comfort zone. No, sometimes you have to feel some discomfort, put yourself in others’ shoes. We also need to choose carefully who/what to follow especially on social media because the media we consume can influence us.
- Open mind: Resist being judgemental and endeavour to keep an open mind. For instance, we can perceive queerness as a subject worthy of interrogation so rather than dismiss or judge LGBTQ people we can study/engage them because queer people have been in existence. We can also welcome writers/texts that explore the subject as a resistance to what has been the norm. This will help us better understand the issue of queerness better.
- Read something every day: Read news, stories, poems, whatever you can lay your hands but try and read something every day.
- Self-Care: Through discipline and proper dieting.
We may have come across these points while reading or listening to countless books, resources, teachings on self-development but hearing them from Chika and Uche hits different. Even the cliche points conveyed more meaning as we discussed.
