For me, Affirmations (and the Law of Attraction) work in a more pragmatic way. Like attracts like. If I’m passionate about something, then my energy will allow me to take action and soon everyone and everything would see my passion, then maybe, just maybe the universe will listen to me.

The ego is the total of all our fears, worries and negative thoughts and provides the incessant inner voice that doubts us and holds us back from whatever opportunity of bewilderment, intuition and awe we might have come our way.

Our minds have two parts; the conscious mind, which is the creative one and the one we have little access to, which is completely controlled by the other part–the sub-conscious mind. This sub-conscious mind is like a recording machine which takes in all the information from our conditioning, the environment, and our behaviour, and it then adds it all up to direct our final actions.

This idea of perfection is a myth, and the simple truth is that we are meant to be whole and not perfect. This includes both the joy of successes and the pain of failures. And the only way we learn and grow is through both differing experiences.

I just came back from a short trip to Prague and London. This was not a business trip, but a holiday I’d planned a year ago with childhood friends. Much of it was spent in luxurious hotels and good restaurants.

I’ve always been curious about myself. Though I didn’t keep a diary as an 11-year-old arriving to a new school in a new country, I did reflect heavily on myself. After my school years, I got distracted with life and my environment and stopped my self-examination, instead getting lost with the concept of ‘fitting in’ and the flow of life.

That sense of overwhelm has also been heightened as I’ve started writing my memoir. Work needs to be done. Deadlines need to be met. As if that weren’t enough, I’m also digging deep into my blog, writing niche and audience with guidance from a specialist coach so as to make my writing reach further and deeper.

We are all interconnected. We are all inter-dependent as is the past, present and future. However, the sad truth is that most of us continue our lives as if there is no problem. In fact, we run away as fast as we can from facing our struggles, hoping they disappear on their own. We refuse to believe these issues will linger on and affect our children.

Often, we invite alternatives in our life not because we want the best option, but only that we’re bored with what we are doing. We are bored, not due to lack of choices but rather because we are not content with ourselves. We feel that we are missing out on something. We compare what we are doing with what others are doing. We compare what we have with what others have. We presume it would give us more joy to do the things that they are doing or have the things that they have.

I’m listening to Tim Ferris’s podcast where Neil Gaiman, one of the best fiction writers alive is talking. His voice is hypnotic. It penetrates straight to the emotional mind. It’s not only because of his majestic accent but also the passion he shows when describing writing.

Nietzsche through his many illnesses and madness still found the focus and thinking that would go on to inspire generations of thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Herman Hesse, long after his death.

I don’t like Mondays. It’s as if my soul leaves my body on Sunday night and only returns on Tuesday morning. Maybe it’s a feeling that I have inherited from my 11-year-old self during my school years, where dread and anxiety took control of me most Monday mornings. Or perhaps it’s the fact that I haven’t been enjoying my work for a long while now and Monday is the first day of non-enjoyment.

Gibran wrote in both Arabic and English, and his best work was produced in the era of the Roaring Twenties in New York, USA. He was influenced by the free thought and exuberance of that time, and he was regularly associated with W.B. Yeats, Carl Jung and August Rodin. His seminal book The Prophet is amongst the best-selling books of all time after the Bible and Shakespeare’s collections.

I love how honest and refreshing he is, not only to the public but to himself. He doesn’t paint an evangelical picture of himself trying to save mankind as so many other people do, but instead, he is honest enough to say that he does it for himself.

The story is told of the CEO who calls his CFO to authorise the travel and associated costs of an expensive training programme for some core members of his team.  Aghast at the high cost for the programme, the CFO remarks, ‘we are spending all this money to train them.  What if they leave our company even after we have spent all this money training then?” The CEO was calm and responded, ‘Ah, but what if we don’t train them and they stay?’

My week started on a high as my football team, Man Utd, won a difficult game away to Chelsea. I don’t know what football does to me, but somehow it transports me to my 11-year old self. Winning means that adrenaline starts pumping through my veins, my heart beats faster and that immediately I’m in a great mood. However, when we lose, I’m best avoided for a few hours.

Acceptance is not an easy concept to understand. It is also one, which is saddled with many negative undertones. As Carl Jung said, “the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”

It was apparently Dr Martin Luther King who said you don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step – and as I sat with a group of 70 odd women global leaders at a meeting convened by Vital Voices in Johannesburg, I completely understood Dr King’s words more so than ever before.

In Psychology, consciousness is defined as the individual awareness of our unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations, and environment. Our conscious experiences are continually shifting and changing.