Iman Refaat's Blog, page 18

Are You Locked Up?

Change is a law of nature, I’ve read. While writing my novel, I read a book on Dramatic Writing. One of the very useful insights it gave me was that characters must change, especially if the story was happening over many years. But some people don’t change, I thought. Yet the author went on sharing examples and advocating for this idea, insisting that characters must change over time. It’s a natural law, he advocated; change is everywhere, watch the seasons, the sky patterns, the moon vs crescent and many more aspects he pointed at.

Following the writer’s advice I did ensure that all my characters change with the flow of events, gradually sometimes and even if the change was minimal. But when it came to real life, I started to study people around me. Do they all truly change? Why do some people appear as if they are unchangeable. They adopt certain behaviours, act in a systematic way, have a set of routines and even reactions. The book was so convincing that I concluded that it was me who failed to notice the change because all people change as by the law of nature.

My observation skills failed me. The only change I was able to witness in many people was the increase of a trait, but not its change. The bitter became more bitter, the victim played the role with more proficiency, the selfish became a selfish pro, the forgiving was more forgiving, and the giving was more giving, maybe because people expected from him to give more. No matter what the reasons were, the only change I noticed was the ‘more’.

Attending a Mindfulness session one day a new perspective unfolded. My real unchangeable characters were locked up. They weren’t living in the present. They were locked up in a different tense. Whether it was the past or the future, they were occupying a zone out of the present tense. They adopted this ‘more’ per choice. It offered them security and saved them the hustle of changing themselves and the burden of dealing with the unexpected reactions of people in their circles towards the change. And because change is a natural law, the only change they allowed themselves was the ‘more’.

Are you locked up? In which tense do you spend most of your day? Are your changing or becoming a ‘more’ of your original version? “If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living,” Gail Sheehy.

#FabulousVeilsNovel#Open_Discussion

Why do we lock ourselves up?

 

#Fabulous Veils#The Secrets behind the Scenes# Secret 23

Use the Power of Imagination. Team up with your subconscious and enable it to energise you in your pursuit of making your dream come true. Robin Sharma, Global Leadership Expert, in one of his videos, advocated for the impact of Vision Boards. He advised his viewers to prepare a collage of pictures which reflects their own vision for a perfect life. Using this tactic to make your dream come true, there are three steps to follow:

1- Identify your vision for a perfect life.

Whether you start cutting pictures from magazines and glue them or use pictures from the internet and an app for collage, the main thing is that you select your pictures wisely. Think of what matters to you the most in this life. Don’t think under your feet, dream big and aim to live a long life of significance and contribution. Consider a balanced happy life.

2- See your dream as a part of your perfect life.

Have a picture in your collage for your dream and add it to your vision board. See your dream as a part of the big picture. If you have other dreams add them too. In my vision board I had a picture for a Youtube channel many months before it existed.

3- Feed your subconscious with this picture on a daily basis.

Make sure to have your board in an accessible place. Observe it on a daily basis. Sharma advises that one looks at his vision board first thing when he wakes up and last thing before going to bed. This is a key to ensure that both your conscious mind and subconscious mind collaborate in making your dream come true. Your conscious mind is the one who makes the decisions and hence he’s the one who will identify the pictures he wishes to have on your vision board. While your subconscious mind is the one in charge of making the decisions happen, hence feed him daily with the pictures to stay motivated and focused in your pursuit.

What’s your vision for a perfect life? If you can dream it, you can make it.

You Can’t Be Yourself

Are you free to be yourself? Do you truly know what does ‘Being Yourself’ mean in its original state?  Jim Morrison, American singer, songwriter, and poet claimed that, “The best freedom is being yourself”. Are we being ourselves or we think we are being so?

Sitting in the second row and taking notes while the Trainer was explaining one of the Meta-coaching patterns last month his closing sentence hit me: “And only then you would be free.” Only when? I wondered. I froze in the moment, studied my notes again to connect the dots and figure out this tempting piece of information he muttered as simple as he was breathing.

“Taking ownership of your powers, acting instead of reacting, controlling your thoughts, emotions, behaviours and actions is the key to freedom,” the Meta-coach explained. And how is this supposed to happen? Is it truly that simple to control our actions, to stop ourselves from getting nervous, from losing our temper in tough times, to feel okay when being criticised or hurt? Is it an easy activity to carry our own weather under the storming events of the demanding and crazy-busy life we’re living?

Where to start was my question? How to make the impossible possible. How to act instead of react. The Trainer wasn’t talking about suppressing feelings or pretending to be fine on the surface while boiling from the inside. He was seriously talking about living freely by owning our powers, disallowing anyone to drag us to the ‘Reaction’ territory.

Meanings. The answer was in these eight letters. Reexamining the meanings we had attached to things and reframing them was the clue. Taking ‘insult’ as an example, what meanings do we attach to it? You’re driving your car, the person next to you tries to surpass you and he insults you on his way. How would you react? In many cases we get angry, we yell at him, we lose our temper, we curse the day and expect it to be a BAD one. Why? Because of the meanings we attached to ‘insult’. What if we detach the meaning from this experience. The same person insults you yet, this time ‘insult’ has no reference in your mind. You don’t know how to react. You hear some words, see his facial expressions and continue driving while listening to your favourite song or the last chapter of your ebook. The difference between both situations was in you. You didn’t feel hurt when a stranger insulted you. You didn’t allow him to infect your day. You didn’t empower him to contaminate your mood.

The key to make this happen is to quality control the meanings we attach to events and incidents we face every single day, the Coach instructed. Not receiving a gift on a special event doesn’t mean our beloved one stopped loving us like before. A nagging child doesn’t mean he’s undisciplined. A crying elderly doesn’t mean he’s seeking attention.

Our meanings aren’t originally ours. We were conditioned and brainwashed. Wether by our parents, our teachers, the media or the whole society. Though we were born like a blank page we turned into sponges and absorbed all the meanings offered to us and hence they controlled us and took over our thoughts, emotions, behaviour and actions. They overruled our lives.

You can’t be free unless you be yourself and you can’t be yourself unless you reexamine the meanings you’re attaching to things and develop your own meanings. Love, life, problems, struggles, family, career, success, stress, hardship, wealth, health, happiness are very few examples of the countless meanings we ought to define for ourselves to inhale freedom.

#FabulousVeilsNovel#Thought_Provoking

“Fabulous Veils is a thought provoking and emotional provoking novel. It urges you to reflect on your actions and offers you a new perception.”

#FabulousVeilsNovel#Book Review

“It took me a week to read it. I felt as if I lived with and known each one of the characters. I hated them all, loved them all, empathised with them all, pitied them all and felt their happiness and sorrows. Beside the writing style and how it makes you see the scenes in real, the stories are so deep and so touching. Everyone who is oppressed is a victim by choice and criminal by force.

Oppression is a closed end circle that must end.

We must not accept to live the life of victimhood or oppress others for the sake of social acceptance.”

#Fabulous Veils#The Secrets behind the Scenes# Secret 22

‘Slow is Fast’ is a lesson I learned from the Global Leadership Expert Robin Sharma. Though the statement sounds confusing at first, I find it very inspiring. In order to make your dream come true you need to slow down regularly in order to keep moving faster along your journey. I’m offering you the 3 tactics I followed while putting this lesson into practice:

1- Make regular stops to reflect and evaluate your current state.

Whether you do it on paper or you do it through self talks, the point is that you slow down and ask yourself some questions. What am I doing right now, where did I reach in my dream, are there any opportunities I missed that I should have taken? Are there any opportunities I accepted that I shouldn’t have taken? Am I progressing towards my destination? Is my dream still my dream? Is what I’m doing in order to reach my dream aligned with my values? And the most important question to ask yourself is: ‘Why am I pursuing this dream’?

2- Schedule time for reflection.

Allocating specific time and blocking it for this evaluation is a key factor. I personally commit to it on monthly basis. I slow down for an average of an hour on the last day of each month to answer the questions above and evaluate my current state.

3- Identify clearly the next steps you need to take during the coming period.

During my ‘Slowing down’ time I start to plan my next month, identifying clearly and specifically the actions I need to take, the things I need to learn, the help I need to seek and the changes I need to adopt whether in my routines, my habits or my environment.

Slow is fast. Make sure not to become over busy and super fast that you lose track with your dream.

Are You Free?

Freedom. Freud claimed that: “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom assumes responsibility and most people are afraid of that responsibility.” Are you one of those people who are afraid to assume responsibly? And if we were to explain freedom in one word, just one, would ‘responsibility’ be the one?

I enjoy watching movies and extracting their morale messages.  ‘Ana Horra’ (I’m free) was an Arabic film for the famous Egyptian actress Lobna Abdel Aziz. Watching it in my teenage defined the meaning of ‘Freedom’ for me. Every time I heard this word my subconscious recalled the meanings I got from the actress’ actions. She rebelled against the rotten traditions and norms. She insisted to proceed with her studies at University, which was uncommon for women in Egypt in the early years of the 20th century. And afterwards she started working and living for a cause beyond herself, standing against corruptions and supporting political activists. This was the meaning of Freedom for me. To rebel, to do what you want even if it’s uncommon and to live for a higher cause. I lived for decades believing this was freedom.

In 2013 I watched ‘A long walk to freedom’ which was a chronicle of Nelson Mandela’s life journey. Nelson happened to be a political activist and was imprisoned for twenty seven years. Then he went out of jail forgiving his enemy and focused on writing history in his own terms. My mind got confused. The meanings of Freedom I had earlier were shacked and I started to study his example. He rebelled, he was imprisoned; which meant he wasn’t free to do what he wanted like Lobna in Ana Horra. Then he did the uncommon; forgiving his enemies, and he lived for the cause all his life. My conclusion was that they both rebelled. They  both did the uncommon and lived for a cause. Yet she did what she wanted while Mandela was imprisoned for almost three decades, which caught him from acting freely. My mind got stuck. Was Mandela a free man or wasn’t he?

To solve this riddle I started to read about freedom. Malcolm X saying doubled my confusion: “You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.” Then how Mandela had peace and forgiveness while he wasn’t free? my mind objected.

I spent hours thinking of freedom and observing people around me. Wondering about the example Mandela had set for mankind. Changing history and crafting his destiny while spending twenty seven years enclosed in a tiny room with metal bars on its small window. Freedom. What is it?

Greta Garbo, the Swedish-born American film actress in the 1920s and 1930s, opened me a new perspective by declaring that: “Freedom is a state of mind”. Reaching this understanding I thought again about Lobna Abdelaziz who acted freely and Mandela who thought freely and I developed my simple and basic definition of freedom. A state of mind that empowers people to take the responsibility of their own lives, to rebel against what they disapprove, to accept what they can’t change, to make wise choices, to stand tirelessly for their own principles and values, to have courage to do the uncommon and mostly to live for a higher purpose. With this definition, do you consider yourself a free person?

How is your state of mind? Are you in peace with what you can’t change? Are you taking the responsibility of your own life? Don’t wait for people’s permission to be you. “The best freedom is being yourself,” Jim Morrison.

#FabulousVeilsNovel#Open_Discussion

From your perspective, what is ‘Freedom’ in one word?

 

#Fabulous Veils#The Secrets behind the Scenes# Secret 21

Gratitude. Expressing gratitude was one of the secrets behind making my dream come true. While learning, I so often stumbled upon the impact of gratitude on one’s happiness, peacefulness and serenity. I’m offering with you this time the two tactics I used to express m gratitude:

1- Expressing gratitude to God.

I made it a daily habit to spare five minutes every morning to write down in my journal the things I felt grateful for. This was another lesson I learned from the extraordinary leader Robin Sharma.

2- Expressing gratitude to people.

In my novel 54 persons lent me a hand. Though some people helped me more than others, I made sure to express my gratitude to every single one who helped me with it. I sent them ‘Thank you’ cards with personalised notes. Though it was a little act of kindness yet it did have a big impact. This was a lesson I learned from my top role model Stephen R. Covey: “In relationships, little things are the big things.”

Expressing gratitude reminds you that you aren’t alone in your pursuit. It secures you. It boosts your positive energy. And it attracts to you positive vibes. Every time you give out something you receive it back multiplied. Give out gratitude.