Iman Refaat's Blog, page 19
February 9, 2017
What Are You Waiting For?
Is it a life rule that we have to surrender to that one must be knocked down first before starting to live intentionally? Do we have to be hit by a devastating event to start leading our lives and playing big, acting upon our potentials?
When I first read ‘The Monk who sold his Ferrari ‘ for Robin Sharma I was fascinated with how courageous he was. Standing up again after collapsing in the courtroom and starting all over, quitting his job as a successful lawyer and joining monks to find life balance sounded inspiring. Later on, I started to watch interviews and TED talks for successful people and one of the things I found common between them was that they all hit the bottom. They all were broke whether personally or professionally and they used their pain and agony as a fuel to play big. Oprah Winfrey, Lisa Nichols, Tony Robbins, Les Brown and many others.
Reading the ‘Big Magic’ for Elizabeth Gilbert a couple of month ago she tackled one of the beliefs I had since my childhood. To be creative one needs to go through pain. To write, authors need to suffer. To create great things, artists need to live in agony. Gilbert claimed that this is one of the misconceptions we live with.
It took me sometime to consider Elizabeth’s point. I reflected on my life and how I was knocked down in 2010 and how living mute for weeks urged me to write my Personal Mission statement and identify clearly my life purpose. And I studied my life during the past year and a half since I started writing my novel. I thought of how I was fuelled with love from my family, my friends and my students. How the excitement of making my dream come true filled my lungs and dyed my cells. Elizabeth was right, why do we associate suffer with creation and evolution? Why do we have to wait till our lives fall apart before taking the initiative to fix it? Can’t we break this cycle?
If you’re living at peace with your life right now and feeling happy and fulfilled this would be great. If not, don’t wait like J.K. Rolling for your partner to abandon you, don’t wait like Lisa to be financially broke to the extent that you don’t have the money to buy a diaper for your child. Don’t wait till one of your beloved ones passes away so that you become alert. Give yourself the wake up call now. No matter where you are or how tough your life is it will change, this is one of the natural laws of life; whatever it is it will not last forever.
Act now, take the lead, hold your life tight in your hand, display courage and start from where you are with what you have. Don’t wait for life to knock you down.
February 8, 2017
#FabulousVeilsNovel#Teenagers’_Greatness
Working with teenagers is one of life greatest blessings. They possess limitless potentials. They allow themselves to dream big and to take risks. They give out love generously and sincerely.
February 7, 2017
#FabulousVeilsNovel#Book Review
“Refaat’s book is a window on the daily agony of many Egyptian women – of the same age bracket of Gameela, Madeeha and Fatema, as of older and younger. It shows the complexity of anxieties that go way beyond the obvious financial challenges, to the emotionally draining binds that most must submit to.
With 2017 labeled by the Egyptian government as ‘the year of women’ by the government, with officials making announcements about state support for women, Fabulous Veils offers a serious reminder that many injustices go deeper than what the state is yet willing to acknowledge.”
February 6, 2017
#Fabulous Veils#The Secrets behind the Scenes# Secret 20
Opportunities will knock your door. Be wise. At the beginning of my journey with writing my novel, my mentor advised me to say ‘yes’ to every opportunity that arises. I was excited with the idea and waited for the knocks. However, when it came to putting it into practice I found out that not all the things that appeared were truly ‘opportunities’. By time, I developed a 6 steps strategy that I followed before opening the gate for what knocked my door:
1- Evaluate the expected revenue.
Volunteering to write on a Facebook page was one of the opportunities I embraced. Thinking of the skills it would urge me to develop and the community I will be surrounded with I found it an opportunity. The revenue was directly related to my dream; developing my writing skills.
2- Compare the time invested with the expected benefit.
Attending a TEDx event was an opportunity. Meeting new people, enlarging the circle of my network while attending an event right next to my home and which lasted for few hours, I found that the revenue was higher than the investment. I was invited too, it costed me zero money 
February 5, 2017
Will You Allow Yourself to Remain Deceived?
For how long have you been living in your comfort zone? And do you have any plans to depart it in the near future? Is it really that comfortable?
Looking for definitions became one my favourite activities. After enrolling in a Neurolinguistic course, I was alarmed at the amount of misconceptions most of us have. We’ve learned many vocabulary words since our childhood, attached meanings to these words and carried our lives without reexamining them. Take ‘dogs’ for example. In our Eastern culture, in my childhood, most people associated dogs with bites. I used to feel threatened and my heart used to race the moment I saw any dog. I believed that dogs were dangerous till my daughter reframed the meaning of dogs for me few years ago. What about comfort? Do we have a clear and correct frame for this word?
Comfort, as stated in the dictionary, is a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint. It means prosperity and a pleasant lifestyle. Does living in our comfort zones provide us with freedom from pain; emotional pain? Does it enable us to live in prosperity?
To push myself out of my unpleasant zone and lead my life I kept Margaret Thatcher’s words at the back of my mind. I allowed them to echo constantly to awake the giant in me. “Watch your thoughts for they become words. Watch your habits for they become your character. And watch your character for it becomes your destiny.” My first baby step to lead my life and urge myself to go out of my comfort zone was watching my ‘thoughts’. I was both shocked and choked. Though people used to praise me for my professional and personal successes I was blaming, scolding and torturing myself. I belittled it and was telling it that I will never be able to make further successes. I was about to turn forty which, from my perception, meant that I will start to become weaker, less energetic, less productive, less creative, less successful and less beautiful. These were my thoughts that Thatcher demanded me to watch. Awful and sad discovery by then.
This discovery forced me to slow down and study the quote. My thoughts will form my ‘destiny’. Which meant that I will, truly, start getting weak, less beautiful and my success curve will start to go down. I thought of my grandmother who was in her eighties and who was spending her last thirty years staying in bed watching television and chatting over the phone. She was more than double my age which meant I could live more than what I had lived. And? And if I allow myself to live with these weak thoughts I will end mostly like her. My question to myself was: “Are you ready to live as a weak person for decades?” This became my most dominant thought; that getting older means getting weaker and become helpless.
After weeks of watching my thoughts I started to quality control them. I reminded myself with the great role models who had blasting success stories while they were above their forties. Stephen R. Covey, Robin Sharma, Lisa Nichols, Oprah Winfrey and many others. I admired Nelson Mandela’s story and how, not only he watched his thoughts, yet, he nurtured and empowered them till his destiny became the President for South Africa. Forties became for me the beginning of a new life, of adventures, accomplishments and meaningful contributions. I departed my comfort zone and blowed it up. I started to scribble my novel and a month after my forty first birthday I was awarded as a Success Story among the community of Passion to Profit; people living with passion.
Thatcher and Mandela became two of my close friends who salut me every morning, tapping on my shoulder and asking me to lead my thoughts.
February 4, 2017
#FabulousVeilsNovel#Open_Discussion
What’s the main thing people ought to lead?
February 3, 2017
#Fabulous Veils#The Secrets behind the Scenes# Secret 19
Celebrate! Enough being serious and working hard. Now you need to slow down and celebrate your achievements. Yes, your achievements. If your inner voice is making fun of you please put it on mute mode and allow yourself to read the following strategies till the end:
1- Redefine your understanding of achievement.
Don’t wait for leaps or great contributions. Celebrate your first baby steps in your dreams. Subscribing in a Writing workshop and writing my first 3 lines was my first achievement and it did deserve a celebration.
2- Reward yourself while enlarging your steps or achievements.
At the beginning celebrate your baby steps, then gradually start celebrating bigger ones. At first I celebrated my three first lines. Later I celebrated outlining my novel. Lately I celebrated starting this series of videos which was something I kept struggling with for months. Just conquering my fear and posting my first video deserved a celebration.
3- Reward yourself regular for your commitment and persistence.
Whether weekly or monthly, just make it regularly. Rewarding myself by the end of each month for working on my passion every single day became a ritual I wait for. Same for committing to exercising every day for a whole week. Make your celebration a regular ritual.
The main point isn’t to turn yourself into a materialistic person or to depend on extrinsic motivation. The main aim from regular reward is that you start building a healthy relationship with yourself. Think of how people use sugar cubes to tam wild horses. This is something similar. You tam and train yourself to obey you. If you want from yourself to stay on fire and work hard, reward it regularly and it will become your devoted servant.
4- Identify the best ways to celebrate or the rewards you personally prefer.
Each person has his own preference. You need to have such self-awareness. For me, I reward myself by either going out to one of my favourite restaurants, by going to the cinema or by buying new books. These might be awful rewards from your perspective. Connect to yourself and understand what it prefers and offer it the proper reward.
The main value you will receive from this secret is the relation you will establish with yourself and how it will obey you out of trust in you and your appreciation.
February 2, 2017
How ‘BEAUTIFUL’ is your place?
“A comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing ever grows there.” What a lie?!
I used to like this quote and agree with it for a long time. Till one day, all of a sudden, I figured out that it was a deception. There are actually plenty of things that grow there, in this ‘beautiful’ place. Poor self-esteem, low self-confidence, discontentment, unhappiness, shame, self-judgment, self-hatred, reactivity, victimhood, emptiness and then regret. And why all that, because of the comfort zone.
‘Who moved my cheese’, for Spencer Johnson, was one of the books I read many years ago and which I didn’t put into practice till last year. The comfort zone was extremely comfortable. I was living in my close circle of family, friends, students and colleagues. I felt fulfilled, or at least I thought I was. Years passed and I remained in my warm agreeable spot. Until I was about to turn forty and spared some time to reflect on my life and evaluate it from a meta-state, as if I’m looking at it from the audience’s seat. I started to imagine the end and my current state. My death bed and what I was currently doing. The contrast wasn’t to be missed. I knew I had more potentials than I exhibited. I figured out that I was wasting long hours in meaningless activities and I felt a bitter taste in my throat. It was time to lead myself. To play big. To pull it out of the comfort zone. To force it to invest its decreasing time left on earth in wiser and more meaningful ways. It was time to reexamine who I was and compare it with whom I was created to become.
Success, fame, wealth weren’t what I associated with my future self. A leader was what I knew myself for. A leader without a title. Someone who was created to bring more leaders. Who was created for a mission and who would find her ultimate fulfilment and happiness in touching people’s lives and reaching their hearts. In lending them a gentle hand to unleash their potentials and live with purpose. John C. Maxwell saying reframe it for me: “True leadership must be for the benefit of the followers, not to enrich the leaders.”
In addition to my previous work as an educator, I started practicing writing and public speaking. I activated my social media channels and started to use them as a platform to answer my calling and fulfil my life purpose. And while doing that I was hit by the concept of ‘followers’ whether on Instagram or Facebook. Followers. Why would we want to have followers? True leaders shouldn’t be interested in having followers. “Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders,” as Tom Peters clarified. Hence, we should take the lead, go out of the comfort zone to create more ‘leaders’. I wish social media channels replace their ‘follow’ button with a ‘lead’ one.
When we practice courage, we, unconsciously, give permission to people in our circles to do the same. Going out of our comfort zone is a well of enrichment for our lives and the lives of all mankind.
“The world is waiting. Leadership is a choice – and it starts with YOU.” Elyse Nelson
February 1, 2017
#Fabulous Veils#Breaking the Cycle
“We will be doing a great injustice if we think that Fabulous Veils is a feminist novel. It’s about us all; men and women. It’s about breaking the cycle.”
January 31, 2017
#FabulousVeilsNovel#Book Review
“Fabulous Veils is not just a novel, it is a reformation movement waiting to happen. It discusses a lot of pressing issues that are predominant in our societies and we have neglected for generations. It makes you reexamine your beliefs, actions and motivations. I recommend that everybody reads this novel, because it is not just a novel, it is an experience.”
