If everything around you is changing, why are you not changing?

I am sure we could not have imagined 2020 could have turned out the way it has, this was the year that was going to change our lives. A new year, a new decade which was going to change our lives but can you see how things have turned out now! Our plans for the year have totally been destroyed and we really want the year that started so well to come to an end and for things to go back to normal. The truth is that things will never go back to the way we knew them, you see now and again something happens that changes everything and things are never the same and our job is to adjust to the new normal. I remember growing up in a small mining town in Luanshya northern Zambia and when the mine closed people had to adjust and do things they…read more >

Pick your friends wisely

The one thing I was not good at when growing up was picking friends and this was because I was bullied throughout my childhood and I just felt lucky whenever I had a friend. This resulted in me becoming friends with people just because they spoke to me. When I moved to the UK I struggled to have friends to the point that I had no friends outside school. One day I was walking in the park near my house and I saw a group of people playing basketball and they invited me to play, after playing I asked for their numbers because I wanted to make friends, they all refused to give me their numbers and they told me that I should just meet them at the court for a game of basketball. I went back to the park the next few days to see if they were there…read more >

Learn, keep learning and then relearn everything all over again

When I was around 9 or 10 years old I had a friend who I used play rugby with, he was a very good rugby player, he was faster than me, he was a lot quicker and generally a better rugby player than I was. However some of the rules in the game of rugby are always changing but my friend did not care about the rules he just wanted to play rugby, but at the same time he wanted to hold on to the old rules. This resulted in a lot of arguments with him; he always used to say everyone was wrong. I remember one particular occasion very well, it took us over half an hour to start a game because we were trying to convince him that the rules had changed and he was not having it and in the end we played on with him operating…read more >

Using an adversity as an opportunity

My friend James is one of the most inspirational people I know, he has done very well for himself, he travels to many parts of the world for business and is respected in his industry. However this was not always the case, when James graduated from university he went through a lot of trials and tribulations, he struggled to find a job and when he found one he suffered a lot of discrimination because he is black. He talks about going to a new job and been given the simplest work to do, if he ever made mistake everyone on the team was on him. This was putting him down and it got worse when the amount of work that was coming his way reduced. This happened because he had made a mistake in his first few weeks in the job. He realised that he was not going to be…read more >

If you do not handle it with grace, it will stay in your face

There was time when I was having a really bad time at work, one of my colleagues had started finding fought in everything that I did and very soon I was anxious about work and everything else. The days and weeks that followed were really bad; I could not sleep at all and I was very tired all the time. I was very anxious everyday about how this colleague was treating me, this had happened to me before and it was happening again. I remember thinking when is this going to ever end, when are people going to stop treating me differently because of the colour of my skin. One night I was having another one of my sleepless nights so I went to do the watching up that I should have done a few hours earlier and that was when it came to me, something that I had heard…read more >

Focus on the big picture

A friend of mine was telling me about how his colleagues were not including him in anything, he told me about how the people in his team would all go outside to discuss certain issues without including him. This was making him feel unwanted and unimportant in the team. My friend is a very ambitious young man with a goal to do great things in his life; he always wants things to work very well and if they are not it drives him crazy. I could see that this was one of those things that was driving him crazy, apart from this driving him crazy I noticed this was making him lose focus on the big picture. He had a dream to have his own business but I started to feel that he was been side tract by things that did not matter, the people he was working with were…read more >

Accepting that life is uncertain is very important to our happiness

I have told this story a lot of times but I will tell it again, it is the story of how the mine company my mum worked for upped and left all the workers without pay. My mum did not have any income all of the sudden and most days we did not know if we were going to have anything to eat. The one thing I remember was that we just accepted this uncertainty, as young people we still had the same amount of joy we had, we did not know if we were going to have anything to eat but we were always happy. I have to say we had more to eat than most of my friends but the joy and the love was always there. As a group of young people we were wise enough to accept that life is uncertainty, we were never certain about…read more >

The time of uncertainty is the time to get ahead

In around 2001 the mine company that was running the mine in my home town Luasnhya upped and left and this meant a lot of people did not get paid. People were still going to work every day but there was no salary coming in for months and sometimes up to 6 months at the time. This was a very difficult time for a lot of people, people stopped making big plans and they put all their goals on hold because of the uncertainty that was in the town. I had never seen so much poverty in one place, just a few months earlier we had everything but now the whole town was covered in poverty that had not been seen before. However the one thing I remember was that some people used this opportunity to do better for themselves, a lot of people decided to stop trading because they…read more >

If you are not doing anything about it then you are not very worried about it

One day on my way from work, I heard two students talking about their upcoming exams, one of them said they were very worried about their exams and to ensure that they were prepared they will spend the whole weekend revising. The person said that I am very worried too but I will spend my weekend doing something fun. They went on to talk about all the things that they will be doing that weekend instead of revising. The other person was so surprised that this person was going to spend the entire weekend just having fun instead of working hard on the things that really matter. They walked for almost half a mile and this person who was going to spend his weekend revising asked why his friend was going to spend the whole weekend playing instead of studying? This young person then said something that is really profound,…read more >

Stop rushing through life and start learning

My boss walked in the room and gave me a hand written document to type up and email to her, I grab the document and without even thinking through what I have been asked I rush to carry out the task without giving it a lot of thought. After that I go to my to-do list and tick that task off and I move on to the next task. I tick off a lot of tasks and I am proud of myself, I have gone through a lot of tasks very quickly. For me looking at how many tasks have completed constituted a successful day. I go into work the next day and my boss is not happy with the standard of my work, the other managers are not happy with the quality of the work I have been doing for them, this is not what i wanted, I always…read more >