News
Food for Living: Managing Emotions with Meditations and Reflections
- /home/rhoncare/pointblank.ng/wp-content/plugins/mvp-social-buttons/mvp-social-buttons.php on line 27
https://pointblank.ng/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/download.jpeg&description=Food for Living: Managing Emotions with Meditations and Reflections', 'pinterestShare', 'width=750,height=350'); return false;" title="Pin This Post">
- Share
- Tweet /home/rhoncare/pointblank.ng/wp-content/plugins/mvp-social-buttons/mvp-social-buttons.php on line 69
https://pointblank.ng/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/download.jpeg&description=Food for Living: Managing Emotions with Meditations and Reflections', 'pinterestShare', 'width=750,height=350'); return false;" title="Pin This Post">
By Henry Ukazu
Dear destiny Friends,
The constant truth remains that every living being feels things differently, and at the same time, reacts differently to situations.
Much as everyone faces challenges in the journey of time, the individual reaction to each of the challenges ultimately determines the difference. Whether it is failure in relationship, business, health, personal or even professional life, it’s important to note that no one is alone; everyone has a fair share of the challenges of life, but the ultimate difference is how one manages the situation. These challenges can lead to high profile emotions.
In the course of this analysis, however, two powerful forces in the management of emotions or the vicissitudes of life, which are meditation and reflection, will be highlighted.
Emotions are powerful because they can push you to greatness and can also make you make the greatest loss of your life. Let’s think about it for a minute, how many times have people said something they later regretted? How many emotions have been broken because of uncontrolled emotions? How many opportunities have been lost because someone reacted impulsively instead of thinking things through? It should be noted, if you cannot control your emotions, they will control you and when they control you, they will make you weak and easily manipulated.
As we experience life in different dimensions, waves will come, some will be storms, while some will be current. One of the greatest skills one can have is staying calm in the midst of pressure, stressful situations or in the face of adversity, and this is because one is able to train their mind.
Managing emotions is not as easy as it appears. Imagine loving someone and you get hurt by the person. Trust me, it will surely hit you hard, the only time one might not feel so bad is when they don’t really like the person. Managing emotions is like managing human relationships. It’s a skill that needs to be cultivated. The ability to manage people is an uncommon skill. Before you can manage people, one should be able to manage themself. This is because human beings are the most difficult set of people to manage.
One of the most treasured skills any human being can have is building sustainable relationships. Building a solid relationship is like building a house on a solid foundation. One don’t need to be afraid if the house will collapse because the foundation is very strong. In the same way, when friendship has been truly tested and loyalty established, one don’t need to fear if betrayal will set in and if it does, one has to endeavor to manage it well because life happens sometimes.
Training your mind to stay in every situation is like training the muscle, at first it’s difficult because you feel like reacting immediately, but the ability to stay calm can be a game change which will pay off much more. Imagine being at the gym, you won’t get muscle but overtime you will get muscle when you constantly lift weight. That’s how one trains the mind, overtime, one will grow in maturity.
This process requires patience and consistency. Some days you will succeed, some days, you will fall back to old habits. The key is to keep going. Every time you stay calm instead of reacting, you strengthen your mental discipline, every time you take a deep breath without speaking, you build emotional intelligence, everytime you let go of something that is not worth your peace, you take back your emotional power.
Make a firm commitment to train your mind, the next time you feel frustrated. If people provoke you to breathe, if life throws a challenge at you, step back before reacting. A person who has mastered his emotions has mastered life.
How to manage your emotion
Awareness: Aware is a great way to manage emotions. There are several ways to observe how you feel when somebody says something negative to you. You respond with intelligence. Self and social awareness is a critical tool for emotional intelligence.
Detach from need to always react
When an irrational act comes across your way, you don’t have to respond immediately. Most times we are quick to respond. Maturity teaches one not to respond to everything, learn to be selective on what you react to, and you do this by selecting your battles. This act helps to conserve your power. Sometimes, we allow small disagreements to affect our mindset. Moral: know what worth your time.
It’s instructive to note that you can’t control everything, but you can control yourself. Life happens, so don’t try to control what is out of your hands, that’s basically a waste of energy. The words you tell yourself shape your emotions and your emotions shape your actions. When you take control of your thoughts and actions, you take control of your life.
To manage emotions, we have to stop listening to our emotions and instead make our feelings listen to us because our emotions can be a trap for us. Whether as a man or lady, when you allow your emotions to control, you will become a slave to the person. It’s just like money, most people are slaves to money because they allow money to control them instead of controlling money.
As a man, when you allow anger to take a hold of you, it will cloud your sense of reasoning, and when that happens, one will understand that actions have consequences. In the same way, some ladies are loyal and slave to their feelings. They allow temporary pain to have permanent stain and pain to their life. If only they had applied a little bit of caution and discernment, they would have gotten a different result.
When it comes to managing your emotions, what you focus on, grows. It’s advisable to choose peace over chaos. The calmer you are, the stronger you become. When you feel stress, anger and frustration, your mind will amplify it, but when you focus on solutions, you develop inner strength.
Do you know that in managing your emotions, you can feel angry and act calm. This is the highest of an emotional intelligence a balanced leader can exhibit.
It is instructive to note that we don’t belong to our feelings. Our feelings belong to us. We control how we want to feel, but most times as humans we don’t know the power we have. The feeling of sadness and joy is entirely up to us. We allow circumstances to dictate how we feel, what we fail to understand is that circumstances don’t say who we are, they reveal who we are. For instance, one might have little or no cash, imagine receiving a huge credit alert, it will change one’s attitude. That’s how we allow our emotions to control us.
Let’s switch the scenario to a case where a man has no cash to solve his problems, and some tries to offer him cash through fraudulent means, if he rejects the money, that tells you he’s in charge of his emotions and feelings.
Let’s see another situation where a man trying to talk to a lady, the man might have the resources and appurtenance that comes with wooing a lady, and the lady refuses on the ground that he does not appeal to her. Ordinarily, most ladies will give him to the man’s requests, but for this lady, there are qualities that appeal to her more. That means she manages she’s not a slave to her feelings and emotions.
In conclusion, when you wake up every day, you have the right to tell yourself how you feel or let your feelings control you. You can either feel depressed or speak to the depression and order it to transform into an expression of joy. Trust me when you, it will obey you. Don’t be mastered by your emotions. Instead, master them, and you will matter in life.
Henry Ukazu writes from New York. He works with the New York City Department of Correction as the Legal Coordinator. He’s the founder of Gloemi. He’s a Transformative Human Capacity and Mindset coach. He is also a public speaker, youth advocate, creative writer and author of Design Your Destiny Design Your and Unleash Your Destiny . He can be reached via info@gloemi.com
Ahead of the 2027 general elections, the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) has accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of removing some of its nominated candidates from the commission’s list and replacing them with names allegedly unknown to the party.
The National Chairman of the party, Senator Moses Cleopas Zuwoghe, made the allegation in a statement on Sunday, following INEC’s publication of candidates for the 2027 State Houses of Assembly elections.
Cleopas said the names published by INEC, particularly in Anambra State, suggested an attempt to undermine the party ahead of the elections and create disaffection among its supporters.
The NDC chairman specifically alleged that nine persons whose names were not authorised or submitted by the party had been listed as its candidates in various constituencies in Anambra State, the home state of the party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi.
He called on the INEC Chairman to immediately investigate the development and determine how the names got onto the commission’s list.
Cleopas also urged INEC to extend the investigation to other states, including Benue and Imo, where he said the party had observed a similar pattern.
According to him, the development had embarrassed the party, its leadership and its genuine candidates, while creating disaffection among its supporters in Nigeria and the Diaspora.
“We, as a party, are also carrying out our own independent investigation, the preliminary findings of which are already pointing to the complicity of INEC officials in foisting names purporting to be our candidates, but who are not from us,” he alleged.
He said the party’s investigation indicated that the uploading process was being used to intimidate and embarrass the NDC.
The party listed the following persons as names allegedly published by INEC as its candidates in Anambra:
Onitsha South 1 — Umennaajiego Jude Ezenwa
Onitsha South 2 — Akpotue Obinna Chibuike
Orumba North — Nwankwo Chiemerie
Anaocha 1 — Maduagwu Eric K
Idemili North — Ngoebisi Obinna
Njikoka 1 — Isintume Charles
Nnewi South — Nwachukwu Nonso
Nnewi South 2 — Okeke Ifeanyi Akunne
Ayamelum — Nnonyelu Samson E
Dunukofia — Azotani Chuks Francis
Cleopas, however, said the party is particularly concerned about the process through which the names were uploaded and published.
He said after the conclusion of the party’s primaries and appeal process, stakeholders from Anambra, the party leadership, representatives of Obi and the appeals panel agreed on a final list of candidates.
According to him, the list was signed off by the relevant stakeholders before being uploaded to the INEC portal using the code provided to the party by the electoral commission.
He alleged that INEC officials subsequently kept nine of the names on “Pending” status, claiming that the names were already in the commission’s system based on submissions by officials who monitored the party’s primaries.
Cleopas said the NDC formally challenged the names and submitted the identities of candidates it said were legitimately nominated by the party, but INEC allegedly declined to replace the disputed names.
He further alleged that INEC subsequently collected Form EC-9 directly from the persons whose names were in dispute and uploaded the forms without going through the party.
“To further confirm that there was a predetermined effort on the part of INEC to impose the said nine candidates on the party, and embarrass both NDC and Mr. Peter Obi, INEC went behind the NDC to collect the Form EC-9 directly from the candidates, bypassing the party, and uploading same,” he alleged.
Cleopas argued that where there was a discrepancy between names submitted by a political party and information received by INEC from its monitoring teams, the commission should have left the affected positions vacant pending clarification, rather than publish names the party said it did not nominate.
“At the very worst, INEC could have left us with no candidates for those positions, if they knew they were unwilling to engage us in addressing any perceived anomaly,” he said.
The NDC chairman accused INEC of creating a pattern in which opposition parties were allegedly prevented from uploading their preferred candidates while other names were introduced into their candidate lists.
He vowed that the party would pursue the matter through all available legal channels and seek to have what it described as its authentic candidates restored.
“We are moving to approach the court of competent jurisdiction to seek redress and restore our authentic candidates. The general public and our millions of supporters should note that these are not our candidates,” he said.
Nepal said Sunday it had begun burying some of the hundreds of bodies recovered after devastating floods, after taking DNA samples and marking them so families can later retrieve them.
The dead are traditionally cremated on funeral pyres in Hindu-majority Nepal, so the burials are viewed as long-term storage until families can retrieve them.
Foreign Secretary Amrit Bahadur Rai told reporters that all those buried were carefully recorded, but also appealed for international support, saying Nepal needed “more than a thousand” freezer units to store bodies.
The announcement of the burials came as Nepal’s disaster ministry increased its toll again on Sunday to 752 bodies recovered and 2,502 people missing.
That list includes 589 foreigners unaccounted for.
Chinese state media earlier confirmed 16 dead in Tibet and 546 people missing following Wednesday’s disaster, taking the overall toll to 768 dead and 3,048 unaccounted for.
“Following standard and accepted protocols, such as those of ICRC (Red Cross), the mortal remains of the dead, especially those not recognisable… have been temporarily buried,” Rai told reporters.
“Medical teams took DNA samples from every victim prior to the burial so that families can match-reference later, and would be allowed to exhume for necessary rituals.”
Nepal has called for freezer storage units and DNA testing kits, as it is overwhelmed with the number of bodies to store safely.
“We have requested different countries for freezers; we will need more than a thousand,” Rai added.
“Many dead bodies have been collected, and they have started decomposing. To preserve public health, we had to bury the decomposing bodies,” he added.
AFP
By Henry Ukazu
Dear Destiny Friends,
Everyone loves influence. Everyone wants to be a person of influence. Everyone wants to be relevant. Everyone wants to be celebrated. Everyone likes attention, appreciation, approval, and admiration. All these are products of influence.
The question I need you to ask yourself is, are you a person of influence? Are you influencing anyone? Do you have a positive or negative influence on your children, spouse, friends, mentors/mentee, or even strangers? Take a minute to listen to yourself.
When we talk about influence, uninformed minds just think influence is only about money, power, authority, or even being a mentor. Influence is far from it. We are all influencers in one way or another. Many people have influenced us in different ways, some positive, some negative. Similarly, we have also influenced many people in good and bad ways.
But today, I’m here to share with you what influence is about and the positive ways one can be a person of influence. Influence comes in different ways: as a politician, you are influencing people; as a leader, you are influencing policy; as a youth advocate, mentor, teacher, pastor, and employee, you are influencing somebody in one way or the other.
Do you know you can influence someone with your lifestyle? Yes, the way you talk, write, lead, dress, eat, exercise, preach the word of God, do your job, serve people, train your children, etc., are all part of influence. Influence is powerful. It has a way of permeating someone without them knowing. I believe that’s why my late mother would always say, if you are hanging out with a friend, only take the good part and leave the bad part.
We currently live in the 21st century, where the internet leads. The internet is regarded as the fifth estate for a reason, because it empowers networked individuals and alternative media to hold traditional institutions, governments, and mainstream media accountable. Everyone and almost everything is on the internet; however, sometimes, the information we get on the internet is regarded as fake because it’s unverified.
In some quarters, the internet has been regarded as a bad influence on the younger generation because of the limited restrictions and the negative information it has exposed their minds to think in a particular way. Some other schools of thought have opined that the internet has done more good than harm due to the knowledge it has exposed their minds to, as opposed to the information being peddled by some other schools of thought. Regardless of the aisle one belongs to, the internet truly has its pros and cons, especially as it relates to influence.
The big question one needs to answer is what influence is. According to Nosakhare Tune Oni – A Pan-African Strategist, leadership and business coach, “influence is when people trust your judgment enough to act on it. It is when someone calls you before making an important decision. When your recommendation opens a door. When your name carries weight in a room, you’re not even in. When people are willing to put their reputation behind yours. That’s influence.
Let’s take a minute to dwell on those lines again. Has anyone played any of such roles in your life? If yes, that’s the best definition of influence in a nutshell. Influence is not about quantity, but quality. The quality of people in your life is more valuable than the quantity of people one’s life. Do you know we don’t really need battalions of friends, whether online or in person, but just one person of influence can be a game-changer. According to Les Brown, a leadership coach, we need only quality people.
Do you know we are everywhere and nowhere at the same time? Do you also know that we can be everywhere and still have very little influence? Influence is about knowing your value and the right people who appreciate the value you bring. Do you know one can be a person of value to the wrong person or audience?
Influence is about having followers who believe and follow your teaching. We can have visibility with little or no influence. One may have 100,000 followers. We may trend on Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, or even WhatsApp. Your name is a household name. That is visibility.
Let me give you a practical example. If you have a large crowd of people following you online or in person. The critical question one must ask oneself is: why are they following me? Are they following me because of my ideology, my talent/gift, academic process, position, profession, vocation, skill, or jokes? If they follow you because of the ideology you represent, you are a person of influence. If they are following you because of your jokes, you may be a content creator or comedian with little or no value in influencing them to do or not do certain things. Real influence provokes action.
According to Nosakhare Tune Oni, influence is built differently from attention. Attention can be bought. Influence must be earned. You can manufacture visibility with advertising, controversy, or constant posting. But you cannot manufacture trust that easily. It comes from consistently being useful. Keeping your word. Knowing what you’re talking about. Showing up when it matters. Building relationships before you need them.
And creating value for people without constantly asking, “What’s in it for me?”
Do you know a person with 1,000 followers and deep trust within a particular industry may have more real influence than someone with 100,000 followers who nobody listens to. So, I don’t think the goal should simply be: “How many people know me?” A better question is: “How much does my presence actually change things?” Because visibility gets you noticed. Value gets you remembered. Trust gets you listened to, but influence is what happens when people trust your value enough to move.
As I prepare to conclude, please take a minute to ask yourself: are you a person of influence? Do you have influence? What positive influence have you had on people or anyone? Today, I want you to be a man/lady of influence like Martin Luther King Jnr, Mother Theresea, Evangelist Ebuka Obi, President Nelson Mandela, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Dr. Kola Adesina, Dr. Joe Abah, Dr. Dele Momodu, Barr. Henry Ukazu and Miss Ginika Dike.
Henry Ukazu writes from New York. He works with the New York City Department of Correction as the Legal Coordinator. He’s the founder of Gloemi. He’s a Transformative Human Capacity and Mindset coach. He is also a public speaker, youth advocate, creative writer, and author of Design Your Destiny- Actualizing Your Birthright to Success, Unleash Your Destiny, and The Six Pillars of Success. He can be reached via info@gloemi.com
