I have long been an avid fan of observing nature and all its wondrous gifts and insight it provides on how to live a great life…if we allow it to.

Just recently on a wonderful summer break in a beautiful place called Venus Bay, I learnt a lot from the beach! In fact more accurately said I learnt this from my wife Silvana’s observation of the beach! She said that every night as the tide comes in it resets and cancels every footstep, holes dug and sand castles from the day.

Every day it resets!!! Everyday begins anew completely uninfluenced from the day before. The beach doesn’t have an ego that produces regretful thoughts. For example, it doesn’t say, “oh but these were special sand castles that only my sons could make!!” The beach doesn’t have an opinion, it just continues to be what it is.

It doesn’t hold onto to anything from the day before, no matter how ‘special’ or how ordinary.

Every day this beach was different. Some days the waves were wild, other days calmer and other days c...

Firstly, what is the difference between wisdom and knowledge? Whilst dictionary definitions of these words overlap in many ways, the main difference between the two, is that wisdom is applied knowledge, whilst knowledge can be ‘known’, but not necessarily applied or experienced. Another way of looking at this is knowing about something vs knowing something from experience. Most of us at some point have been guilty of information gathering about something but not applying it. That is, knowledge without wisdom. Wisdom has knowledge within it, but unapplied knowledge has no wisdom.

When we apply knowledge, we gain wisdom. In essence wisdom is created and expanded by what we experience, and knowledge is something we know about, without experiencing it. Whilst reading about baking gives me knowledge, the wisdom can only come from being in the kitchen and failing forward with our successes and failures. Wisdom runs deep, knowledge unapplied does not. Wisdom connects to our essence, our bein...

The soul knows nothing about our past. It doesn’t define itself by our history. In fact, it doesn’t define itself by time at all. The soul expresses itself based on our desires, choices and the meaning we give our experiences. The soul creates. With awareness we can create ourselves anew every day, by choosing a different way to respond. To respond with a compassionate understanding rather than judgement. This compassionate understanding is especially important for ourselves. Our very own ego (mind) judges us all the time.

For example, have you ever beat yourself up over a mistake you made. I have. Most of us have. In these moments we can choose to judge ourselves (mind reacting) or we can compassionately understand that we were doing what we thought was right at the time or that was what we knew best at the time (soul creating).

We are creating how we experience of our experiences all the time, whether we know it or whether we don’t. The mind (ego) tends to react to experiences. It ...

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What if everything that showed up in your life was designed and placed there by you for a purpose?

To reclaim, to remember who you really are…

Everything shows up in our lives so we can make a choice. A choice of who we want to be. A choice which moves us closer to love, or closer to fear. Fear is the domain of the ego. Love is the domain of our soul. If we choose to react, we become a slave to our emotions. We become dominated by our ego. Fear becomes king of our psychological domain. All anxiety and depression issues are extensions of fear. Our soul cannot be anxious or depressed. Love is the existential domain of our soul.

In every moment we can choose. Our lives are filled on a daily level of many micro moments. It was literally just the other day I witnessed a micro moment. I was standing on the corner of two streets and a big truck was turning a corner and had to stop in mid turn to give way to a pedestrian. The car behind the truck tooted in a very angry way to the truck. Oth...

Every iota of experience is filled with the colours and flavours of our emotions. The quality of our lives is absolutely determined by the quality of our experiences. The quality of our experiences is amplified or minimised by our emotions. Our emotions are our lives. Fascinatingly, our emotions are not automated. Our emotions do not automatically respond to facts.

Our emotions respond to our interpretation of the facts.

The key word is ‘interpretation’. In other words, our emotions are manufactured by the meaning we give our thoughts, and our thoughts are merely what we think is happening in that experience. For example, you are walking down a busy local street and you see your friend across the road. You wave at them and they fail to wave back. What do you think just happened? What is our interpretation of what just happened? What is the meaning you assign to that. Right there is a pivotal moment. The meaning you give that moment is a psychological portal, a doorway to your rea...

We are all on a journey from ambition to meaning. Within the worlds of ambition and meaning, there are journeys within journeys. Sitting at the core of these two worlds there are the identity phases we evolve through.   

Our identity, the single most powerful force in the human condition. This is because we will do all we can to remain consistent with our identity. Any inconsistency and we can feel intense emotional pain. For example, there have been many people who define themselves by their careers and then suddenly lose their jobs. For many, this can turn into a crisis. If I am my career and now that has been taken away from me, I will feel the pangs of pain. The very thing that defined me, that I would remain consistent with is now no longer there. I now have an inconsistency between how I see myself and what I am not doing. This can lead to an identity crisis – a discussion for another time.

The ambition driven world is a journey about growing up, an expansion of responsibility....

Psychologically, there are two worlds we live in. How things and people seem to be (outer world) and how we feel and see ourselves in this world (inner world). The outer world is our interpretation and our inner world is a knowing. When we become more loyal to our outer world we begin behaving and making decisions that are influenced by external sources with their own agendas, hidden or open. Becoming a slave to outer world needs causes us to behave the way we are meant to based on media, advertising, social media, movies, and perhaps people in your life who don’t truly know you.

It is impossible for anyone to truly know your inner world experience. Think about it, there is nobody in your life who knows or has access to parts of your inner world which you know intimately. For example, my wife Silvana and I and have known each other since 1993. We are very close. You could say that we know everything there is to know about each other. I would completely agree with that. Well, hold on, ...

A crisis in life, whether that be in health, finances, relationship or career, can be likened to a psychological tremor through to a psychological earthquake. The strongest structures remain standing in an earthquake and the weakest structures fall and disappear for ever.

Our psychological earthquakes clarify what matters most in our lives and which relationships are the strongest and which are perhaps not what we thought. A real relationship can handle robust conversation about any topic.  A strong relationship can aggressively tackle any topic and not the person.  

Many have been experiencing psychological earthquakes, losing businesses, relationships and in some cases their lives. Life will sometimes produce tremors. Tremors are like warnings. Warnings of changes we may need to make. Tremors wake us up to our priorities, causing us to perhaps think differently about how we live. 

Crises of any kind, amplify who we were already heading into the crises. I have noticed people who we...

It has been said that love is blind. Any reasonably intense emotion will blind us. Have you ever been standing at your pantry door looking for the salt whilst in an intensely flustered state? Where’s the salt? Right in front of you! Did you see it? No!!! Why? Because any form of intense emotion, whether it be anger, frustration or despair blinds us. On the other hand, positive good feeling emotions open our eyes! We can see again!

Despair is an extension of fear. Fear of the future, fear of uncertainty. Despair also tends to influence where we focus on our timeline. In despair, we tend to focus on how things used to be. How good things used to be, and even more so how things are no longer the way they used to be. By focusing on the past, we are blind to new possibilities. Hope, on the other hand, opens our eyes to the future. Typically, hope is defined as having a positive expectation of our future. Hope is having something to look forward to which in turn adds energy and vibrancy to ...