SCANTY GELA: Ebele Mogo

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I started college pretty early at the age of 14, finished at 18 and got my Masters at 19. Just sharing my story and some tips that helped me make it through. Hopefully you will learn a thing or two.

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You have something you are great at but take for granted. Why don't you share it? There's Youtube, Facebook,twitter, Pinterest, wordpress, blogger...so many free opportunities to build a platform. What is holding you back? Actually, think about it. What really is holding you back? Start something, somewhere, anything...you'd be surprised how the rest add up with time. Happy Monday!

My course already (https://www.udemy.com/become-excellent) has over 500 students because I took the risk and took action!

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Stop waiting for someone else to validate you before you decide you are worthy to share your gift.
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I have come across this line of thinking that says that we can either have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. I enjoy the perspective it offers.

A fixed mindset is an approach to your life, creations, relationships where you see things as fixed. If everything is fixed, then it means that you view your capacity as set in stone. Your mistakes are much more personal, and you will probably avoid them since you see them as reflecting on you. It will be harder to learn from others since that makes them seem better than you. You will be frustrated by challenges since they point not at your potential to grow but at your inabilities.

A growth mindset is one that views everything as a work in progress. This allows you to be more open to failure since rather than it having a negative effect on your self-concept it simply is an opportunity to get even better. Challenges are an opportunity to grow your capacity and to see the extent of your potential. There is always room to grow, learn, expand etc.

There is a difference between thinking you are a failure at a project and assessing it to see your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities to grow and the risks that you need to manage next time. You can give up on working with people or reflect critically on the type of people who have been most fulfilling to you, how to nurture such connections, how to protect yourself, the boundaries you need. Same goes for your past decisions – the shortcomings of each can be cause for regret or better still an opportunity to truly internalize wisdom on how to integrate your experiences, critical thinking skills and emotions into decision making.

In reflecting on this in relation to myself, I have realized the sometimes irrational pressure I have put on myself to be perfect, regretting the failure of events rather than seeing the opportunity they afforded me to learn. I sometimes look back at drafts of things I have created, or how I have handled things in the past and feel embarrassed. Yet if the only way to my potential is growth and learning, perhaps I should be proud that I have grown so much instead.

My mistakes have been a very powerful learning tool for me, especially in the area of decision making and relationships whether personal or corporate. In dealing with people, I have learnt more about boundaries, and become more clear about my own values, my own vision and how to communicate this. My mistakes have helped me with discernment and have given me more intimacy with my intuition and hence more clarity in my communications. My failures have taught me a lot about the opportunities and risks that each of my character traits offer and how to better manage myself. I have learnt more about working with people – how to communicate, understand personalities, protect myself, setting up the right incentives etc. I keep learning everyday.

It is a beautiful and freeing thing to see ourselves as works in progress. It releases us from the need to be perfect. It allows us to own our imperfection. We have less to protect, rather we can look back and see how far we have come and be proud. It allows us to embrace learning since we are more enthusiastic about who we could be on the other end, rather than protecting this fixed idea of who we are. Our mistakes also allow us to bond with and even impact others since there is that possibility for empathy. And of course, in situations where it is even more critical that we make informed decisions – on bigger platforms and when the stakes are higher- we can do better.

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Growing up is hard isn't it? You have to deal with choices, rejection, no road map etc. A few things I have learnt and want to share about growing up.

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STREET-SIDE CONVOS - "Using our anger productively" by Ebele Mogo [OPINION]
Often times we think our angst is so unique. It makes us weird.. But maybe we are not usually as alone as we think. Maybe our angst is a pointer to the future, to a coming wave we can catch on right in time...READ MORE Learn more »

Street-Side Convos: "Are We Living in a Culture of Waste" by EBELE MOGO [OPINION]
While it is a cultural norm to always be busy, it is curious that so much of the effort...Read more

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What comes to mind when you think of the word “critic”? I would imagine that you remember the voice either inside you or in the world that doubts if things will work out and if they will be worth it, and when, and how and why, etcetera. I have found that the voice in my head is often just a way to get control over things I cannot control and I am getting better at putting it in its place. Enough about that: we all know about the inner critic and her downsides but I have found that she also has a place where she can be useful.

My inner critic is very useful in making plans – in setting goals, and strategizing, and evaluating. The critical me is good at setting limits and boundaries and time lines to get things done. The critical you can be useful in helping you do things. A few ways that being critical has helped me lately:

In writing: A kind reviewer helped me to think more clearly about how to work on a really long essay I am trying to craft by advising me to ask the following critical questions as I thought of my narrative: What happened? So what? And now what? Asking these three simple but critical questions helped me to think of how to craft my story with much more oomph. And once I got the foundation right, it became easy to imagine making something that was both sturdy, engaging and creative.

In my organization’s work: At Engage Africa Foundation, we gathered to plan strategically for the new year. We had to be critical about our organization and where we wanted to go and so we had a long meeting to think about our strengths (the things we had going for us), our weaknesses (the things that weren’t our edge), opportunities, and potential threats. This was so useful in helping us see where it was that we would be best positioned to achieve our mission. It helped to frame our discussions and funny enough, so many great spontaneous ideas came out of giving ourselves a seemingly strict framework to guide our discussion.

The same applies to the process of learning to ask better questions that my dissertation formulation is taking me through. A key aspect of being a scholar is tapping into work, frameworks, results, papers that have come before yours – understanding what the literature says and based on that where you can add value. This helps you to yield insight by first looking critically at work that has paved the way for your own question. It helps you to get realistic about your question, and the back and forth between you and other scholars also refines the question even more until it can make a true contribution to the field.

So maybe it is not about silencing our inner critic but setting the right boundaries for her. Maybe she is trying to help and we have to guide her. I say her simply because I am female:) Instead of using your inner critic to put yourself down, your critical self can be tasked with helping you see clearly, with finding the tools to shape your craft. I find it interesting how giving ourselves some boundaries (which our critical self is good at doing) can be useful in helping us be more spontaneous and creative.

Your critical lens can help with finding where it is that you are already positioned to dance freely and happily by helping you take an honest, good, and analytical look at yourself, your work and your world. A realistic assessment of your work can give it room to find its best shape.

Don’t be afraid to put your critical self to good use, just make sure she is serving you, not detracting you. When she moves over into self-doubt and worry call her back to where she is best placed to serve you: when she is helping you think concretely, plan clearly and shape your thinking so there’s lots of room to play.

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I think so and I could be wrong. It is nice to be able to look up to your favourite celebrity after all. However, it seems to get truer and truer for me- that I value ordinariness over extraordinariness. Ordinariness prompts a sort of healthy simplicity- before words and making meaning, before titles, before the need to arrange it all into something lovely.

I see as much (maybe even more) to admire in the ordinariness of someone as I do in their accolades. I see so much that makes me confront my own self. I see that my joy is bigger than me- it holds hands with the passions and joys of someone else in some other place. I see that my pain has its kin in some random person. I am relieved to see that my obsessions might be strange but not entirely unique.

Ordinary people break and twist and bend. Ordinary people change. Ordinary people push hard and aim high but their persistent stringing together of half-bold half-scared moments comprises their prayer beads, their hope, their certainty. Ordinary people have depressing days. Ordinary people have amazing days. Ordinary people are walking contradictions. Ordinary people sometimes think they are extremely different, they just don’t know the truth- that everyone is ordinary like them.

Ordinary people will keep us alive. They will draw one side of the curtain to the left, the other to the right and help us see that they too have been there. They will be the clear water in which we see ourselves reflected. We will touch our faces. We will feel ourselves. We will breathe, feel animated again, and keep on living.

Sometimes I think that life is too short to know all the answers to the questions that I ask in all my deepest places. I want to be like the extraordinary people who seem to know. Sometimes I wonder the shape that my longing and questions and passion will take and then I look at extraordinary people and think- wouldn’t it be nice for it to all fall together nicely like theirs seems to have? I forget that close up, they too are ordinary like me.

But I think I get it for the most part. There is already too much noise keeping people safe but isolated, keeping people thinking that their pain is so unique and unbearable and driving them in crazy directions. I see how an ordinary person can save their lives.

I see how being ordinary might help us meet each other in the most surprising places. If we were ordinary I suspect there will be spaces for others to enter in and exhale. If we were ordinary I suspect our ordinariness would automatically be the hand that motions to another- hey climb up, you’ve got it in you too.

More and more, I think I get the reason why stringing ordinary imperfect words together matters. It is the same reason why the world needs more ordinary people- they resuscitate us all.

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