Quoting others - Why do we do it ?

By Heather de Wit – Founder of INSPIRING SOUTH AFRICANS

Quotes from famous, infamous, other people and organizations

Since time immemorial, people, organizations, past and present, have been recognized and even defined by and associated with their famous quotes – Whether positive or negative, they become a part of that person or organization’s identity.

The curious in me has always questioned why we do this ? Why should those words belong to them, define them or their organization ?

Quotes can have either a positive or a negative connotation – they either uplift us, depress us, mobilize us into positive or negative action or inform us in the case of an organization tagline as to their mission, vision or intention.

Posting quotes on the Social Media

We all do this ! – Some folk on the Social Media, I believe, post far too many quotes per day and I tend to opt out of their notifications as they block my feeds.

I work subliminally on the Social Media and so I have no idea what I am posting from one day to the next – I am guided, according to where I am at on the day and what I need to feel or do – The right post or posts always find me. My intention is always set to inspiring, mobilizing and uplifting others, seeking positive stories and possibility – No politics or negative content will you find in my posts. This also keeps me focused on the positive and possibility.

I post either my own, which I enjoy doing, or other people’s. Quotes that find me I select because they move me emotionally from the head or from the heart – in a positive, kind and good way – and they become my message to me for the day, which I want to share with the world. To propel me into positive action on some level.  

I choose to stay away from negative stories, politics and content that I believe is unnecessary. When I post a quote, I am embracing what I read and it changes one on a cellular level, which is my intention and which should in turn have the same effect on my audience, assuming we’re on the same page of thinking ?

Having said that, I continue to inspire others to write their own authentic quotes from the heart from time to time. 

What makes words effective ?

There is only one book in my book ? – The Dictionary, in any language ! – It is how we string words together that makes them have an impact, or not – resonate, or not, move us, or not and so on.

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Podcasts and the Arts

By Heather de Wit – Founder of INSPIRING SOUTH AFRICANS

What is ‘The Arts’ ?

• The Arts is a group of disciplines, comprising many genres, endeavors or art forms, all united by their employment of the human creative impulse, to express and communicate through various art forms.
• New and additional genres are being added daily.
• Let us put them all in one box for ease of understanding. This may be contentious to some globally, who have different perceptions of The Arts.
• The many forms of expression create an adequate or enormous income for many players, but for others, sadly it must just be perceived as a pastime, due to lack of funds or infrastructures.
• The Arts are dying in many countries, which are not getting sufficient financial support from their governments or other and so it is time to seek other means of exposure and marketing platforms.

What do The Arts enable ?

 

• Opening the thinking channels and inner awareness
• Imparting a message
• Telling a story
• Education
• Imparting and utilizing own gifts and sharing passions
• Invoking inspiration - creating mindset shifts with perceptions gleaned from these disciplines
• Enabling interactive conversation
• Enabling enjoyment, laughter, sadness, joy, anger …
• Creativity and self-expression
• Inspiring mobility into some form of action
• Right brain stimulation
• Enabling escape from real life and so on

Let’s look at some ways we can use Podcasts to gain more exposure, audiences, business, buyers and viewers

Musical Events, tours, New CD/DVD or other launches

• Muso’s would do well to embrace all forms of trending technology and other mediums to get their music in all its forms out there.

 

Theatre - including Dance, Poetry, Magicians, musical theatre et al

• Cast members, producers, playwrights et al can be interviewed and showcased.

Book Launches

·         Authors can tell their story and share their book content

·         This can be co-marketed with e-commerce book companies, online communities and off-line bookstores, that want to drive traffic to their stores and sites

Media Interviews

·         Invite reporters or editors to an online Podcast.

·         These web events can be conducted with the media and shared through relevant websites and e-commerce sites.

·         Online web interviews enable interviewing all relevant journalists at once, with the promotion of their stories on Movie, TV, Radio, Theatre, Music, Dance, Arts et al.

·         Podcasts enable you to expose large groups of people at once to interviews with actors, singers, dancers, poets, playwrights, producers, choreographers, directors etc.

Art Exhibitions

·         Artists across all art forms, can use Podcasts to go global, communicate and showcase their art to the world.

·         They could even stream a pre-recorded Podcast from their own studio or gallery.

·         Inviting a well-known art expert as a guest speaker to a Podcast, who in their own rights, will attract numbers to the web event, would be an added bonus.

Why use Podcasts ?

• Voice and the spoken word is powerful - hearing is believing.
• They enable the host and guest/s to be heard in an informal space.
• They're different, have more impact, are more powerful, personal and effective.
• They make so much sense - They are a fairly new trend and are a perfect adjunct marketing tool to tell your story and promote yourself, your craft or your organization.
• An attention grabber.
• Enables you to listen to voice and develop a relationship with that person, engaging them on a level that is simply not possible with a static text.
• Podcast Recordings remain on the web, so they can usually be listened to at your own leisure.
• Static text is easy to ignore and at its best, gives readers only the vaguest notion of what you, your group or organization really values.

• Voice resonates on the subliminal level.
• Additional creative marketing platforms are constantly being sought in all genres and Podcasts are becoming more and more acceptable in mainstream and other market spaces.
• They can be used as an adjunct marketing tool on your Social Media and Websites.
• Old school marketing is no longer effective.
• Google loves Podcasts.

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The Archetype of SOULMATES

by Heather de Wit – Founder INSPIRING SOUTH AFRICANS

SOULMATES

There’s been talk around soulmates for time immemorial and most often around a romantic bond or connection and perhaps sometimes an over-bandied word.

Many are yearning for and searching for their soulmate in the romantic sense and believe and hope that, in their fantasy world, when they find him or her they will be complete, happy, fulfilled, richer, better … Not true.

We all have different beliefs around this and there is no right or wrong – I believe we have many soulmates of both genders, including animals, that come into our lives for a certain time or a lifetime.

Animals have souls and therefore they too have soulmates and can be our soulmates in turn.

Soulmates ‘see’ and totally ‘get’ one another, have a strong affinity, shared values and tastes – They connect on a soul level and are completely honest with one another - They’re someone with whom you can be yourself, but this is not necessarily a perfect fit. They move in and out, as we choose to keep or discard them. They test us, teach us, help us to learn lessons, if we’re open to it and even guide us on this journey called life.

A joyous union or a dysfunctional one, not all soulmate unions are harmonious, nor are they meant to be.

A true soulmate is like a mirror, reflecting back to you the aspects within yourself that are holding you back from being your true authentic self, or you see in your soulmate aspects that you like in them and that you would like to have in yourself. They should make you feel entirely whole, healed and intact, like no piece is missing from the puzzle.

A soulmate should ideally influence you to change and better yourself, in order to be the best you and should also bring out the best in you. Soulmates come in many different guises and we will all have many soulmate encounters in our lifetime, where we think this is 'it’ –  only to find down the line, that good old Mr. Fantasy had lured us in and hoodwinked us yet again and it could have taken just one sentence or a certain response, that made us change our minds and realize that this wasn’t in fact ‘it’.

  

ELEMENTS of a SOULMATE

·         An inner knowing a tenacious, profound and lingering emotion, which few words can express.

·         If you believe in past lives and your partner is your soulmate, they were probably present in your past lives. You might suddenly and briefly experience flashbacks of your soulmate. You might at times even feel an odd sense of déjà vu, as if the moment in time has already taken place, perhaps a long time ago, perhaps in a different setting.

·         You just get each other – You often finish each other’s sentences.

·         You fall in love with their flaws, their imperfections and accept one another just as you are. Soulmate relationships will have their ups and downs, but because of the strong bond, acceptance and forgiveness during the downs will be easier.

·         It’s intense in both good and bad ways, but the bond always keeps it strong and accepting.

·         You are always mentally in tune e.g. You may call one another at the exact same time.

·         You feel protected and secure – your soulmate should not play on your insecurities.

·         You cannot imagine life with them, which often takes us to the fear of losing the other.

·         You look each other in the eye with your deep-seated connection.

LIFE PARTNERS

Life Partners without the essence of the Soulmate archetype can lack the elements to mould perfectly to you. They can be a great support, provider and long-time companion, but their capacity to enrich your spirit and really connect to you on a soul level is limited.

Some Life Partners marry or stay together, because they choose to settle for a multitude of reasons - For money, companionship, prestige or other, mainly because they have a real subconscious fear of being alone.

We were all born with free will and responsible choice and can, at any time, remain in or change any relationship as we see fit

We don’t need anyone to complete us 

We are complete just as we are !

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The SKEPTIC and VULNERABILITY

By Heather de Wit – Founder of Inspiring South Africans – INSPIRING SOUTH AFRICANS

The Skeptic

The Skeptic - also spelt Sceptic - is generally any questioning attitude towards unempirical knowledge or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, a method of intellectual caution and suspended judgement.

Also an attitude of doubt regarding claims or a disposition to incredulity, that are taken for granted elsewhere. Skeptics may even doubt the reliability of their own senses.

Skepticism is often separated into categories related to morality - right or wrong - or religion - religious doubt -  or the nature of knowledge - there is no knowledge beyond how things appear.

Some definitions of the Skeptic

·         Philosophical skepticism is a systematic approach that questions the notion that absolutely certain knowledge is possible.

·         Classical philosophical skepticism derives from the 'Skeptikoi', a school who ‘asserted nothing’. 

·         Religious skepticism, on the other hand, is ‘doubt concerning basic religious principles, such as immortality, providence, and revelation’.

·         Scientific skepticism is about testing beliefs for reliability, by subjecting them to systematic investigation using the scientific method, to discover empirical evidence for them.

·         Legal skeptism is a branch of jurisprudence, an essence, a critique of the natural law theories and of the legal positivism.

Sometimes the word skeptic can be perceived as a rather harsh word and at other times it fully resonates. We move in and out of skepticism as human beings, driven by the senses, the heart or by the head.

Quite simply – when choose to assume the role of the skeptic, we don’t believe what we are hearing or seeing to be true, to be a fact, a reality and more especially when we are feeling vulnerable.

Vulnerability

The general perception of vulnerability is that it is weakness. However, it is absolutely at the core of fear, anxiety, shame and every emotion we experience and it is also the birthplace of love, belonging, of creativity, of faith.

We’re actually losing our capacity and tolerance for vulnerability, because joy actually becomes almost foreboding. It’s much easier to live a disappointed life, than to admit being vulnerable – We numb it out.

Vulnerability is the state of being open to injury, or appearing as if you are. It might be emotional, like admitting that you are in love with someone, who might only like you as a friend, or it can also be literal, like the vulnerability of a soccer goal that is unprotected by any defensive players.

Vulnerability refers to the inability of a system or a unit, to withstand the effects of a hostile environment.

A window of vulnerability - WoV - is a time frame within which defensive measures are diminished, compromised or lacking.

Social Vulnerability

Social vulnerability is one dimension of vulnerability to multiple stressors, the agent responsible for stress and shocks, including abuse, social exclusion and natural hazards.  Social vulnerability refers to the inability of people, organizations and societies to withstand adverse impacts from multiple stressors to which they are exposed. These impacts are due in part to characteristics inherent in social interactions, institutions, and systems of cultural values.

Cognitive Vulnerability

A cognitive vulnerability, in cognitive psychology, is an erroneous belief, a cognitive bias or pattern of thought that is believed to predispose the individual to psychological problems. It is in place before the symptoms of psychological disorders start to appear, after the individual encounters a stressful experience, the cognitive vulnerability shapes a maladaptive response that may lead to a psychological disorder.  

In psychopathology, cognitive vulnerability is constructed from schema models, hopelessness models and attachment theory. Attentional bias is one mechanism leading to faulty cognitive bias that leads to cognitive vulnerability. Allocating a danger level to a threat depends on the urgency or intensity of the threshold.

The World today

The reality today is that we are living in a very fast-paced world, with information streaming in at a phenomenal pace, via the Internet, mainstream Media and Social Media and so on, where we can very quickly and easily be swept into believing untruths and buy into unhealthy mindsets with convincing mind control techniques by all these and other mediums.

Many of us live in a culture where there is not enough, the big diverse divide is a reality, it’s not safe enough, we are not good enough, we are not extraordinary enough. Somehow an ordinary life has become synonymous with a meaningless life and we are missing what is most important, because we are on this journey we believe is extraordinary, not understanding that it is in the ordinary moments of our lives, where we can find the most joy !

How do we thrive on the planet as Skeptics and Vulnerable human beings ?

No quick or final answers here I’m afraid … a few thought to ponder on …

·         Don’t believe everything you see or read  

·         Research all you can before assuming it to be true or judging it

·         Tap into your intuition and inner genius

·         Listen to your inner child

·         Surround the situation with loving, positive energy

·         Surround yourself with people who are on the same mission and you are

·         Allow more joy, love and gratitude into your life

·         Stop, breathe listen

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That Branding word

By Heather de Wit – Founder of INSPIRING SOUTH AFRICANS

Self-Image – Identity > BRAND

We need to take a step back from time to time and ask ourselves whether we are truly living our Brand as an individual or as a collective brand / Business / Organization. 

• What messages are we sending ‘out there’ ?
• What are we trying to achieve ?
•  Who is our target audience and are they effectively ‘hearing’ and ‘seeing’ us ?
• Is what we are doing in our marketing endeavors working … or not ?

TRENDS and MARKETING

How do we choose the most effective tool to market ourselves as a Brand ?  

Seeing what’s hot and what’s not – Trends shift and come and go at an alarming pace and if we don’t observe and take positive action on those that are working, we could get left behind.

Resist all you like, but consistent marketing of intelligent content on the Social Media is key to staying ahead of the pack and keeping your presence as an Individual or as a Business alive and thriving.

THE HUMAN CONDITION ?

The human condition is defined as 'the characteristics, key events and situations, which compose the essentials of human existence, such as birth, growth, emotionality, aspiration, conflict and mortality.'

We are all in the process of transcending into something else all the time – moving constantly from one space to another, mentally in our heads and physically in our bodies.  We produce new cells in our bodies every few months - So that every few months we become ‘in matter’ something else entirely.

The same applies in principle to Business – always moving and seeking which best business practices, marketing ideas, concepts and technology are best to implement to achieve our goals and to win and succeed.

MINDSET MASTERY

Smart and honest marketing, which fully expresses your values, your message, true essence and principles, will convert and change the minds of prospects into buyers. 

Much can be ‘said’ and expressed in pictures – Pictures are a powerful medium to get your message across and out there – enables simple resonance across language and age. 

Mainstream businesses, educational institutions, online training and Non Profits, across genres, are embracing and utilizing Animated film and 2D 3D et al Film Ads to tell their story.

What are you doing to get You or your Business out there ?

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The lure of Fantasy

By Heather de Wit – Founder of INSPIRING SOUTH AFRICANS

As a curious human being, I don’t believe everything I hear and read, but the realm of fantasy is something that can make or break you, if you don’t dig deep and unpack what you are perceiving is your reality.

FANTASY, DREAMS and REALITY

Let’s look at fantasy, dreams and reality - How do we differentiate between them > When our heart rules ? or > When our head rules ? – Which one do we believe ?.  I believe there is a fine line between fantasy, dreams and reality, but that is my perception.

FANTASY

Fantasy is powerful – it pulls you in via TV, the Media, film, especially animated film, the Internet and all it represents and so on. 

What really pulls us in ? - Mind Control, which is nothing new and which has been practised for centuries and comes in many guises and talks of how ‘they’ lure you in so slickly. It just is what it is – Controlling the mind with fancy jargon, expectations, promises, hope and we get lured in either by the heart or by the head. 

Get rich quick and MLM schemes are one example – they pull you into the fantasy, hook you in with the same jargon – ‘We’re in … countries’  ‘Our top leader made … in … months. ‘We give back to …’  

All same same – I’ve been there, done that, worn the Tshirt and it did not work for me. Intrinsically, intuitively and in principle, I knew it was not me, not what I wanted to do, not what I believed in, but I got addicted to the jargon, the promises, the hope. I had to learn that first and when I eventually ‘got it’, I walked away from anything that smacks of it many years ago - for life !

DREAMS and VISIONS

A peep into some of my dreams and visions since I was a child.

As an avid and imaginative dreamer, while ‘asleep’ – for many years now, I’ve traveled to countries and places I’ve never been to in my lifetime – Astral traveling ? – I knew them, felt them, sensed the smells there - that déjà vu thing – What is that ?. I have my inner knowing of it and I do enjoy the ride and forgot to say - it has saved me a small fortune in airfares and other expenses !

I often experience what I call 'my black and white slide show' – flashes, in quick succession, of faces of departed people, visuals of animals and birds from decades, even centuries ago – Always in black and white, no colour – Past lives ? They won’t stop until I switch them off. I ‘knew’ them all well – So what was that ? - I have my inner knowing of it and I embrace the messages I get with gusto.

This one visits me often – a gorgeous lady singer, done up and dusted, perched on a stool, donning a glittering headband, complete with feathers, weaving a very long cigarette holder – in a smoky speakeasy during the prohibition era – about to burst into song – Jazz of course ! Who is she ? I’ve been there, I know her, I feel she a part of me. What is that ? I have my inner knowing here too, so I choose to simply enjoy and embrace her visits and enjoy the music !

All this in the realms of my dreamworld, which no one has privy to, unless I choose to share them.  The curious being that I am, I always try to write them down, as I remember them and to unpack them, to find my special message or lesson – I always seem to find one or a few, which alerts me to what needs to be done … or undone …

FIRST LOVE

Let’s go back to our first love – we should all have one, but not conforming to the norm and not believing everything I hear, I believe we can have many first loves. Remember the butterflies, the excitement, the high, the expectations, the hope - which, once experienced, we forever yearn to feel again – to experience that ‘high’ again.

So who was in charge of that First Love ? Was it the heart or the head ? And – was it just a fantasy – our fantasy – of a perfect experience between two people, with boundless possibilities for a ‘happily ever after’ ?

FAIRIES

As a child, around 5 or 6, I used to build what we called 'fairy glens' in a hidden part of the garden - make the fairies mud pies, pick flowers for them, give them cookies, all sorts - I swear I saw them early in the morning when I went to see if they had taken the pickings and every time, without fail, all the goodies had disappeared. What was that ? - Well Mom or Dad could have ? or ... ? - My knowing said what I saw was real and I loved believing that.

One of my favorite movies of all times  is FairyTale : A true Story - which I have watched time and again and never tire of it - My assumption - I fully believe those little girls ...

ALIENS

I have had a few visitations from Aliens - I saw them, I sketched them - What was that ? - I knew them, they knew me. The one was negative and it rattled me and I did not like their energy. My knowing knew why they came - why they were attracted to me and so I had to do the necessary process to detach them from my auric field. 

CHOICES

No matter what cards we get dealt in life, dream, fantasy or reality, we do get to choose how we will respond internally. 

We can choose to resist or resent them, either bemoaning our fate, or we can face and embrace them - Expanding in the moment to possibility, to the now, the present moment, which is all there is.

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The Art of Imperfection and Wabi Sabi

By Heather de Wit – Founder of INSPIRING SOUTH AFRICANS

The PERFECTIONIST

As I continue down the road on my journey, I’m trying to drop The Perfectionist in me – it’s not an easy process, as resistance rears its niggly head often and challenges me – But I’ll get there … with the tools I’ve found and continue to find along the way. We can be way too hard on ourselves at times, which can block possibility and even immobilize us.

IMPERFECTION as an ART

As an out there creative, seeing imperfection as an Art makes me smile, as I believe we are all Artists in whatever role we are playing in this life. – That all is perfect, just as it is, in this moment – That we are all right where we are meant to be – right now - in this moment – We manifested our current status in life all by ourselves, by the conscious choices we have made and this may not seem perfect right now …

We see so much of the small stuff as imperfect and try to perfect it with a quick fix, in the hopes that it will go away. But with a shift in attitude, we can change the power it has over us, the way we can choose to see it, so it does not affect our day or our mood.

WABI-SABI

Wabi-Sabi is a fascinating Japanese sensibility, that reveres the Art of Imperfection and the paradox of the inevitability of mistakes. It represents Japanese aesthetics and world view, centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is ‘imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete’.

It is a concept derived from the Buddhist teaching of the 3 marks of existence, specifically impermanence, suffering and emptiness or absence of self-nature.

 

Characteristics of the Wabi-Sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, asperity - roughness or irregularity - simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes.

Architect and Artist Leonard Koren explains in Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers’ – It is about the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral – things so subtle and evanescent they are almost invisible at first glance – impermanent, imperfect, incomplete.

So how do we do this if we choose ?

•  Introduce the fabric of Wabi-Sabi into our daily lives
• Lighten up
• Take the time to see the sacred in the subtle and most ordinary of things – e.g. watching the ants, the flowers, the clouds, butterflies, the glory of nature in all things …
• Be kind to ourselves
• Oh – and did I mention, you have to slow down !

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Shapeshifting > Mindshifting > Downshifting

By Heather de Wit – Founder of INSPIRING SOUTH AFRICANS

SHAPESHIFTING

Shapeshifting has always fascinated me – A change of physical form, manifested as if by supernatural means.  We see this all the time today in fantasy and sci-fi movies, children’s literature and pop culture.

Mythology, folklore and modern fantasy fiction tell us that shapeshifting is the ability of a being to physically transform into another form or being, either as an inherent faculty of a mythological creature, or by means of magic – What fun !

The most common form of shape-shifting is Therianthropy - the transformation of a human being into an animal, or conversely of an animal into human form and sometimes, the transformation may be into a plant or object, or into another human form.

Why am I going here ? – To illustrate the possibility that we as human beings can transform ourselves into and be whomever we want, at any time, should we choose !

MINDSHIFTING

This is probably one of the biggest challenges facing us as human beings – To first have the desire to change our minds and then to do the work to shift the mind from preconceived beliefs, mind sets, ancestral history, conditioning into another reality or consciousness.  

It takes work - no buts … To rise and move out of our fears and comfort zones and to decide to change our minds – We can train and retrain our brains and our subconscious minds at any time – The sub conscious mind is the most powerful thing we all have and if we feed it right, magic happens.  

DOWNSHIFTING

We are living in exciting times, but the pace is overwhelmingly fast.  The Internet, TV, Mobiles, Movies, Social Media etc are available to all of us and, if we allow it -  it can consume us and many are addicted to their Mobiles and Social Media 24/7. Wherever I look, people are looking down (at their Mobiles) - instead of up, just in case they miss something ... 

If we don’t discipline ourselves and manage our time spent in these arenas efficiently, by focusing on things that really matter, we will find little time to step back and to see what’s really going on in our lives – To see what is and what’s not working.  

When you slow down and switch everything off, possibility peeps in …

Stop, breathe, listen …

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