Transcript

Hi everybody. I decided to do something different today which is a bit of a personal experience sharing with you with a couple of lessons that I've learned along the way that also might benefit you.

I'm right now in our back garden as you can see. It's a place that we're still refurbishing but it's a place of tranquillity and peace. I think it's important in life that we find our ways to really come to ourselves and be peaceful and be congruent and we can grow. I mean, connecting the head and the heart.

Especially in a western society, we sometimes get a little bit too much up here (head) and not enough here (heart) and we kind of shut it off and that is really a problem because that's a disconnect and a disconnect always causes issues. Issues in the sense of recurring patterns or problems that keep popping up in our life just as feedback to let us know that we slid off; we got off track.

The feedback is there to remind ourselves to basically own up to the disconnect that we have created and that it also gives us the opportunity to do better, to do different so you restore the connection between head and heart. As we do, I found time and time and time again that things really change for the better.

But also if we don't do it you know what life keeps treating you on: the same old experiences until the penny drops, you get it and you own up to it.

I'm sharing all this here today with you guys because I just had a very meaningful conversation, to some extent a bit tough, with a very close friend of mine overseas. He just raised something that had to be said and it just basically confronted me with something that i had turned a blind eye to. This friend of mine many moons ago has helped me out with a purchase of a property (our home) and I actually failed financially speaking to pay him back in a meaningful way. Look, this is one of the things that I certainly have been working on, which is putting structure to money and doing what i've got to do in that department.

Again, I just want to be open and raw and real with you guys. It's not too scripted as you can tell. I haven't got a teleprompter in front of me. I haven't even got let's say notes that i've taken because I thought “let me just show you the real raw me” because often people say “Hey Bram, you always look so happy and cheerful and chirpy and you're also always so energizing and it's great to be around you”…

You know what guys? Letting you know I’m not always like that. Like you, I have my demons. I have my baggage of the past. I've got certain things to do something about because there's certain thoughts that I’ve put in my mind and I accepted them as true and it's just a perception and they're not always serving me these thoughts. Equally, there's certain things that I’ve shut out of my heart. It's sometimes really good to face the truth for what it is without judging it because often we do that.

It's easy to be happy and have great days and success and wins and that sort of stuff and celebrate those but you know what? I found that the biggest blessings come from those things that look initially as our problems. They initially challenge us. They are hard yes. It's easy to turn a blind eye to them. I'm the first one to put on my hand for it.

It's really about owning them too and as you integrate the rosy stuff along with the more challenging stuff… what you're doing is reconnecting your head and your heart.

When the two are open, when the two are fully connected and there's basically a connection, not only that information is going back and forth, but what you think and what you feel is in harmony with one another, guess what means.

That's the reason why you have been successful because you had unison. You had something working in a synergy. You got momentum happening. You got in the zone because what you felt and what you thought were connected.

I invite you today to just face the truth for what it is. Own the traits of both good and bad. Don't just think that you are only positive and cheerful or only depressed and negative. You know what you got both just like I do. And if there's anything to be done, take stock once in a while. Reflect on what has to be said and also when somebody else tells you what has to be said, just listen to it without judging and accept it for what it is.

When you then take the action with that (for example: one of my learning lessons has definitely been to manage money deal with money and do it in a constructive way and it continues to be in a way a learning journey for me today), as you really take the full blessing of the learnings on board, you integrate it and you re-establish that connection between head and heart in that department.

You start seeing that the actions will create momentum and as it does with a wheel that you put in motion, what initially was hard starts to get more and more traction over time. You and I know that. Sooner or later, you start seeing that things will happening for you.

Just letting you know again, the big domain for me has been about money.

This friend of mine reminded me of a moment when I was really going through the deep valley of wallowing and self-pity, not really having found my way, being disconnected, having lost my way, not having a vision, just really feeling stuck and lost in a way…

Back in those days, I actually spent some time overseas just to reconnect with my roots and see my friends and my family because I needed some sort of supportive environment. This is many years ago now and I even forgot about it until this friend of mine raised it again today.

He reminded me that i said to him back then that all of my belongings were sitting in a car that I had parked at the airport prior to jumping on the plane to go back to Europe.

when he just told me that, even now I almost start getting tears in my eyes because that's sometimes the stuff that we go through in life. You know, we all have our challenges, our curveballs, our stuff that happens along the way.

When I now reflect, this is probably 12 years later, I live in a beautiful home. The car that my stuff was in back then wasn't mine; I borrowed it. I have my own now.

Like I said, my journey continues just like yours does and I still have my learning lessons and I still have to put structure to things and own up to it and face it and do something about it and not just look for the stuff that is easy but also look at the stuff that is hard to admit.  

I just want to give you this video here as a message that everything is okay. Everything that happens to you is happening to you for a reason and it's there to help you grow. As as soon as you accept that as truth you're on a path of rediscovery, growth and achievement.

So, whether it's personal stuff that you're dealing with right now or business stuff that you're dealing with right now, KNOW and TRUST that the world is conspiring to help you.

You will also always keep getting the experiences and having people pop up in your life that treat you in a certain way to help you grow.

Seriously, this is really one of the biggest blessings in life. Don't just judge stuff or people for what they do or say to you that you initially thought of as being unfair or not appropriate or not very kind or any of that because that's judgment.

You're not getting the message when you're going there. It's a space of gratitude where everything changes for the better.

I hope this video serves you.

If I can just share one more quick example with you of something that I experienced back in the days when things were really tough…

I remember when my business was really not working for me at a certain time, I was looking for a way out because I just couldn't make it work, mainly due to the business model (I was selling time for money which is not a viable option if you think about it from an entrepreneur's perspective; you need a better business model).

Back in those days, I was looking for a way out or a better way and the finances were not really coming in recurringly from the business and of course i had by then a family to look after and you know a mortgage to pay and actually another one to look after as well.

We sometimes got to do what we got to do and to again show you that i'm not always the cheerful happy bouncy highly energized and whatever else you want to call me Bram, I remember exactly swallowing my pride to go to an organization where I would get 25 bucks an hour to scan items. It was stock take. I remember doing that like three to four hours per day in one shop and just driving around to shops while i was trying to get my business back up and running.

Just letting you know if you're a fellow entrepreneur and it's it has been a bit of a tough ride or you're right now in it or you're about to head into one, just know that it's always there to help you grow.

Yeah, I've been there too and I'll probably will continue having challenges along the way. And you know what? It's all good! It's there to help you grow.

I'm so grateful that that organization was there because it taught me to be humble, not to be too much self-absorbed. It taught me to overcome pretentiousness. It helped me put my ego back in check. Sometimes we all need a bit of a shake-up and that's why those initial challenges in your life are there to help you grow and soar and thrive.

So, I hope that my message served you in some way.

Any thoughts or questions, please drop me a comment below. I'd love to hear from you. There's also a few resources that I will pop in below this video to some of my programs and some PDFs that you can download and other resources. Just go check them out.

Again, leave me a comment because I love hearing from you. Have a good day. Thank you for joining. Cheers