Equipping young women professionals with young families to find fulfillment, contentment and joy as mothers and home makers without losing sight of who they are as women.

Volume 02, Issue 26: Explore Your Passions

Playing to our strengths is living on purpose. It is about doing what we love to do, what we can do well and accomplishing what is important to us. That may be more than one thing for each of us.

I was elated when I realized that we are not wired to love to do just one thing. Each of us may have one overreaching passion, but neatly tied to our overall purpose is a set of other passions. Don’t limit yourself to your first discovery. Explore your passions and find channels of expressing them in living out your purpose.

Your skill of applying your gift grows with learning and practice. Over time as we employ our gifts, the channels for their expression changes and expands, but our purpose remains the same. Allow yourself room for flexibility in the expression of your gift.

Choose to lead a fulfilling life, a life you love and feel great about. Embrace purpose-driven living. Pursue the positive desires of your heart while you work hard at developing your passions to transform them into finely polished competencies.

Lillian Chebosi

Volume 02, Issue 26: Explore Your Passions

Playing to our strengths is living on purpose. It is about doing what we love to do, what we can do well and accomplishing what is important to us. That may be more than one thing for each of us.

I was elated when I realized that we are not wired to love to do just one thing. Each of us may have one overreaching passion, but neatly tied to our overall purpose is a set of other passions. Don’t limit yourself to your first discovery. Explore your passions and find channels of expressing them in living out your purpose.

Your skill of applying your gift grows with learning and practice. Over time as we employ our gifts, the channels for their expression changes and expands, but our purpose remains the same. Allow yourself room for flexibility in the expression of your gift.

Choose to lead a fulfilling life, a life you love and feel great about. Embrace purpose-driven living. Pursue the positive desires of your heart while you work hard at developing your passions to transform them into finely polished competencies.

Lillian Chebosi

Volume 02, Issue 25: Build on the Best you Have

How do we play to our strengths if we don’t believe that our strengths would make a difference? There is a reason why our make-up draws us to certain things and repels us from others. Each of us is wired to do certain things exceptionally well, and have fun in the process.

The absence of belief in our strengths and the pressure to improve our fault lines keeps us busy patching up cracks; to make us at least good, if not average at everything. And we label this self development.

Self development is about improving our strengths, not our weaknesses. We can only go so far in trying to improve our weaknesses. Fixing our weaknesses isn’t the way to go. We would never be great by patching up our weaknesses, because we could never be the best at them regardless of how much we improved. However, there’s endless room for improvement when it comes to developing our strengths.

We grow most where we are already strong. Our weaknesses will never become our areas of greatest opportunity. This does not mean that we ignore our weaknesses but we need not spend immoderate amounts of time trying to convert them into strengths. They will never be.  Build on your strengths and manage around your weaknesses.

Personal development is building on the best you have; your strengths, not your weaknesses. Dare to go against the grain and play to your strengths. Believe in your natural abilities and passions, and work hard at developing them into finely polished competencies; then make your contribution to the world with them.

Lillian Chebosi

Volume 02, Issue 24: Playing to Our Strengths

Growing up, our parents and teachers pushed us to get A’s in all subjects. Like everybody else, there were subjects that were obvious A’s and B’s for you. But there was at least one notorious subject where you scored a D. Taking home the report card on closing day, our parents would drill us and even spank us for getting a D, sometimes neglecting to praise us for the A’s that populated our report cards. The focus was on our areas of weakness.

We were expected to be good at everything. So, we grew up thinking that fixing our weaknesses was the way to go. Having grown up that way, some of us are finding ourselves applying the same principles to our children, pushing them to turn their one or two notorious D’s into A’s. We even experience it at work as supervisors and supervisees where we are expected and expect others to work on improving their fault lines.

But think about it. Isn’t building on our strengths as opposed to fixing our weaknesses what will make us more successful? We can’t ignore our weaknesses but they will never become areas of our greatest opportunity. We grow most where we are already strong.

You need to become really specific about what your strengths are. Your personality doesn’t change as you grow older. As you grow older you become more of who you already are now. Your values, dreams and aspirations will change but the core of who you are and your personality remains the same.

Your weaknesses are not your areas of opportunity. You grow most in your areas of greatest strengths. Address your weaknesses but they are areas of your least opportunity. Build on your strengths and manage around your weaknesses.

In this light, shouldn’t we put more emphasis on the subjects that our children score highly in; and instead of pushing them to work harder on their D subjects, try and find out why they are doing poorly in them? We may find that the problem is in the method of teaching by a particular teacher, or something else; and addressing that could improve the D to a C, and be ok with that as we support them to get better and better in the areas they are already good at.

You will be your most creative, most productive, and most fulfilled when you discover how to play to your strengths.

Lillian Chebosi

Volume 02, Issue 23: Happiness is an Inside Job

If you are like me, you know people who fault others for their unhappiness. There are people busy blaming their circumstances, relatives, and even the government for the lack of happiness in their lives. It is always someone’s fault that things are not working for them.

Well, it’s nobody fault. And the worst part is that this attitude offers no solution to their status. And while they waste time at this blame game, they lose opportunities to do what they can to do to find fulfillment.

Your happiness is nobody’s responsibility; it’s entirely up to you to be happy. Although our loved ones bring happiness into our lives, it is not your spouse’s or children’s job to make you happy. You are responsible for being happy, the world does not owe you anything. The government doesn’t owe you a job. And even if it gave you one, you would probably still be unhappy, because it is not a job or money that makes one happy.

Happiness depends on your personal development. When you do the things that make you feel strong and successful, you will spend your days happy. When you find the things that God wired you to do and discipline yourself to do them, you will be happy. When you make it a priority to feed your mind every day with material that build and inspire you, you will be happy. When you make spiritual development a priority by disciplining yourself to spend quality time in prayer and in the word of God, you will be happy. When you find and create opportunities to do the things you love to do, you will be happy.

When you get established in these things, then where you are and what people around you are doing or not doing for you become irrelevant. You will find joy and fulfillment in your preoccupations. You will look forward to each day because you will be happy with your life. Your loved ones may still not regard you the way you want them to, but you will be happy anyway.

Personal development helps you discover who you are and what God build you to do and love to do. When you do, you will find ways to concentrate your work in line with what you love to do, the activities that strengthen you. You will make it upon yourself to surround yourself with people who build and motivate you, and stay away from those who belittle your ambition and bring you down.

Happiness is an inside job. Being satisfied and fulfilled in life is about personal development. Quit blaming others and your circumstances for your unhappiness. Arise and develop yourself, then you will be undoubtedly happy.

Lillian Chebosi