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 01 Issue 11: Gifts and Money

As we start the holidays and festive season, we stumble upon the emphasis to give gifts to those dear to us. We give gifts throughout the year at different occasions but the Christmas spirit does put an emphasis on us to express love though gifts. Gift giving is indeed fundamental to love. As reiterated by Dr. Gary Chapman in his book on love languages, "it doesn’t matter whether it costs money. What matters is that you thought of him or her. And it is not the thought implanted only in the mind that counts, but the thought expressed in actually securing the gift and giving it as the expression of love." However, as obvious as it may seem, giving gifts doesn’t come naturally to all of us. Some are good at it, others could use some help.

Gifts come in all forms. Some are expensive and others don’t have financial implications. My focus today is on gifts that we have to spend money on. Each of us has a personal perception of the use of money and we have various emotions associated with spending it. People with a spending orientation feel good about themselves when they spend money. Some of us on the other hand have a saving and investing orientation. We feel good about ourselves when we save money and invest it wisely. Spend thrifts have little difficulty purchasing gifts for their spouses. Savers on the other hand experience emotional resistance to the idea of spending money as an expression of love. They certainly don’t consider gifts as investments but as expenses to be avoided. A saver hardly buys things for himself or herself. This makes it difficult for a saver to buy things for his or her spouse.

But here is a reality check for you if you fall on the category of savers. Saving and investing is purchasing things for yourself. By saving and investing you are purchasing self worth, emotional and financial security. You are caring for your own emotional needs for financial security in your way of handling money. What you may not be doing is meeting the emotional needs of your spouse. If your spouse feels loved by receiving gifts, then purchasing gifts for him or her is a worthwhile investment to make for your relationship. Gifts are enjoyed by all, including those who don’t put too much value on receiving gifts. A well thought out gift every now and then won’t compromise your savings. Invest in your spouse.

Receiving gifts makes us feel thought of, remembered and special. “People will forget what you said; People will forget what you did; But people will never forget how you make them feel”. Bonnie Jean Wasmund.

Lillian Chebosi

Volume 01 Issue 10: Health is Personal

Those of us who are petite often find ourselves trying to keep our physical development involvements a secret. A common question from family and friends at the mention of our physical development observances is usually “what for?”. I have come to appreciate that the fact that one has no fat to burn nor weight to shed doesn’t make him/her any healthier than those who do. Health and fitness is for everyone, big and small alike. We all need our physique to deliver our goals regardless of our size. Other than non-modifiable factors of genes, inborn defects, age and sex, health is determined by diet, exercise, rest, social and emotional environment. This implies that health is largely a product of lifestyle. Genes for instance only load the trigger. Lifestyle pulls it.

Diet

We are largely ignorant about the foods that we take. The Bible warns us that God’s people perish for lack of knowledge. Just the way we value our vehicles and give them fuel that we deem to be good. Shouldn’t we make an effort to learn about the foods that we feed our bodies? Are you letting modern society determine what you should eat? I do not purport to be an expert in diet but my observations indicate that what you feed your body with determines its useful life. My own practice confirms that taste buds are indeed in the brain, not in the mouth. The more you eat foods that you would otherwise consider tasteless, the more you develop a taste and liking for them and eventually prefer them over the not so healthy ones that appear tasty.

Exercise

Engaging in physical fitness is not just for weight loss as it is wrongly construed. Once we attain our personal ideal weight, we exercise to maintain it. But more importantly, we exercise to attain and maintain cardiovascular fitness, muscular strength and endurance (which come in handy in emergency situations), flexibility and body tone.  All body parts benefit from physical fitness, the heart, the brain, muscles, GIT and the skin.

I take it that engaging in physical development in our youth is commensurate with making financial savings and investments now for future consumption when we lose our earning abilities. Invest in health and fitness now while you are healthy. We usually watch with sadness whenever we find an elderly overweight fellow in the gym struggling to exercise because the physician has advised that his/her life depends on it. Why don’t you eat well and exercise now while you have the privilege of youth and vitality? Healthy living doesn’t guarantee us a disease free life. But there is plenty of wisdom in choosing preventive measures over curative ones for our health.

Lillian Chebosi

Volume 01 Issue 09: Master Your Time

What is your relationship with time? Is it a happy one or an unhappy one? Do you often feel like you don’t have enough time to do the things that are important to you? The only time we have is the time as we make use of. Time management equates to self management, implying that if we can manage out time we can manage ourselves. We are responsible for the employment of our time. We have to choose to organize our time or agonize over losing it because once lost, it cannot be recovered. Given the number of things that compete for our time in any given day, an analysis of the abundance of time reveals that we have very limited personal time. After deducting the time we spend at work, travelling, with family and at social events, we are left with very limited personal time. Hence the urgency to plan and prioritize our time in order to make efficient and effective use of this valuable but limited resource.

Assign a value to your personal time. How much is your hour worth? Once you determine the value of your time, sieve out things that are of less value. Find practical and creative ways to make optimal use of your personal time. See if there are tasks that you engage in that you find that as you do them, an activity that would better add value to your life is neglected. If you are like me, I spent about an hour most early Saturday mornings in the local market shopping for fresh groceries until I realized that that was not an optimal use of my time and requested the grocer to deliver the supplies. For me, shopping for groceries is a good task but it does not require my personal touch and attention. It is good but not important to me. Important tasks are tasks in line with our goals. What are the important things in your life that you must determine to do first? It takes planning our time and activities to get what makes a difference accomplished. Look out for things that you can effectively delegate. However, I must add that we have to be cautious not to delegate tasks that only we should do, tasks to do with raising a family for instance. We must find practical balance in the employment of our time.

To manage our time we need to identify our time distracters and deal with them. Strengthen your boundaries. Other people’s activities must not distract you from your goals. It is also worth noting that the abundance of activities does not imply effective use of time. If you find yourself busy moving from one activity to another, stop and reflect on the value you derive from those activities. If they do not serve to develop you, find ways to limit them to a bare minimum. Choose to spend your most productive time on activities that develop you and for instance, attend only the reception of a social event if your only role in the event is to bear witness. Although time is never too much, it is never too little. But it is enough. As we make deliberate efforts to master our time, our immediate goal should be to work towards the point where we can say that we have more than enough time to do the things that are important to us. As amply put by Anthony Gitonga in Made for Greatness, time is what life is made of. If you love life do not squander time.

Lillian Chebosi

Volume 01 Issue 08: Value Equation

Have you defined your success? Success means different things to different people. One person’s success is not another person’s success. What does success mean to you? You must define your success statement to know what it means to you specifically. If you have already defined your success, what are you doing to attain it? Success is not a matter of chance; it’s a matter of choice. It’s not something to be waited for; it’s something to be achieved. To succeed we must have specific goals to aim for. Goals are the steps we take along the way to attain our success. There must be things that you want to accomplish in this lifetime; things that you want to make a difference in; contributions that you want to make. How will you know you have accomplished them unless you set your goals? The tragedy in life does not lie in not reaching your goal. The real tragedy of life lies in not having a goal to reach for. Anthony Gitonga, in Pathway to Purpose, emphasizes this thought. “When set, goals determine our pathway of navigation to success. In the absence of goals there’s no desire to make a difference. What do you really want to do? Write it down, then go for it!”

To know your goals you must self reflect. Take time to critically self reflect. Self reflection raises self awareness. It is in the process of self awareness that we discover what we value. Success is uncovered in the diligent pursuit of the things that we value. To help you discover what you value, ask yourself the following questions;

• Where do I spend my time?
• Where do I spend my money?
• Where do I spend my energy?

Do the things that you value come together with the way you spend your time, money and energy? Your value equations determine how you spend your time, money and energy. For instance, if you say you value your family, qualify it by assessing the adequacy of your time and energy that you spend on and with your family. It is worth noting that every time you say “yes” to one thing, you say “no” to another. For instance, every time you give in to an extra hour of sleep beyond what your body requires, you automatically say “no” to engaging in an activity that would develop you. Every time you say “yes” to working late you say “no” to spending time with your family. Whenever you do this, consider the value the thing you said “no” to would have given you had you chosen it. Knowing what we value leads to self choice and action. Self action leads to self discipline, self mastery, self leadership and subsequently, success. Once you define what success means to you, come up with clear activities and clear disciplines that you must do every day to achieve your goals.

Lillian Chebosi

Volume 01 Issue 07: Charisma in Greatness

Listening to the speeches of the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, US President Barrack Obama, Our Prime Minister Raila Odinga, we may be drawn to interpret that leadership is only for those with charismatic abilities. You may look at yourself and admit to having no pinch of charisma and subsequently disqualify yourself from greatness. That on the grounds that you can’t draw a crowd’s attention to yourself, you cannot be great. But what really is charisma? Is it standing at the podium and speaking to people? Real charisma is not about impressing people but being other people minded. Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic speech “I Have a Dream” was not about impressing people but the expression of his deep felt commitment for the freedom of his people. It is not charisma that makes you great. It is your gift. Everybody is charismatic when operating in their gift. When you do that which you love to do, that which you were built for, that which you passionately relate to, you cannot help it but be charismatic. The honors is then to get in touch with yourself and identify your gift. There’s that one thing that gives you the greatest satisfaction when you do; that you do with ease/naturally; and that you can be the best at. When you discover it, you will realize that you too are charismatic whenever you get an opportunity to operate in it. The Bible reiterates that your gift will make room for you and bring you before great men. Doesn’t it then mean that we receive the most fulfillment, recognition and reward when we operate in our gift? Due to the dynamics of life it is a given that we do not operate in our gift all the time. But it certainly would serve us well if we took every opportunity to maximize the times we operate in our gift.

Lillian Chebosi