Rough Re-Entry

For the last few months of my life, I have been mostly quiet on this platform because I intentionally wanted that time away. I needed time to work on many of the internal issues & struggles that we have been dealing with. Truth is, transformation IS an ugly and messy business. And through it, I’ve come to learn a plenty of lessons about myself and how we should navigate the world around us. But as messy and ugly as the transformation process is, the home environment that I was in was always going to be a “controlled” environment. It’s great for training and practicing certain behaviors, attitudes and how we choose to respond to the world around us. But a “controlled” environment can only be so good. At the end of the day, I knew I had to step out of the “controlled” environment and into the real world in order for my new transformations to be properly tested and calibrated.

Stepping Back Out Into the World

So, after 3 months of truly intensive internal work, today was the very first day that I’m stepping back out into the real world. I gotta admit, a part of me is both looking forward to this day, but there is also a part of me that wonders if I would be strong enough to make it through this real world testing. Sitting at P.S. Cafe now @ Raffles City Shopping Mall, and typing out this entry, I like to think that we’ve had a rather strong start to this new phase of our life (even though my day has been slightly rough so far). All things considered, I think it is a sign that we are starting out right. Clearly, what truly matters isn’t just about having a strong start, it is about showing-up daily, and how we finish. But hey, change & transformation, like growth, is a lifelong endeavour. I don’t think we will ever be finished. So yeah, I’ll continue to give it my best to show-up every single day, authentically.

Sharing My New THREE Core Philosophies

One of the very first demons I had to face from our past was the way that we lived. It was as though I was in this perpetuate “autopilot” mode. Every single thing that we did felt like a reaction to the circumstances that we’re in, or dependent on other people’s actions and behaviour. This was happening in every single area of my life, both on the personal/private and professional front. The more I sat with the ugliness of it all, the more it made me realize that our lives behind a shell was more than 90% reactive living. In the face of that ugliness in my past life, we began to develop a brand new core system. I called them my “3 Core Philosophies” in life. These are the values that I will live by from now on. Regardless of whether it’s at a private level, or at the professional level, every single action, decision and activity that we’re a part of, will be put through this filtering system. If the decision, action or activity passes the filtering system, then we will begin the steps to prioritizing it and arranging it into our daily living.

Purpose

This is the first and most important filter. I will begin by first asking myself: “How does this action, decision or activity contribute towards our collective vision/mission? Does it?”

In hindsight, I’ve come to realize that much of the time and energy wasted over the years is because my purpose and mission wasn’t clear enough. I was wasting so much energy and time trying to fit in that I end up chasing after the things that never truly mattered to my long-term mission.

Let’s be very unapologetic about it, we are have a limited number of hours per day. And when we sat down to truly assess our available time and energy on a daily basis, we’ve come to understand that we actually have very little of it. I say little because I am also taking into consideration other factors like focus-level, intensity and quality of output. For me, that means having 6 hours of high-intensity focus energy and maybe 2 hours for less intense activities (i.e. admin tasks, handling video calls and in-person meetings). Anything beyond those 8 hours and my performance/output will start to diminish in quality.

Intentionality

If the decision, action or activity is aligned with one of our missions, then we can begin to ask, “Okay, so how can we tackle this decision, action or activity so that it will bring us closer to our goals?” Similarly, we can also ask, “What can we do to help bring us closer to that vision/mission?”

The reason we want to ask these questions is to ensure that we have a solid plan-of-actions. One of the worst failures of my former life is that a lot of the decisions, actions and energy-spent were on things that didn’t really bring us closer to our goals. They created a lot of motion, but didn’t lead to real progress.

This leads us to our third core philosophy.

Clarity/Completeness

The above two core philosophies serve as pre-decision, pre-action, pre-activity type filters. Before we even put anything on our calendar/timeline, we must first ask those questions. This third philosophy is what we will ask before we complete a task or activity, or when making a decision.

Questions we might have to ask will include:

• “Are we clear on this decision that we are making? Or, are we clear on the actions/steps that we need to take to execute this task?” (Clarity)
• “Have we weighed our options and considered all the potential consequences/impacts?” (Clarity)
• “Have we covered all our bases on this action/activity?” (Completeness aka Excellence)

Day One of Applying Our Core Philosophies

As bumpy and rough as this first day of re-entry has been, I think that our first day has showed signs that we are off to the right start. Don’t get me wrong, I am fully aware that this being our first day back out into the world, we can’t really use it as a long-term measurement or gauge. However, I do think that our actions, decisions and activities today has provided some ease from our initial anxiety about how we’re going to perform in a real-world environment. If today was a test, I would say that we have scored a pretty decent grade today. It’s definitely a solid “B+” for me.

P.S. Significant Changes are coming to My Website

If some of you haven’t already noticed, I have rebranded this website. Some of you might know this from the early days that I started this blog site: it has always been my plan/intention to convert this blog site into something a little bit professional looking. But after years of having to pick and choose a version of myself to present to the world, we have finally decided that we shouldn’t have to choose which parts of ourselves to show to the world. We will instead present ourselves, fully and authentically. That is the reason why my website url is now my name. As we like to say now, “Our brand is our name, and our name is our brand.”

As such, you can expect that I will be consolidating a lot of our professional-level content together with my authentic stories/journey. Alright, it’s about time for us to start packing up and heading back home. I hope to share more updates & content with you in the coming days. Honestly, there is just so much to unpack, I don’t think a single blog will be able to cover all of that.