Conquering my NeMEsis - Stepping Stones to Successful Self-leadership

By Hekkie van der Westhuizen

In today's volatile times, it's more important than ever to do whatever it takes to create sustainable hope and joy.  One way to achieve this goal is by tapping into the power of self-leadership. Only you can control and lead your own life! If you want to reach your full potential and lead others, you need to start successfully leading yourself.

 

Offering the reader 35 years of his own personal self-leadership work and discovery, alongside anecdotes and learnings derived from various global personalities, Dr Hekkie van der Westhuizen shares practical tips, tools and interventions in the form of stepping stones to assist you on the path to becoming the best possible version of yourself. 

 

Join Hekkie as he shares his own journey of self-leadership - a process that will ultimately help you too, to reflect and start reaping the rewards of successfully overcoming the neMEsis within you. Conquer yourself, become your own best friend, and start achieving those goals that have always seemed just out of reach.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quickfox Publishing
• Release date: Sep 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781776329892

Book preview

Chapter 1

Taking Charge

Until you take charge of your own life, things don’t happen.

SUZANNE BRAUN LEVINE

I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

As the last two lines of the Invictus²⁰ poem so clearly remind us, we alone have control over our feelings and our destinies, regardless of our circumstances. If we want to choose our final destinations, we need to place ourselves in the driver’s seat of our own lives. Taking charge of our lives is the most important step we can take on our self-leadership journey. When we do so, we finally become self-reliant and have the autonomy to make decisions for ourselves.

Oprah Winfrey, the American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and billionaire philanthropist, was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenaged mother and then initially cared for by her grandmother. She later moved to inner-city Milwaukee where she was raised by her mother. As a child, Oprah wore potato sacks because her family could not always afford clothing.²¹ She was raped for the first time at age nine, and suffered repeated sexual abuse throughout her childhood and early teen years.

At age 14, Oprah was sent to live with her father, Vernon Winfrey, in Tennessee. At the time, she was already pregnant. Fourteen days after giving birth, her baby died.²²

Life with her father was strict and focused on her academic progress. Oprah secured a job in radio while she was still in high school, and at age 19 she became a co-anchor on the local evening news. Partly owing to her spontaneity and warm personality, Oprah was transferred to the daytime talk show arena.²³ All of these events happened early on in her life before she became famous.

Each of us creates the life that we get to live,²⁴ but if we can learn from Oprah’s story, we need to take on board the statement: We can only create the life we want if we make the conscious decision to take charge.

What a truly remarkable woman Oprah is. Amidst all the turmoil in her life, she must, at some point, have decided that she was finally in a position to create the future life that she wanted to lead. Despite her upbringing, Oprah triumphed and made a huge success of her life. Why? Because at some point she said: No more, and she decided to take charge. While in a dark place, she made that important decision. I would like to think that she put into practice some of the things that I am about to share with you.

Make tough decisions to take charge

You might argue that taking control of your life is not that simple, and that your circumstances won’t, or don’t, allow you to make the necessary changes. I haven’t walked in your shoes and I don’t know your circumstances, but perhaps it’s time to do something about them. Think about Oprah: Moving in with her father radically changed her life. She then made the decision to follow her passion for broadcasting at a young age, which opened up a world of opportunities for her. Taking charge of your life may require a tough decision.

Ask yourself the following question:

In all probability, will my life be better if I stay where I am, or will it improve if I take charge of my life and go live somewhere else?

You’ll find that I use the term: Whatever it takes several times in this book. I honestly believe that when it comes to the fundamentals in life, we have no choice but to do what is necessary. If you need to break out of your current circumstances, and there is even a remote chance that this is possible, then take charge and break out. Do whatever it takes to give yourself the best possible chance of living a better life.

Be intentional

There is great advantage in being intentional in what you do, and in taking initiative to make life happen, instead of merely letting life happen.

David Kraft²⁵

To me, it’s simple: We either decide to live with intent and purpose, or we live life on autopilot and drift in the ocean, like a wine cork. Like Oprah, sooner rather than later, we need to draw the proverbial line in the sand and say: No more. Going forward, I am taking charge. Choice is one of the greatest assets we have in our lives – and it’s all ours. It’s actually as simple as that.

Being in the driver’s seat gives us the freedom to live our lives our way. If you are religious and believe in a Higher Power, I can assure you that God also wants you to take charge of your life and to live a life of purpose and intent. Having said this, I don’t think that understanding the importance of, and making the conscious decision to take charge of your life, has anything to do with your religious convictions. Although, if you have faith, life is easier, you can handle life’s challenges better, and you’ll know that you are not alone. But that is a topic for another book …

What happens without intent?

For more than three years of my life I had a brilliant executive coach who is now a friend and sibling figure. Jenny is a sage, and she played a key role in the success of my self-leadership story. During every coaching session in her office I would look at a large quote on her bookcase by Gary Lew. It read: This is your world. Shape it or someone else will.

If you live without serious intent and don’t want to take charge of your life, you will become a slave to someone, or to something else. Unfortunately, I have seen this happen to too many people in my lifetime – people who don’t get that they, and only they, are responsible for designing their own future. If your life feels out of control, as if someone or something else is controlling it, then chances are, you’re in a dark and uncertain place.

John Atkinson Grimshaw was a self-taught English artist who is today considered one of the great painters of the Victorian era. To the dismay of his parents, in 1861, at the age of 24, he left his job as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway to become a painter.²⁶

When Grimshaw died, he left behind no letters, journals, or papers. His reputation and legacy are based on his townscapes and a jewel of a quote that he left us: If you don’t run your own life, somebody else will.

In this chapter we have looked at two examples of two different people who chose to live with intent. They illustrate that the struggles you and I face in attempting to take charge of our lives are not unique. If we haven’t done so already, it is in our best interests to immediately put a stake in the ground and make a decision to take charge. If we don’t do this, we will become vulnerable, and both the people around us and our environment will influence us more than we influence them.²⁷ That would be a mistake. Obviously, we have the option to choose not to live with intent or to take charge of our lives, but that would be sad. That would mean choosing to lead a lesser life.

Live your own life, no one else’s

One of the key principles of successful self-leadership is the fact that we can only live our own lives and only we can be in charge of living our own lives. Nobody else on this Earth can do it for us. As Bill Gates points out, we are not in competition with anyone else but ourselves, and our goal should be to continuously improve ourselves.

Our time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

Steve Jobs

Most importantly, our focus should be on taking charge of improving the leadership of ourselves, as part of the process of continually improving as individuals. If we want to compare ourselves, the only comparison we should be making is with who we were yesterday – not to who anyone else is today.²⁸ Only ever compare yourself to your own best possible self. Besides, as Will Smith reminds us, when we start comparing ourselves to others, we start losing confidence in ourselves. This is an important subject to which we will return later in this book.

You are the only you … You are the best you. You will always be the second best anyone else.

Leo Buscaglia

Keep your own bundle

Among my family members and friendship circle, we often refer to someone’s ‘bundle’. This is the sum of all the stuff with which he or she needs to deal in their lives. If we allow our mind to drift towards comparing our life to that of another, then our perception of their life, or the bundle they have to carry, is typically skewed by a touch of jealousy. In reality, though, we have no clue what’s going on in anyone else’s life. From the outside, it may seem that many people to whom we look up, like celebrities, have perfect lives. Later, we may be disappointed to discover that’s not the case. The lives of Napoléon Bonaparte and Helen Keller illustrate this point perfectly.

French Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte lived a life that most men of his era envied, and if given the opportunity, many men would still swop theirs for his. Yet Napoléon declared while at St Helena that he never knew six happy days in his life. Despite all of the glory, power and riches, he was not a happy man.

Helen Keller, on the other hand, declared that she had found life to be beautiful, even though she was blind, deaf and dumb.²⁹

From the outside, most of us would probably have chosen the life of Napoléon, but considering what we now know, I would rather have had the peace that Helen Keller felt in her life than have lived an unhappy, albeit heroic and limelight-filled, life of an emperor.

If we only knew the true story and had all of the facts about the lives of the people whom we envy, we’d probably be content just living the lives with which we’ve been blessed. Unfortunately, though, each of our bundles includes baggage. I personally came to the conclusion long ago that since I am the one who has control over my own journey, I need to be content with choosing and rather dealing with my own bundle.

You make your own luck

Luck: Success or failure apparently brought by chance, rather than through one’s own actions.³⁰

I don’t believe in luck, but I do believe in making my own luck. As Gary Player always said: The more I practice, the luckier I get. The same applies to life: The more we take charge of our lives and live with purpose and intent, the ‘luckier’ we seem to get. If we rely on luck, we are like those people who rely only on winning the Lotto to change their lives so that they can live happily ever after. Perhaps in Fantasyland that works, but in real life, it’s just not the case.

Luck is the dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.

Ray Kroc

To rely on luck is an unsustainable, short-term solution. Many people who won millions in the Lotto years ago cannot show a thing for it today. If we are waiting for luck to make the change that we think we want or need in our lives, then we will wait a long time, and ultimately we will be disappointed. On the other hand, to work hard and to take charge of our lives and ourselves is not necessarily easy, but I have no doubt that it is the right starting point for successful