2021, A restructuring year indeed
It’s a beautiful new year eve to 2022, and as usual, burn fires, fireworks, partying and jubilations are the excitement that fills the air, different people, including the crossover night church members (those special people that only attends church once a year, they come in by 11:50pm to receive the new year blessing and by12am they leave, never to been seen again till the next new year eve) are in church for the crossover night. Pastors and prophets are in full spirit saying prophetic declaration/utterance for the new year and the congregations shouting to their topmost voice, “Amen, I receive.” The declarations are often of this nature, “2022, our year of abundance”, “My year of unlimited breakthrough”, “the year of fruitfulness”, Et cetera.
Have you even wondered why all these blessings and declarations seems unfulfilled as the year end approaches and you start hearing phrases like: “Na wa ooohhhh”, “This year is really somehow”, “well, thank God we are alive, once there is life there is hope”, you know the rest, be gracious enough to fill it in. Please don’t get me wrong, this has always been my dilemma for years also until I decided to look and see how I can make my 2021 different, I mean, better. I realized it wasn’t the prophecies that were incorrect and fake, rather, it was my own actions and inactions that made them seemed so. In this little piece of article, I am going to enumerate the little changes I made to make my 2021 a restructuring year indeed.
Self-Evaluation
Pythagoras once said, “Man know thyself; then thou shalt know the Universe and God.” Self-evaluation often comes with self-knowledge and self-knowledge is a triumph and a blessing. when I evaluated myself and asked questions such as: where am I at? where am I currently heading and where do I want to be? pondering on these questions and writing it down really helped me to see that I was treading smoothly on the wrong direction as where I intended to be was totally different from where am currently heading. Pythagoras was right, in knowing myself, I understood where I was in the universe and am knowing God.
Self-Education
As Jim Kwik puts it in his book Limitless, “you learn to earn to give.” The status quo of anyone never really changes except there is a readjusting in the person’s views, believes and thinking, and these three adjustments can only take place as we open our mind in learning. My financial situations cannot really change until I learn how to change it, neither can I be a better parent until I learn what it takes to be a better parent. Therefore, before there can be any substantial change in the life of an individual, there must be a learning process. Here is a little background about me, I am the laziest reader you can ever meet on planet earth, yes that’s right, I dread reading books, reading is not my hobby at all, I can barely finish a 20-page book, even in surfing the internet for information, I often find myself skimming through just to get what I want and am out. Now you can see where I stand when it comes to learning, especially self-development, it was a tough nut to crack. Give me “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill and it will take me 4 months to finish it, that is if I ever finish it. but as the saying goes, once the student is ready, the teacher will appear, so was it in my case. I decided to listen to podcast one day on my phone and I came across Mindset Mentor by Rob Dial. In one of the epistles, he talked about using audiobooks for some of his readings and that was it, it hit me. I immediately subscribed to audible and started listening, of course I could do that, I drive about 25mins to work and back every day that’s about 50mins a day, wow and that was it. Before I know it, I was listening to one audiobook a week and at the end of 2021, I had read/listened to 52 books, wow, God bless audiobooks.
The Turning Point
The more I listened to these books, the more my mind expands, the more my limiting believes changed. Most of the profound books that changed my life and views are: Deep Works by Cal Newport, this book helped me to gain freedom from social media and learnt the power of focused work, although am not fully there yet, Limitless by Jim Kwik, helped me see some of my limiting believes, The Power by Rhonda Byrne helped me changed how I think and act towards others, Psych-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, made me questioned the image I see about myself, and the list goes on.
Most of the people that influenced me in the year 2021 are: Rob Dial: Mindset Mentor Podcast, Dr. Benjamin Hardly, author of Personality isn’t Permanent, Bob Proctor, Jim Rohn, Ewere, (my friend and mentor) etc.
The Result
The area I wanted to change in my life was both my financial life and my relationship with my spouse. My financial status took a drastic turn as my job wasn’t my only means of income, I started getting calls for freelancing work, learnt cloud computing and made a career change to DevOps and landed a better job. Also, because I stop complaining and started taking responsibility of things without pointing fingers, my relationship with my spouse changed for the better. My irritation towards my kids also reduced since I can now see them for who they are and not some ideal pictures I had then in my head. All these took place just in one year and I know that there are better days ahead. Now I shout Amen better at crossover night because I know that the power of realizing those prophesies lies in my believe in them and working towards achieving them. So, if 2022 is “My year of Open Heavens”, what does open heaven mean to me, what plans do I have in place to achieve this open heaven so that at the end of 2022, looking at my result, I can say this year indeed is My Year of Open Heaven.
