Part 6 of the 10 things I wish I knew before I left Africa

1) Erwin Mcmanus

2) Kirk Franklin

3) Eric Wainaina

4) Steve Biko and Malcolm X

It was a dark lonely night in the CBD of Sydney, Australia. Ever since I had moved over from Melbourne,every day pretty much rolled with the same monotonous tone. Me alone looking for work, Me alone looking for a home, listening to personal development tape after personal development tape after personal development tape. As was in my character, I had hope and a vision deeply embeded in my heart but my composure was the one of someone trying to keep his head down and his feet moving forward slowly but steadily

A few days prior I had seen a poster in a cyber cafe:

Tony Robbins coming to Australia! Call me to get cheap tickets!

Upon calling I learned that the tickets would cost a “cheap” price of 1,600 Australian dollars. As expensive as that was, I wanted to go, I needed to go. After all, Tony Robbins was pretty much the catalyst that got me to Sydney in the first place. It was when I watched his interview with Larry King that I learned that a decision is defined as, “ cutting yourself off from all from all other possibility.” That’s when I decided that I had been sitting on my lazy butt for too long and it was time for me to move to Sydney and begin making my dreams and visions come true and cut myself off from any possibility of doing otherwise. It was also Tony who I had been listening to night after night after jobless, homeless night.

So there I was in the middle of Sydney cybercafe at about 2 a.m. wondering how I would convince my parents, cousins and friends to give 1,600 dollars to attend a self help seminar. Before crafting what I intended to be my most eloquent and convincing email to date, I decided to check what my fans had written in to me.One of the emails was from an old friend of mine from Melbourne who I hadn’t seen in forever. His email was short and sweet, I paraphrase:

“I am coming to Sydney to attend Tony Robbins personal development seminar. I have a free ticket for you if you want it. Please give me the names of five people who may also want a free ticket and the ticket is yours.”

Every part of my being literally exploded. In the middle of the cyber cafe I stood up and just started shaking and buzzing with pure joy (not a very comforting thing to be doing as a black man in the middle of the city at 2 in the morning, but I digress).

When I attended his seminar, I was still homeless, I had since found a job and so was able to pay for food and transport to the event (I had to use the train because my car a.k.a my home had broken down near a golf course in the Northern suburbs of Sydney). However those three days shook me, moved me and inspired me to the core. When that seminar ended, that was pretty much when the idea of the Displaced African began to come to fruition. In addition to that, the fire that burned deep within me of what I could be got stoked and I got energy to keep going.

That’s just one of the reasons that I am a huge fan of Mr. Robbins. In addition to that Mr. Anthony Robbins:

1) Has Self-Discipline

As he is fond of saying, this guy pretty much turned himself around. He took himself from a self-destructive broke, overeating fatty to the place he is today where he is featured on Forbes as well as a plethora of other magazines. My favorite epic tale is when a man has a battle with his demons…..and wins!

2) Man of Multiple Disciplines

Tony Robbins has pretty much dedicated his life to discovering why some people succeed at enormous levels whereas most people don’t. He didn’t just limit himself to a single area such as sociology or anthropology or psychology.His travels mean that he has learned and teaches in the areas of peak performance psychology, health and nutrition, relationships, exercise, effective stage communication, changing habits and interpersonal communication among a host of other disciplines. Renaissance men are very rare in this day and age and I think Tony Robbins may very well be one.

3) He Doesn’t Brag About His Intellect

Now considering all his knowledge in a wide variety of areas, I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that the man is an absolute genius. But you would never be able to tell. He always speaks to you in a language you can understand and strives to meet you where you are. He never tries to confuse you by using complex, grandiose language. Instead he helps you change your life while speaking a language you understand (He even swears during his seminars).

4) He Taught Me the Power of Modelling

If Tony had not revealed the idea to me, I never would have known about it. Once he did, it was so simple, I was surprised that I never would have thought of it. I have blogged about modeling in the past but in short:

If you want to succeed in any field of endevour, find people who are already succeeding there and copy their strategies.

Whereas success is much more complex than the above statement, tell me the above statement doesn’t make the road to success waaaaayyyyyy easier.

5) He Taught Me About the Power of One’s Mental State

Also in that category of things I never-would-have-known-but-were-so-simple-once

-I-knew-them-I-am-surprised-I-never-did: The power of one’s mental state.

Simply put:

Your behaviour is heavily affected by the mental state/emotional state you are in. When you are in a peak state (when you are in a state of flow) your decisions are of a much higher quality than when you are in a negative state such as depression.

Now I know a lot of you reading are thinking, “Well, duh!Of course when I am happy I act much better than when I am depressed.”

Well what Tony taught me is if you want to act right, simply get yourself in a good mood. He also reminded me that we are able to put ourselves in a good mood, or a peak state, at any moment in time, should we decide. Information such as this is HUGE! I can basically make myself act right by putting myself in a positive state at any moment in time. So simple to the point it’s almost unbelievable.

6) He is a Man of Passion

Living out here in the West, one of the things that drives me crazy is how this place can numb one’s emotions. When I look around, I feel as though so many people, myself included,are suppressing their emotions and instead putting on a social mask. Tony isn’t like that. Tony is exuberant, he is exciting. He speaks with his whole body and speaks with an intensity and definiteness of purpose that can’t help but suck one in. As a result, Tony is…..

7) The Best Speaker I HAVE EVER Seen Live

I have heard that the man is an obsessive compulsive perfectionist and I must say, having attended one of his seminars, it shows. Never in my life, have I had days go by so quickly and so many peak-emotional-highs in one day. He is a master of storytelling and an absolute gem when it comes to moving us emotionally to action. In my future I see myself maybe doing a little public speaking: take a little dash of Tony Robbins and mix it with a dash of Erwin Mcmanus and there’s no telling where I can go.

To learn more about Tony Robbins please check out his Wikipedia page or his Amazon page or visit Tony Robbins website.

Until then….be blessed, bless others and live with passion (Trademarked by Tony Robbins),

Mwangi

Bonus(Part 3??) in the series: How to Discover Your Mission in Life and Use It to Make Money

Rest of the series:

1) How to discover your mission in life (part one)

2) How to discover your mission in life (part two)

3) How to use your mission to make money

I could lie and say that these bonuses were planned all along, however they were not. What I am about to share with you, I intended to share on later posts. However the research needed to write the final post in this series is more than anticipated. Therefore I thought I would share with you two resources that have really had an impact on how I think and feel about life.

The first is from a man who more of us should know about and celebrate.After all, he founded and headed the largest international African movement in history: I am of course referring to Marcus Garvey. In our African Dream Group, one of our administrators, Obura, posted a snippet of Mr. Garvey’s thoughts. How real and how poignant and how relevant his words are today, I’ll let you be the judge………………………….

The second is from the man himself. The king of the life coaching/ motivation /moving people from zero-to-hero industry Mr. Tony Robbins doing a much better job of helping you discover your purpose and your destiny than I could. This audio is taken from his phenomenal seven day series, Get the Edge, which of course I highly recommend.

And for the encouraging email . Thanks

For man to know himself is for him to feel that for him there is no human master. For him Nature is his servant, and whatsoever he wills in Nature, that shall be his reward. If he wills to be a pigmy, a serf or a slave, that shall he be. If he wills to be a real man in possession of the things common to man, then he shall be his own sovereign. When man fails to grasp his authority he sinks to the level of the lower animals, and whatsoever the real man bids him do, even as if it were of the lower animals, that much shall he do. If he says “go.” He goes. If he says “come,” he comes. By this command he performs the functions of life even as by a similar command the mule, the horse, the cow perform the will of their masters. For the last four hundred years the Negro has been in the position of being commanded even as the lower animals are controlled. Our race has been without a will; without a purpose of its own, for all this length of time.

Because of that we have developed few men who are able to understand the strenuousness of the age in which we live. Where can we find in this race of ours real men. Men of character, men of purpose, men of confidence, men of faith, men who really know themselves? I have come across so many weaklings who profess to be leaders, and in the test I have found them but the slaves of a nobler class. They perform the will of their masters without question. To me, a man has no master but God. Man in his authority is a sovereign lord. As for the individual man, so of the individual race. This feeling makes man so courageous, so bold, as to make it impossible for his brother to intrude upon his rights.

So few of us can understand what it takes to make a man – the man who will never say die; the man who will never give up; the man who will never depend upon others to do for him what he ought to do for himself; the man who will not blame God, who will not blame Nature, who will not blame Fate for his condition; but the man who will go out and make conditions to suit himself. Oh, how disgusting life becomes when on every hand you hear people (who bear your image, who bear your resemblance) telling you that they cannot make it, that Fate is against them, that they cannot get a chance. If 400,000,000 Negroes can only get to know themselves, to know that in them is a sovereign power, is an authority that is absolute, then in the next twenty-four hours we would have a new race, we would have a nation, an empire, – resurrected, not from the will of others to see us rise, – but from our own determination to rise, irrespective of what the world thinks..

Be blessed and bless the rest of humanity,

Mwangi

Part 9 of the 10 things I wish I knew before I left Africa (By now I hope you have abandoned all hope that I will do this series in order; I certainly have)

Hello hello!

First of all, to all my new readers welcome. Over the past three days my traffic has shot up, probably by about 1000% To all who helped make that happen, thanks. To all the new readers, I hope this blog is of service to you and I invite you to contact me or leave comments below and let me know what’s on your mind as you read this blog.

You are What You Eat

A while back I did a post on the negative effects of gangsta hip hop which is completely dominating the radio right now. Below is one of the songs that pretty much put to rest the idea that I could respect most of what is played on the radio today. And after knowing that music such as the track below exist, can you really go back home, switch on your radio and call most of that stuff art?

Dead Prez- Be Healthy (NB: The song and the lyrics have profanity)

Lyrics

It’s all love . . .

I don’t eat no meat, no dairy, no sweets
only ripe vegetables, fresh fruit and whole wheat
I’m from the old school, my household smell like soul food, bro
curried falafel, barbecued tofu
no fish though, no candy bars, no cigarettes
only ganja and fresh-squeezed juice from oranges
exercising daily to stay healthy
and I rarely drink water out the tap, cause it’s filthy

Lentil soup is mental fruit
and ginger root is good for the yout’
Fresh veg-e-table with the mayatl stew
sweet yam fries with the green calalloo
careful how you season and prepare your foods
cause you don’t wanna lose vitamins and miner-ules
and that’s the jewel
life brings life, it’s valuable, so I eat what comes
from the ground, it’s natural
let your food be your medicine (uh huh)
no Excederin (uh uh)
strictly herb, generate in the sun, cause I got melanin
and drink water, eight glasses a day
cause that’s what they say

They say you are what you eat, so I strive to be healthy
my goal in life is not to be rich or wealthy
cause true wealth comes from good health, and wise ways
we got to start taking better care of ourselves

They say you are what you eat, so I strive to be healthy
my goal in life is not to be rich or wealthy
cause true wealth comes from good health, and wise ways
we got to start taking better care of ourselves, be
healthy y’all . . .

Yeah, yeah, yeah, hold the fuck up, yo
we’ll take this little intermission, listen what the
fuck we gotta say, y’know?
Word is bond son, niggaz been livin fat for too long, knowamsayin?
Smokin bogeys, fuckin drinkin all types of shit
wailin out, not givin a fuck what they puttin in they
bodies, son, knowamsayin?
‘Bout time niggaz start thinkin about that shit, son, knowamsayin?
That shit is fuckin, makin us deteriorate, son
word up, we gotta care bout our little babies an shit, son
niggaz got kids to raise, straight up
ya gotta start learnin yo self, learning bout ya health, son
learnin this world we live in, kid, knowamsayin?
It’s time to start changin all that shit god, word up
so I’m gonna leave y’all niggaz on some shit like that, ya knowamean?
Word up, y’all niggaz better start usin y’all minds an
shit, kid
Peace

My Journey through Health and Nutrition

I am still very much a work in progress in this area. I am sure to polarize a few people and I gladly welcome anyone who doesn’t agree with me to do so.

So What Did I Eat When I was In Africa?

To say that I ate food in Africa would be an overstatement. My routine when I was about fifteen years old was a little something like this:

Morning: Tea with all milk and two spoons of sugar. Six slices of white bread with butter.

Morning break: Mandazi (the closest equivalent would be a doughnut for those who don’t know) and sausage; what we would do was wrap the sausage with the Mandazi.

Lunch: Chips with tomato sauce

After school nibble (yeah right) : Half a loaf of bread. Not with butter or with jam, no! My arteries need something that can really clog them up. Instead I would take white sugar and completely cover one slice of bread with it. Then I would cover this with another slice and have myself a:

sweet-sugar-filled-artery-clogging-how-i-didn’t-get-diabetes-in-my-

youth-i’ll-never-know-sandwich.

Now add to that that I was probably the only high school boy in human history who was given the sports captain/vice captain position thrice in my high school career without having any love for or skills in sports. What that means is that my way of sweating off all those calories I gained from my suicidal diet was sitting on the sidelines during sports games making fun of people.

I Was A Fat Unhealthy Slob

And so I landed in Australia with my body getting closer and closer to all sorts of diseases. The saddest bit was I didn’t even know it at the time. Other than the quick lessons about the food pyramid in Home Science, in Kenya we don’t really earn how to eat for nutrition. We learn how to cook cakes and all sorts of poisons that taste good but I never learned how to eat for optimal health.

It All Started Because I Wanted to Look Good…..For the Ladies

You know the way in movies, there is this profound, moving, life changing trigger that moves our protagonist from a place of ignorance and apathy towards a path of true enlightenment. My trigger was far from deep. I was a young adolescent male with raging hormones and an overactive sex drive and I wanted to use my body as a tool to satisfy my carnal desires.

Now, I am many things, but a moderate person is not one of them. I was determined to become the next Shemar Moore and so I began to exercise twice, thrice, up to even five times a day. I pushed weights as I watched television, I pushed weights before I slept, I biked for hours everyday. When I wasn’t busy pushing my body I was online on websites such as www.howstuffworks.com and www.bodybuilding.com trying to understand how the human body works and how I can sculpt it into the human equivalent of an open mating call.

But I Began to Learn….Really Learn about Nutrition and Health

That was 5+ years ago and I must admit that a lot of the stuff I learned is still beneficial to me now. I learned about the importance of minerals, what fat is, the different types of sugars, how muscles expand from resistance training and all sorts of great human anatomy stuff.

But in terms of results, I was a failure! To this day I still have stretch marks on both of my still-scrawny biceps from pushing myself too hard. My weight and fat levels have been yo-yo, though always leaning on the chunky side, for the last 5+ years. And until about June of last year, I was drinking like a sailor the day before alcohol is banned, lived on a daily diet of milk and $2 cookies and created such an aversion to resistance training that I exercised occasionally at best.

And Then I Met Anthony Robbins

I had always been a fan of Anthony Robbins since my days of shame and confusion. Around mid-2007, fueled by a general feeling of discontent with how slowly I was moving towards my goals in life, I became a voracious student of his work again. That’s when I discovered that the man actually had ideas on health and nutrition. My logic went a little something like this:

Tony Robbins is successful; I want to be successful; So I’ll do what Tony does.

I decided that at the very least I would try out his ideas to see if they worked for me.

And So I Began Eating a Vegan Diet

Here I have lost like 99.999999999% of Africans.

“What? No meat? But without meat you are not eating food?”

Yeah, I decided that I would go without meat and the usual animal products -milk, eggs, fish etc- and see what effects that would have on my body. I didn’t decide to do so because of concern about animal rights to be honest; after all I grew up in Kenya where as a kid me and my cousins used to chase and slaughter the chickens that we ate. After researching Tony’s work and work of other great thinkers like John Robbins and the writer of the China Study, I came to one very simple conclusion; animal products-especially the hormone injected ones of today- do way more harm to the body than good. And so I became the first native African I know who tried to do it vegan.

The Effects

You know that feeling you get when you wake up like you’re still full. You feel sluuugggiiissshhh…You feel as though your stomach is still jammed up with food that’s yet to be digested. I haven’t felt that feeling at all since I quit animal products.

As I cut out meat I began to eat more fruits and vegetables. In fact there was a time a couple of months ago that my diet was 99% fruits and vegetables. This caused a slight increase in my energy levels. After experiencing that I knew I was on the right path.

In about a month’s time (no guarantees though) I will begin a 30 day experiment where I eat and live entirely by the health principles recommended by Tony Robbins. The promise from Mr. Robbins is that my energy levels will go through the roof, and after reading and hearing various people’s experiences I am inclined to believe this. Anyway I will blog about my experiment and the lessons learned so look out for that.

A Brief Digression for Nutrition Philosophy from Priestess G

This has absolutely no logical connection to what comes before or after it but I had to include it in here because it just fascinated the heck out of me. I remember once an acquaintance of mine who happens to be a pastor, let’s call her priestess G, stopped by the house. She dropped by with this pearl of wisdom which was had been her nutritional philosophy for a long time. Follow it, at your own peril:

God made me, right? And God made everything, right? Therefore, that means that I can eat anything that God made.

Gotta love it! End of digression.

So Where Am I Headed Now?

My lifetime goals in this area is pretty simple:

1) To experiment until I have found the most nutritious diet for me; pretty much a life-long pursuit.

2) To look good (You may leave adolescence but the superficiality of adolescence never truly leaves you does it?); This is definitely going to become one of the main focuses of my life from the middle part of this year. I pretty much want to sculpt my vessel through the year of 2008 and then pretty much be on maintenance for the rest of my life.

3) The third one is so major I think it warrants a little more discussion:

To Change My Beliefs and Habits Such That I Eat for Nutrition AND NOT For Entertainment

If there is one place that I think we as humanity have really messed up is in creating cultures and supporting belief systems and practices where people put the taste of the food above its nutritional content. Instead of eating so we can have a piece of life in our body nourishing us and helping us heal and dispose of waste, we eat to fill emotional holes and change mental states.

I pretty much am working on myself so that one day my belief systems, my brain, my spirit and my body are in line with the idea: I eat for nutrition and nourishment. Taste is only a secondary concern.

Take a moment and imagine what type of world this would be if we all ate for nourishment. How many diseases would we avoid? What would the cancer rate be? How many people would be saved from heart disease? Would diabetes exist?

My Health Is far From Ideal

As I said, I am still a work in progress in this area. I still have problems with huge sugar and starch cravings and my exercise regimen is far from firing on full cylinders.

That having been said, this country has popped my eyes open to just how important nutrition is. It showed me just how interconnected our bodies, illness, happiness, energy levels and even the environment and ecology are ( If you don’t believe this, check out the documentary,Diet for a New America by John Robbins and tell me that doesn’t scare you). Soon I shall be directing huge portions of my focus to experimenting and learning in this area. Until then permit me to leave this post as incomplete as my health i……………………………..

……Even when a post is incomplete I can’t forget to ask that you please:

Be blessed and bless others,

Mwangi