Living your Balance while dependent incredibly on Self-Awareness and Self-Connection is also significantly influenced by our Relationships and Environments.
Yes, others contribute to these relationships, and we can influence that with what and how we participate. However, we cannot control their contribution. So our participation should always be on what we can control; our Well-intentioned Contribution.
Given how much life is about actions and reactions, living and contributing intentionally can significantly influence what we get back and how we create and maintain our Balance.
I’m looking forward to reflecting and growing with you on
The factors that guide our contribution.
Why and How we stay accountable for our contribution.
Why and How contributing intentionally is the prerequisite to creating and living your Balance.
How to create and sustain lasting relationships from how and what we contribute.
There is no better chance taken than that on self-development. Explore, participate, share and learn practical tools in a space created purposefully for Balance and Growth. Come deep dive and acquire intentional and solution-driven skills for everyday living as you continue your self-actualization journey.
Disclosure: Ticket Price includes an assortment of Appetizers and Wine.
My name is Antoinette Njombua-Fombad, and I hosted a workshop on July 30th, 2022 – ‘Live Your Balance’. I am full of gratitude and thank all those who attended and supported this venture.
As a human being, I’ve always dreamt of creating spaces and environments for healing, loving, and growing. I figured if we can find a way to normalize vulnerability as an opportunity to build ourselves, we benefit from using our lessons to grow and create experiences in alignment with who we become. As a Coach, helping people understand the value of self-connection is one of my greatest passions and mission. Self-awareness is vital to the process.
My purpose for this workshop and future ones is to encourage us to grow just as our environments evolve and to be more intentional with authenticity as we connect with our humanity and our growth and becoming. When we become rigid with our perspectives or perceptions, there’s little room for inspiration, change, or growth. Living more consciously requires a flexible and open mind. That doesn’t mean you become these new perspectives overnight; it simply means you, without restrictions, allow yourself to reflect without conditioning, update your subconscious data, strengthen what you already value, or evolve it to create more balance.
These spaces are not for judgment, disrespect, disregard, shame, or blame. They are not meant for re-living what we already get out there. They are meant for release, reflection, and Growth. I am counting on us all to remember this purpose throughout these experiences so that we allow ourselves to learn from each other, from our reflections, leave intentionally ready to live more self-connected, and more equipped to build or enhance the habits that grow us, and keep us into a future we create for ourselves. I hope you choose to change an opportunity for growth and venture out to my next workshop or connect with me in person.
I’ve often wondered why we have created space for our disabilities, where we increasingly move from being seen as people with challenges, into people who ARE challenges. Or why we feel shame in recognizing such challenges, simply as what they are, challenges.
As a society, I understand the need to identify and provide assistance to individuals born, or with acquired inadequacies affecting their daily lives. Why is it commonly translated as a need for isolation in a space of deficiency, whether purposefully or unintentionally? We all deserve to understand both sides, how that affects our livelihood, and make us unique. Holding back one or the other is a disservice to us all, and influences a future distortion on full self-awareness.
Imagine being consistently identified from childhood, as HAVING a disability. It can affect the mind very differently knowing that you are NOT a disability, but rather live with some inabilities affected by challenges. Epigenetic studies support how this can significantly affect the mindset. The idea of being defective can suppress many abilities that with routine, hard work, and a cultivating mindset, can significantly elevate our lives in many ways.
Now imagine being trained to only believe in perfectionism with nothing beyond your capabilities. Undoubtedly, you will probably thrive with this mindset, crushing your goals and accomplishing many outcomes you set your mind to. Until you find out later in life, things you truly may never be able to accomplish in the manner you dream, because of some independent variable out of your control. It might take just as much time adjusting mentally and emotionally building you back to where you were.
We all have disabilities in some way because we are human, which influences us to develop values more connected to self-acceptance, increase comfort in accepting accountability for our choices, and understand what we can contribute to thriving in any environment, circumstance, and period of life.
We need to elevate our consciousness, to accept ourselves for all that we are, as self-worth is critical to self-awareness. Consciously work to trust that at any given time in your life, conversation, interaction, roadblock, or self-doubt, you are human. We are everything that we are, and that is always enough of a starting point to accurately work on elevating ourselves to where we want to go.
We are not perfect, that fortunately is one of the beautiful things about humanity. For many reasons, the cause and effect, action and reaction realities exist as early as in utero, as both genetics and environment influence our creation. Our environment however is mainly what keeps us trending towards a need for global Perfectionism.
Perfectionism I believe is unattainable, as it is impossible to create a linear continuum of a particular standard for a single person, much more a collective people. Perfection stunts the purity of personal and purposeful growth. Life will forever be an absolute independent experience for every single human being, and our experiences, intentions and environmental influences, are microscopically unique, and individually experienced.
Evolution is messy and cosmic and shocking and experimental. That’s what allows for the possibility of growth and transformation. It has been, and it will continue to be that way even with all human attempts to standardize and normalize predictability. Don’t get me wrong, data is necessary especially in a world rapidly changing and bursting with higher levels of consciousness.
Part of our change in this era of individuality and capitalism definitely requires predictability to allow a certain state of preservation. But even in that state, we still need to remember that we are individuals, and evolve independently before collectively. Rather than mostly focusing on grouping our nature and changes in relation to universal data, it is more beneficial to include the independent variable of individual experiences guided by, and connected to the one and basic factor that has kept us evolving all this while, our Humanity.
We need to remember that humanity is what allows us to be unique, to grow, to change. It is our privilege to decipher why we feel, how it affects us, and how we can use the lessons to grow without compromising the very reason we exist. Perfectionism stalls us from living our truth, for fear of perceived failure. So we keep living in a data driven state, rather than an organic human guided one.
True leadership is an enormous responsibility for the people who look up to you, rather than how they look up to you. Even with an error margin, it has a focus on purpose for service, and the results, directions, and decisions made with, for and on behalf of the people you serve. Are your intentions based on the purpose of caring, inspiring, motivating, and leading others to thrive? How these intentions and actions affect the leader need not be part of the worry because, the act of positive-good-intentioned service, does not only define the kind of leader you are but determines your returns.
As leaders, the goal and purpose should at all times, beyond all benefit of doubt, focus less on the individual, and more on the collective good of the people, by the people, and for the people.
The way I see it, great leadership is evaluated on results that can be felt first, before being seen. It is influenced by spiritual guidance even without knowing, and comes from a place that sits well with understanding the people you serve, relating to their circumstances and putting their basic human needs before any other agenda. Health, safety, equality, justice, a chance for growth and opportunity, and ensuring we maintain an environment conducive for future generations.
Expectedly, leaders are human and do have moments where their flaws outshine their progress. However, that same humanity affords empathy, compassion, love, integrity, grace, vulnerability, kindness and strength, all characteristics of a good leader. As individuals, they also experience the constant struggle with balance, sometimes influencing self-centered decision making rather than decisions focused on getting the most yields for the population as a whole, and building a utilitarian system worth standing ground.
A sovereign system of leadership might produce results, mostly influenced by fear, survival, and a vision extremely hard for people to trust and connect with. It creates a system that seems strong from the outside, but standing on an unstable foundation ready to crumble. Such leadership is not one of service, but one of self interest.True leadership in a democracy requires respecting and building the strengths of all participants, and inspiring them to be their best. It encourages accountability, pride in their participation, and promotes unity.
Every pyramid system built to last is influenced by both the top and the bottom foundation, and both are equally important in ensuring it’s sustainability. How the Leaders at the top connect with the employees at the bottom determines the fragility or strength of the organization. We need leadership that exists in this format so we can all thrive and leave a legacy for future generations to model and ensure sustaining our existence, and humanity.
Time, the one constant still intangible. From quantum theory, spiritual & mystical concepts, and time travel. The possibility that time is the very reason we exist is one theory to live by. Can we live with the reality of knowing when our time starts and stops? Can we handle the newness and realities of circumstances if we could travel to different eras?
As our time ticks and tocks, choosing to live with all its uncertainties may be hard. Truth is, as living creatures, decoding time is realistically impossible. For one reason, every single organism has its own personal clock. Even if we somehow found a way to make it collectively linear, our individuality of thought, our uniqueness, prevents it. Our functioning may be synonymous in many ways but yet so different at the same time. One event remains the same event, but evokes an infinity of reactions from all those experiencing it.
Choosing to continue challenging our intelligence, whether by fact or speculation, is a journey that is purposeful. Focusing on how time affords us our individual journeys is a crucial part of that study. The notion of time having a beginning and an end, can be scary and conforming, even though we know we are energy that cycles through the universe, only present in physical form for some time in this state of consciousness. Time, I believe, doesn’t exist to conform us, it exists to free us.
There’s no disregarding quantum mysticism. There may be a galactic genesis of time, but there is also the reality of direct observation that time connects and navigates our journeys as we grow. Affording us space to evolve into who we are as individuals and collectively as people.
We already travel to the past with our memories, live in the future through our dreams and imagination, and manage our present with reality. Isn’t that time travel? Isn’t that a space for any individual to make the best of their situation? Plants bend and twist, and our bodies build antibodies in hopes of furthering our existence. However we came into being, we are afforded these gifts to live our time, to make our time, to travel through our time as best as we can, with as much time as we have.
We often hear motivational content say ‘the world is in your hands’. While meditating, I journeyed deeper into its meaning. In a space of gratitude, I remembered how much the world is in my hands. Every individual I connect with has experienced the world differently, So indirectly, I have shared their experiences through connection. I might not have been physically present, but our interaction and connection allow us to remember them as shared memories.
There is also the abundance of technology, books, music, manuals, art, nature, media, movies, people who inspire and motivate us, home, family, cousins, aunties, uncles, friends, neighbors, colleagues, teachers, clients, pets, the tree in my front yard, my car… and I realise just how much I am inspired by, and connected to the world around me.
I have experienced a vast array of people, places, food, personalities, tragedies, celebrations, cultures through all my relationships, and I am thankful for the gift of infinite connection through energy transfer. I am thankful for having the opportunity to travel the world personally, and indirectly through the world around me. To experience my social gatherings as an adventure, a place different from my comfort zone and an opportunity to relax and let my guard down.
Open your eyes, your mind, and your heart, and speak your truth as you interact and you give yourself a free ticket to 90 days around YOUR universe. You will see, feel, and connect with people and your environment in ways you never thought were possible. Such connections might create countless opportunities to define and shape your life in all the ways you dream.
We have crossed over from the fossil age to a civilization of energy. With this enormous dose of human interaction and connection, it is fair in that sense to agree that your world is in your hands, and providing priceless encounters and opportunities to grow. So wake up tomorrow, start all over, take another journey around your world, before your twenty four hours run out.
I come to you asking for help. Asking for help to find myself. Asking for help to get to where and who I’m suppose to be instead of what I’m suppose to be. I’m slowly starting to understand all the signs you’ve been sending my way. All the messages meant to guide me.
I cannot thank you enough for the capability to understand them and the directions they have lead me toward. Being a coach is not the same as BEING a coach. It is not something or someone to be, it is just someone who is. I‘ve been trying hard to follow your guide, but my humanity keeps letting me fall short, or maybe my humanity just reminds me that I am a coach, because I am human. My humanity is one of the things that enable me to be ONE.
MINDFULNESS, I say often, but now I understand what it truly means. I understand now what Jay Shetty meant. I don’t want to be the coach who is good but doesn’t know it. I want to be the coach that excels not for reasons of the flesh, but for reasons of the spirit. I understand now that is only possible if I acknowledge my human-ness and stay mindful of its entirety through every stage of the process.
I promise you, I will be more aware of my surroundings. Wisdom helps others, but it has to help me too. I will continue to listen to my body, mind and spirit and connect it to YOUR purpose that I am affirming for myself, connect it to you, and all you are, and how you protect and guide me. I am your creation, I will care for it like you have cared for me from the day you birthed me.
Thank you for great relationships, help me to be more mindful of my contribution. Thank you for the children, help me to be more mindful of their joy. Thank you for the man I love. Help me to be more mindful of his spirit. Thank you for my gifts, help me to be more mindful of how I use them.
It’s been a journey worth more than words can tell. It starts slow, scheduled exercise days. With your mind and body in resistance mode, it takes much to comply, but you understand this is the hardest part, so you push yourself, will yourself, and dang near force yourself to keep your commitment!
Eating habits are not exempt from this struggle. White rice switches to brown, and whole grains more often than before. Salads become lunch regulars and before you know it, you enjoy finding creative ways to make them tastier. For snacks, grilled veggies, fruits and nuts become so much more appealing than sugary or salty processed temptations. Eating cut off time becomes 8pm instead of 10pm, of course there are occasional days you splurge. Life has to be lived too 😊.
Food is not just calories; it is information. It talks to our DNA and tells it what to do. (quote from Instagram – ConsciousVibrancy).
Suddenly, your body starts to tell you it is happier. Energy levels go up, Joy heightens, mental clarity doubles and your clothes graciously take the curve of your body. All these, grace you with a recharged sense of existence and a boost in confidence.
Midway there, your mind and body have made a truce, they are no longer fighting against, but they are now more powerful than your will, and on the other side pulling you forward. The consistency graph peaks. Everything is now more purposeful, and more conscious, such that even the unconscious and subconscious states join in.
Workouts are now equally as important as the air you breath, the food you eat, and the water you drink. You are no longer living to eat, but eating to live. You know that it is about what you eat, but it is also truly about HOW you eat. It has become a LIFESTYLE. A year later, you look in the mirror and all you see is transformation. Not just physical, but mental and spiritual. Life is just not the same and you can’t imagine going back.
Start somewhere, anywhere, change can be hard especially when a lot about you will fight it. Small changes are what lead to bigger ones. In the words of @tribestrong “Your body is not Amazon Prime, it’s not going to show up in 2 days”. You have to make it, will it, dang near force it to accept your lifestyle change, and I promise you, it will be worth it.
With everything going on in the world right now, and how emotionally drained I sometimes find myself, I can certainly use some stress relief. A year ago, I made the lifestyle change to consistently include purposeful workouts. Today, the thought of my treadmill literally depletes my motivational battery. Recently picked up biking to relieve my knees from my frequent runs. So I decided to just Nike-up for a quick four-mile bike ride.
On the road, the wind blowing on me automatically relaxes my body. I am attentive to what I am doing now. Stretch one is about a mile uphill. Going steady, maintaining the rhythm on gear 6. Halfway up, my legs are burning, and I self-criticize as thoughts of giving up consume me. Why am I being so hard on myself? Growth is not an easy journey, why feel defeated? No work, no gain. It doesn’t matter if it’s running or biking, let it go, Nettie. That’s all it took. Almost felt surreal, as my motivational battery instantly recharged, determination set in, I’m more positive, engaged and purposeful with my strides. All this, just from one positive affirmation.
I’m turning the corner for the next stretch, I’m pumped, and the universe works to assist me. Listening to Ella Mai’s ‘Easy’, while going downhill, how perfect the synchrony. She sings ‘love is easy, easy, easy, so don’t you make it hard’ but I’m fully owning the moment, all I hear is LIFE “is easy, easy, easy, so don’t you make it hard“. I scream along without a care, in unison to express the message in my heart for all those hurting today from all the injustices in this world. The same wind that created resistance going uphill, relaxes me almost as if to thank me for experiencing multiple reasons for its creation. How sweet the duality of life. My motivational battery is fully charged. I feel connected to everything around me, and start to appreciate just how every home, church, tree, garden, fence, and school I pass helps to build a beautiful neighborhood, and along with it, afford this pavement I’m graced to be riding on. I ride past a lifeless bird on the grass, and the first thing that comes to my mind is the loss of a spirit. Not a bird, but a soul.
Stretch three. I’m going uphill again, the load is a lot lighter than in the beginning. Is it because my muscles are now conditioned, or that my current aura affords me full control? I always pick up speed here, almost to remind myself that life will suck , but only to help us work for the greater times ahead on the horizon. Adrenaline-high, HR pumping but going uphill is much easier this time, simply because my affirmation kept me going.
Stretch four. I assess the journey realizing just how much life I lived during this ride. I experienced a vast array of emotions, and in many ways than I can express. My ride started with a mix of emotional trauma, stress, moodiness, pre-workout school teacher exhaustion, and then journeyed through doubt, pain, perseverance, resilience, kindness, empathy, affirmation, motivation, peace, joy, awareness, connection, gratitude, assurance, relaxation, and finally, clarity. If it took just one positive affirmation to start a chain reaction that led to such energy balance, imagine what many would do.
We are human and emotion is our unspoken language. Without it, we are not whole. Every emotion is purposeful, the goal is to use them to grow, even the unpleasant ones. Let the lessons from your circumstances be the very reason you do. It can be the difference between a mediocre day, and an impactful one. Find something that will serve to rebalance you, and when you do, remember that a positive attitude is a choice, and most importantly it is free, you do not need permission from any person to be positive. And just like everything else, If you cultivate it, it becomes your fall-back when things are difficult. Cultivate the skill of choosing to stay positive in your daily routines, make it your fall back.
? We all deserve to understand both sides, how that affects our livelihood, and make us unique. Holding back one or the other is a disservice to us all, and influences a future distortion on full self-awareness. 
