By Sodeeq Abdulakeem Sulyman
When you take time to replenish your spirit, it allows you to serve others from the overflow. You cannot serve from an empty vessel.” – Gbenga Adebambo
About three weeks ago, precisely on the 5th of April, 2021, that week’s edition of Potentiality Digest that was titled “How to Be More Productive” was written. In the Digest, which is available at bit.ly/Productive-PB, I talked about a concept known as Self-serving Rituals.
With the responses I have received from a few people, I think the term is unprecedented and it is now resonating in some people’s consciousness, charging them to be more deliberate in leading their lives towards the direction of success and relevance.
Admittedly, the term itself is not what I consciously coined, but because I believe so much in my intuition and guts, I have been able to do many things, which some people don’t think that I can. However, because I have always done something to leave myself in awe every day, I believe the concept of Self-serving Rituals is here to stay and there are a lot of teachings inherent in it to help other people transform their lives. The term, since the day I have written about it, has given rise to other rituals I am working on assiduously every day so that I can share its bliss to renew most people’s lives.
Self-serving Rituals are what we do every day. But what makes it look new to some people is because they have never been leading their lives with the intentions to reach the promises their future holds, to arrive at the point where they will have the mastery of themselves and how they can use what they have to create what they want. For you to consistently feel the thrills of your life, you have to cease from being frozen by your own internal limitations.
Self-serving Rituals are what you do every day to sharpen yourself to always be better than your old self, to be beating your tracks and be meeting yourself at the highest level you can only reach about yourself and for yourself. Gbenga Adebambo says, “We need to constantly adjust ourselves to get the best out of life. Destiny decays when discipline declines.” If you have your own Self-serving Rituals and works by it, you will always be unstoppable and breaking the yoke of impossibility will become your own norms.
Your Self-serving Rituals are the reflections of what you believe and what you want in life. Don’t forget that you can believe something, but may not want it. You can also want something and don’t believe it. However, if you want something and believe it, you will design your Self-serving Rituals to be in alignment with your desires, with what challenges you to develop yourself.
The problem of not prioritising self-development is what has limited some potentially great and success stories to end up living below what they deserve in life. No one ever develops to the highest level of individual qualities without being ready to be driven far to the extreme of the coast by the wave of the ocean. Yomi Garnett affirmed that “The journey of self-development is a very long and arduous one. No one who would truly enjoy a happy and successful life can do without devoting at least two hours every day to self-development.”
The worth of your life doesn’t remain stagnant, it either increases or decreases in values. The slopes your life will head are determined by your Self-serving Rituals. You are not here today by remaining what you were. So, for you to be what you want, you must raise every standard you have set for yourself, you must not be operating at a level that will be robbing you of the qualities lying in you. Kola Adesina cautioned that “If you continue to benchmark yourself against average, you will never go anywhere.”
Use this moment to ask yourself what your Self-serving Rituals are. Do they reflect what you want and believe in life? Are they something that position and equip you for the life you envision for yourself? See, if your Self-serving Rituals don’t charge you to be fashioning yourself for the opportunities the world has for you and re-creating you for the world you envisioned, you have to work on them.
Your own Self-serving Rituals may be to be talking to other people to learn and hone your communication skills. It may be initiating discussion with the people you respect so that you can be tapping from their wisdom and also be grooming your thinking skills. It may also be spending your time in solitude for some minutes or hours to recollect some memories that can energise your soul and boost your sense of self-appreciation. Remember, everything it requires to be keeping yourself astonished about yourself deserves to be done.
“Keep your mind moving in the right direction,” Joel Osteen encourages, “you can’t have a victim mentality and expect to live in victory.” Stop existing in life; you are designed to be living and your living stems from creating the bliss, happiness and success through the amplification and renewal of your internal world to suit your outside world. With that, nothing can stop the world from unlocking the doors to your spiritual abundance and celebrating the heroic in you.
SULYMAN, Sodeeq Abdulakeem is a Librarian, Author. He can be reached via +2348132226994. His new book titled: “The Path to Greatness,” foreword by Henry Ukazu, President and Founder of GLOEMI Inc., The Bronx, New York City, USA, is now available on https://bit.ly/Amzn-HS-TP2G
