I will strive to be better today
In a small but meaningful way,
Than I was yesterday.
Many burdens on my shoulders weigh;
For them to be lighter, I do not pray.
But to grow in truth, strength or faith,
With each step I take along the way.

Be better today!

Carpe diem!

Think about your day so far.

Did you wake up at the time you would have ideally liked?

Did you spend at least a few minutes last night, thinking about what you wanted to do today?

Did you have a clear purpose when you woke up this morning or a clear plan for what you wanted to accomplish today?

Did you think about whether it was actually achievable?

Are you mindful about the things that you were and weren't able to control?

Perhaps we can all agree, without qualification, that being able to answer 'yes' to each of the questions above would be good and desirable. It doesn't take a lot of time, effort or skill to accomplish either. Perhaps the main reason a vast majority of us are not able to do that on most days of our lives is that we have not been taught about the value of approaching each day with questions like these in mind. Now you know about it. But why should you bother to do it?

The lure of dreams

We all have big dreams. The problem with big dreams is that they cannot be achieved in a single day. That is both what is tragic and deluding about them. Since we cannot achieve any of our big dreams in a single day, we can delude ourselves into believing that it is ok to continue dreaming about them without doing anything to achieve them. Put another way, what we can do in a single day seems so insignificant that we can procrastinate without feeling like our dreams are actually slipping away. I know, because that's precisely what I have been doing for much of my life.

Big dreams are not without problems of their own. Looking back, I am glad that I did not forsake much else to achieve some of the big dreams I had when I was younger. There is a price attached to whatever we want to achieve in life, and we don't always know what it is - or whether it is worth paying. We therefore need guidance to craft dreams that are worth the price we have to pay to achieve them and understand what we have to do and accomplish each day to realize them. So how do we choose the right dreams to follow and how do we go about fulfilling them?

A life's worth of time is all we have

We all have been given a lifetime worth of time. We have not earned it, and we cannot disown it. Everything we gain or forego in life is a consequence of what we trade our time for and who we trade with. A full lifetime is made up of seasons - starting off as hapless infants and moving through childhood, young adulthood and midlife, to old age. I each of these seasons of life, we are primed to do and achieve certain things more than others. It is not that we should altogether abandon the dreams we failed to realize - whose time has passed - but those that help us actualize our full potential in the stage of life we are in, and those that help us prepare for the next stage of our lives are likely to be the most rewarding.

But what do we have to do to craft a fulfill fulfilling life - by achieving our most meaningful dreams before they expire? Perhaps we can borrow part of the answer from the philosopher Lao Tzu who said '...watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.' As much as our lives are made up of seasons, those seasons are made up of years, months, weeks, and days... and each day is made up of hundreds - if not thousands - of minor decisions we make in the course of it - to eat something healthy as opposed to something that's unhealthy, to exercise or watch TV, take a break to drink some water and stretch or just keep working.

What we do and what we value

Our actions reflect what we truly value, more authentically than our words.

What are the little decisions that you have acted on so far this day? What values do they reflect? You may say and believe that your family is your highest priority, but when you had to choose between spending time with a loved one and watching TV or staying back at work, which of the options did you actually choose?

What are the values you hold that influenced the choices you made so far today?

Is there anything you would want to change or do better tomorrow – than you did today?

If there is one little thing that you want to change or do better tomorrow than you did today, would you make it your goal to achieve that tomorrow – so that when you wake up tomorrow you will have a clear goal to achieve?

Better Today!

That's the simple idea that if we can wake up each day - focused and determined as we can be,

a. To improve in so small and simple a way that we couldn't fail unless we tried, and

b. In something meaningful to us that we care about and value,

...all those improvements will inevitably compound over time to make even the most impossible dreams become a reality. And because improving in something that is meaningful that we truly care about is a source of deep gratification, we would be able to sustain a virtuous cycle of focused effort over long periods. That is not to ignore the inevitability of setbacks. We will all fail to the extent that we are all fallible creatures. What we need is a reliable and encouraging partner to guide us through both failure and success.

Who can be that reliable partner?

We all have it in us...

We all have a little voice in the back of our heads that plays a constant commentary about our lives, don’t we? Would you tolerate the voice in the back of your head if it were an actual person, whispering behind your shoulder all the time? Would you let that inner voice of yours speak the way it does to your children – or even colleagues? If there was someone so critical and negative at work, wouldn’t we complain to HR?

But we somehow tolerate it because we take it for granted that it is actually voicing our own thoughts. But they are not our own thoughts – if it was, we wouldn’t be able to perceive it as a voice! When we say that we are our harshest critics, we are often thinking about that critical, and mostly negative voice in our heads.

That voice is powerful because it has a captive audience! It is easy to characterize it as an enemy, but it is in fact the greatest friend we will ever have. That voice has been helping us discern between right and wrong, long before we could speak or understand words. Because that is in fact the voice of our conscience. By ignoring its voice over the years, and actively subverting it, we may have turned it into an enemy.

The only way to destroy enemies is to convert them into friends. All it takes is a simple shift in our perspective.

That little voice has never abandoned us in difficult times. It has been with us all our lives, so it knows everything there is to know about us - our memories, fears and desires. More importantly, it is guaranteed to be faithfully with us at every moment in our future - till we die.

So, instead of allowing ourselves to be tyrannized and bullied by this voice in the back of your head, why can’t we ask that voice to treat us as someone it is responsible for caring and nurturing, much like a child or perhaps more appropriately, someone who is sick and afflicted - that we are singularly responsible for nursing back to good health.

We can train our inner voices – instead of being the tyrannical critics, to be supportive friends. The ideal friend we all yearn for - who is devoted to us, understands us very deeply and desires nothing but the best for us!

The voices

It is helpful to visualize the whispers in our heads as coming from many voices - not just one. When we pay careful attention, we can see that there may be a voice that wants us to exercise and eat healthy, while another tempts us to sit on the couch with a bag of chips instead and watch a movie we've been wanting to. All the while, another voice is complaining about the mess in the spare room we need to clean-up, and another that is worried about the presentation at work the following day.

Remember, all these voices mean us well. They are often the ghosts of our parents, teachers and friends - trying to highlight problems and areas for improvement in our lives the best way they know how. Some of those ways are helpful and others are counterproductive. Given enough guidance and patience, we can help these voices do what they are meant to do - which is help us be better today than we were yesterday!

Why we need to be our own mentors?

Mentoring comes from four sources.

People

When we think about 'mentors' and 'teachers', our minds are often first drawn to people who have taught us, and from whom we have learned much. More often, and most dearly, we think about people who have shown great care and empathy towards us, meant us well and had wellsprings of experience, wisdom and guidance to offer us when we needed it most - regardless of whether we knew we needed it at the time. Instinctively, we think of teachers, mentors and coaches as being older and wiser than us, who have seen and experienced more of life than we have. So it may take some effort to see potential mentors in people who are younger and clearly not as mature as we think we are.

But one does not need to be older and wiser, or even be aware of any such distinction to be a mentor. For example, parents can very quickly learn to appreciate the mentoring their children can provide. Because in many ways, the "father", "mother" and "child" are all 'born' at the same time. Infants in particular are superb mentors to their parents - they constantly teach them how to be good parents and can point out very vocally - and more intelligibly than one might expect - when they need to improve. Even as they grow, the parents constantly get trained on how to be a good parent to a one-year-old, then a two-year-old and so on, because they constantly change in ways their parents cannot fully anticipate and demand that they learn and grow to keep up. Similarly in the professional world, colleagues from different generations invariably have much to learn from each other. It doesn't matter how senior and experienced one is in their profession, someone from a different generation, a different discipline or industry will always have something new to help us discover.

Experience

Experience is a great mentor and can come into our lives in diverse ways. There are of course the lived experiences - adventures, activities, events and encounters. Tempted though we may be, we should be careful not to think of them merely as 'wins" & 'loses' or 'positive' & 'negative'. History is the accumulated lessons of lived experience of all generations and have much to teach us about how the world works, so that we may find a meaningful purpose in it. Art and literature can be mentors too. In fact, a well-crafted story or great music can reveal deep truths about the inner workings of our hearts and minds, leading to self-understanding. The emotions that are either drawn out or well up with each of our experiences are like a dashboard in a car that indicate the magnitude of our strengths and weaknesses, or a shadow on a wall that can reveal the shape of our soul.

Self

For each of us, we are at the center of our own world. We experience the world from our perspective and survey it from our height. We curate the image the world can see of us. Even when that is not meant to deceive the world - though we all have a capacity to deceive - other people can never quite comprehend us or fully empathize with us, because only we can see the dashboard of our emotions and the shadow of our souls.

Therefore, even though other people and what we experience can be useful mentors, we are ultimately responsible for mentoring ourselves, and only we can be held accountable for it. We are also the most qualified to be our own mentors because only we can understand ourselves, our circumstances and past experience well enough to both identify and prioritize where we need to improve and how we may practically do so. More importantly, we can only count on our conscience to be with us at every moment of our lives till we die - no matter where we go.

Community

Even though mentoring is our own prerogative and responsibility, it is hardly true that we can command ourselves to do anything or be anyone and expect every sinew in our body and every neuron in our brain to strive with one purpose to achieve it. We are rather poor masters of ourselves - tending all too often to the extremes of self-tyranny or recalcitrance. Most of us - if not all - may never attain any self-understanding or self-mastery by our own efforts or acting alone. It is often by integrating ourselves in a community that we are able to attain the discipline and commitment necessary for self-improvement. A community of well-meaning and sufficiently enlightened fellow travelers can be a great source of stability, continuity and purpose in our self-improvement journey.

And so, we have come full circle. Because these are again the people who we need to be our mentors at times and circumstances when our own desire to improve and the accumulated wisdom of the ages is not quite enough.

Individuality

We are all unique. Nobody knows or can aspire to know our needs and circumstances better than we do ourselves.

Presence

The voice in the back of our heads - our conscience - has been, is, and always will be in our lives at all times and places.

Three things to remember

Mentoring has many dimensions. There are three aspects of mentoring that are worth reflecting on here.

1.

The first is about setting incremental and achievable goals. The key is to aim to be a little bit better today, than we were yesterday. Whether that is by starting to exercise and make little changes towards eating and living a healthier life, learning a new language or skill, mending a failing or broken relationship, volunteering or sharing something we have with another in a way that would enrich both the giver and the receiver.

2.

The second aspect is about nurturing a supportive and encouraging place that we can take refuge in. Especially those who seem strongest and most formidable need a refuge. All of us do, especially when we fall short of our own expectations and the expectations of others. We don't always manage to achieve even the simplest goals we set for ourselves. In fact, we often fail. If we could all maintain a regime of daily, incremental improvement, given the compounding nature of improvement, we should all have near superhuman abilities. But we don't. Because we fail, often. When we do, we need someone who can pick us up and encourage us to keep trying, keep simplifying our goals to make them more meaningful and achievable. That could be a person or a quiet place, a book or a piece of music. Most of all, we should be able to find refuge in our own conscience.

3.

The third and perhaps most important aspect of mentoring is the guidance we all need; knowing where to find it and being able to discern good advice from bad. Suffice to say, it is not simple. Any guidance or advice can only be judged based on how effective it is in leading us to where we wish to go. However, it is not easy to pick a goal or destination that we would find to be meaningful even after we've achieved it. Some goals that are wonderful to behold from afar, can turn out to be hollow once we achieve them. Certain kinds of successes attract glory while others may attract shallow fame and insincere friends. Quite often though, we set out to achieve goals without knowing the price we will have to pay to achieve them or the risks we will have to endure to preserve them.

So we need guidance not merely to guide us to the next waypoint that we want to get to in the present stage of our life, but to think through our choices to be sure that they are wholesome. As difficult - if not impossible - as this seams, it is a question that many of the greatest minds have grappled with for at least a couple of thousand years. We certainly don't have to start from scratch or rely on any one individual - least of all ourselves - to guide us. We have the wisdom of the ages at our disposal. All we need is a map to help us find the ultimate destination and chart a course towards it that we are fit enough and equipped enough to trek. We may also need guidance on how we can become fit and well-equipped for the journey.

In this approach to self-mentoring, I will use the word that ancient Greeks used to describe the common goal we all share in life - Eudaimonia.

We will need to unpack its meaning for sure, but suffice to note that the idea of self-mentoring is not about 'the blind and afflicted having to lead themselves', but a process of developing a structured transit map where we can orient ourselves towards a meaningful destination and plot a path to it, progressing on incremental goals and knowing where we can find knowledge, experience, feedback, encouragement and refuge on our way to leading a fulfilling and meaningful life.

Goals

Having meaningful goals is like navigating by the North Star. They orient us towards what is wholesome and virtuous. Achievable goals propel us forward, but meaningful ones give purpose to our journey. They ignite passion, foster growth, and infuse life with significance. Whether it’s learning a new skill, nurturing relationships, or making a positive impact, meaningful goals guide us toward fulfillment.

Refuge

Home is the final destination of all our journeys; all others are merely resting places. It is not merely a roof above our heads, but a refuge we carry within. It’s the scent of childhood memories, the warmth of shared laughter, and the comfort of acceptance. We find it in the embrace of a loved one, the pages of a cherished book, or the melody of a favorite song. It is where we find solace during life’s storms; where we know we will always belong.

Wisdom

The wise Owl is perched on a branch with its sharp focus on the future and the patient Tortoise is walking calmy towards its goal. A playful Fox reminds us to seek joy in every place and moment while the humble Shrew is working diligently. They are all gathered at the Tree of Wisdom - its roots running deep, with a branch in autumn holding knowledge from the past and another in spring bearing all our hopes and promise of the future.

The self-mentoring process

Eudaimonia

The question of how to live well has been the subject of some of the greatest philosophical thought and literary works since ancient times. That is not by accident, because it is one of the most profound and demonstrably important questions we can ask ourselves. And yet, it is a question that most of us are rarely encouraged to grapple, with any intensity or seriousness during our formative years. Even if we had the prescience to ask such a question, mentors and teachers may hasten to tell us that it is a question that is impossible to answer in a general sense, and that it is up to each of us to answer for ourselves. Instead, the business of teaching, learning and personal development – from kindergarten to university and later at workplaces – is focused on providing us with tools to productively engage with and ‘succeed’ in the economy. That’s just SMART.

When our idea of success is too narrowly defined in terms of a job title we wish to earn, an amount of wealth we wish to accumulate or any form of power to bend the world to our will – no matter how noble our intentions - it is easy to ignore case studies of individuals who are ‘successful’ in their careers and yet ‘failed’ in their own estimations in other aspects of life, and vice versa. It is reasonable to conclude from such stories that, to ‘succeed’ in one aspect of life, one must be ready to compromise on others. There is a grain of truth in the notion, but that’s not the whole truth. Eudaimonia is an idea that helps us think about success in terms of living purposefully, and finding value as well as meaning in processes instead of outcomes.

The question about how to live well deserves to be explored also because it can open our minds to wisdom that some of the greatest human minds have accumulated over two and a half millennia. The idea of Eudaimonia that Aristotle wrote about in his ‘Nicomachean ethics’ is as relevant to us today as it was in ancient cultures and the values underpinning it remain the same, even though we may interpret them on our own terms. There are a constellation of stories and great art that guide and console us in our quest to craft our lives purposefully.

For Aristotle, the purpose of life was to pursue the highest human good and it was in that pursuit that one’s Eudaimonia could be found. It is a direct challenge to the common conception that ‘happiness is all we want in life’. Instead, the path to Eudaimonia is the path that forces us to make use of all our senses and faculties, manifesting the best and highest of our virtues, and appreciating fully what it means to be alive. Even when that path leads us through hardship and suffering. Eudaimonia is what we find most desirable for its own sake rather than as a means towards achieving something else.

Self-Discovery

Know thyself! Self-awareness is the necessary foundation for self-improvement. This section is structured to guide you using a series of questions that will provoke deeper reflection. Don’t expect to be able to complete it in a hurry. The idea is to revisit these questions as often as possible, and create times and spaces where you can grapple with them alone or with trusted companions. You may find it is most fruitful during times of hardship, challenge, and change.

Minimum requirements for self-discovery.

- Courage.

- Truthfulness.

- Time.

Why I do what I do.

- Awareness of our basic needs and motivators

Focus on gratitude.

- Our main refuge and source of hope. Gratitude magically transforms suffering, hardship and challenges into opportunities to discover ourselves and realize our potential to overcome and persevere.

When am I at my best.

- This is not an easy question to find an answer, but the search for it will set you off on finding your path to Eudaimonia.

The stage in my life.

- Contextualising the present moment in the transition of our lives. While each individual is unique, there are commonalities in the way we think about and experience life. We share many priorities, needs and anxieties with our peers of similar age, place and circumstances. On one hand, the needs and priorities of teenagers are different from those in their mid-life. Similarly, a 40 year old with young kids may have some shared interests with a 30 year-old with young children than with another 40 year-old who is single. Thinking about our present stage in life is a useful starting point from which we can determine what we should prioritise now and also envision more clearly, the next stages of life that we need to prepare for. As much as we transition from primary to high school and onto university… then work, we may also transition from the workforce to retirement, or from being parents of young children to empty nesters. Each stage poses questions about relationships, financial decisions, skills and competencies as well as health and wellbeing that we need to consider and prioritise accordingly. There is a wealth of accumulated experience and research that is available to guide us.

Hierarchy of values

Visualising our values as a hierarchy is not easy, and certainly cannot be done in one sitting on a lazy afternoon. Instead, we may have to observe ourselves over months and years to objectively and critically analyse our true values - those that we live by, as opposed to the ones we profess - and recognise that we often sacrifice some values to preserve others (e.g.:- we may value our commitment to our profession and career advancement as well as our families, but observing the choices we make given the option to stay back at the office to create a good impression at work or going home early to spend time with one’s family will be instructive about our relative priorities). Does the hierarchy of values you live by in practice, align with what you believe or profess?

Role of emotions

Emotions are like the dashboard and indicators in a car. They are not the powertrain that propels us (even though they often seem like it). Just like dials and indicators on a car dashboard, they change constantly. One of the most valuable life-skills we learn is to realise the transitory nature of our emotions. Understanding their transitory nature can help us develop skills to observe them coming in and going out, or intensifying and subduing. Because our dashboard of emotions are linked to the powertrain that drives our actions, they can sometimes be indiscernible from one another. When we are driving along, we can see a clear connection between the engine revs counter and the speedometer, but that is only true when the clutch is engaged. We also have a mental clutch that allows us to choose when to act on our emotions and when to disengage our actions from them. It may be an oversimplification to put in these terms, but what we understand as self-mastery is in large part fine-tuning our discernment about when to act on our emotions and when to defy them. That is not all though. Because each individual in various circumstances, have a default hierarchy of emotions they act on. Sometimes our desires are overridden by fear of failure or rejection. But we also need to learn when it is opportune to override our fear with courage and when it is wiser to pay attention to what fear can teach us if we pay attention to it. We also need to learn to read our emotions as they play out in unison – the intensity and frequency of certain emotions can tell us when we need to switch off the engine and recuperate – because we all need to be refuelled often and book ourselves in for service and repairs from time to time.

Character

Our capacity to do good and win in life is equally matched by our capacity for bad, evil, and failure. As in great stories, whether we end up being heroes of villains will be determined by our manifest virtues and vices. Character building – that is developing and strengthening virtues such as courage, fortitude, honesty, humility, temperance, discernment and so on, as well as pathways for escaping from the stranglehold of vices may be foundational tools - necessary to define and progress towards Eudaimonia.

However, character building – the necessary foundation on which this template is built on – requires a different kind of template altogether. For one, it cannot be based purely on self-reflection, but on action and continuous interactions. It requires a platform – or controlled environment - that can support experimentation and failure as well as constant access to feedback, coaching and evaluation. Ideally, such a program or platform would be most effectively targeted at young people and children, though the benefits for adults of various levels of maturity should not be underestimated.

The Process

Self improvement is an arduous process and it is not a road that leads straight up a mountain to a visible peak. Instead, it is a winding and slippery path where we may slip back even as we try to move forward. We will have to persevere; to stay on the path and take the next immediate step forward, knowing we may slip and fall from time to time. Our faith need not be indomitable, but it must be strong enough to drag us back onto our feet when we fall. It is bound to be joyful too, because we find meaning when we improve ourselves in consequential ways. the peak we are trying to scale, and in our ability and It requires introspection, prioritisation, humility, perseverence, courage, truth, feedback from others that we may not necessarily want to hear and overcoming many obstacles and distractions along the way.

The Self-Mentoring Guide

The Self-Mentoring Guide distills most - if not all - of the insights outlined above into a single page. It contains many years of experience, reflection and care, and is shared freely.

It is nevertheless still limited by the fact that it still reflects predominantly the experience and knowledge of an individual over a relatively short period.

Therefore I am sharing this in the hope that all those who choose to explore and use this may share their experience, thoughts and suggestions here, and that such a dialog among practitioners may help improve its content and structure over time.

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