Until you interrogate & deconstruct patriarchal gender roles in your ideology, those expectations will continue to bleed into your consciousness & shape how you reason & react.
A caller on Brekete Radio today said his brother's wife was kidnapped, gave birth in bandit captivity, and Bello Turji named the child after himself before increasing the ransom, saying he bought a ram for the naming ceremony.
You will never outperform your self-image, this is one of the most important things ever said about human behavior and almost nobody understands what it really means, your self-image is the picture you carry inside your head of who you are, what you're capable of, what you deserve, and what's possible for you, and your entire life is just your nervous system executing the orders of that picture, you don't behave according to what you want, you don't behave according to what you say, you don't behave according to your goals, you behave according to who you secretly believe you are, and the gap between where you are and where you want to be is almost always the exact gap between your real self-image and the one you keep trying to talk yourself into.
The plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz figured this out in the 1950s when he noticed that some patients, even after he fixed their face perfectly, still walked out of his office feeling ugly, and others with minor cosmetic changes walked out feeling brand new, the surgery didn't matter, what mattered was whether the internal picture had changed, and he wrote a book called Psycho-Cybernetics in 1960 that became the foundation of basically every self-development book that came after it, his point was simple, the brain operates like a guided missile that locks onto whatever self-image you've installed, and it will steer you, sabotage you, and bring you home to that image no matter how hard your conscious mind fights, you can win the lottery and end up broke again in two years if your self-image is "poor person," you can lose 50 pounds and gain it back if your self-image is "fat person," you can land your dream job and quietly destroy it if your self-image is "not good enough," because the brain experiences any mismatch between reality and self-image as a problem to be corrected, and it always corrects toward the image.
This is why goal-setting, willpower, motivation, and discipline almost always fail in the long run, they're all happening at the level of behavior while the self-image underneath stays exactly the same, you can't out-discipline a self-image, you can't motivate yourself past it for more than a few weeks before it pulls you back, the only real way to change your life is to change the picture first, and the picture changes through repeated vivid imagination, especially in the relaxed state right before sleep and right after waking, when the critical part of your mind goes quiet and the subconscious actually listens, you spend ten or fifteen minutes a day living inside the version of you you want to become, with full sensory detail, with the feeling of it already being true, you do that consistently for a few months and the internal picture genuinely shifts, and once the picture shifts the behavior follows by itself, no daily battle required, because now your subconscious is steering you toward a different home.
Unmasking The Hidden Wealth In Nigeria
Where Is Dele Alake?
Something happened on August 12th, 2023, that redefined the Tinubu government, which may be the reason for the heightened insecurity spreading like wildfire across the country.
And the story continues….
Firstly, Ethiopia is under US sanctions while Vietnam is not. And speaking of former French colonies, Haiti was the first to get independence (1804) and is still one of the poorest countries in the world because of the debt they had to take on to gain independence (it took them until 1947 to fully repay it!). Whereas, New Caledonia is still a French colony and is neither rich nor poor.
"If colonialism were the answer to why Africa is poor..."
This line completely ignores the European powers' (and US) post-colonial control over Africa. Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the DRC, was tortured and killed by Belgium and the US for being a nationalist. His body was dissolved in acid so he wouldn't become a martyr. His legacy is largely unknown even within the continent. Several other such "lessons" were meted out. Google Thomas Sankara (Burkina Faso) and Sylvanus Olympio (Togo).
Once you set the example, you gain obedience. The VietCong, on the other hand, didn't surrender even though 3 million Vietnamese died during the war, and several thousand more continue to die to this day (!) from Agent Orange exposure.
As for former French colonies in Africa, France still controls their currency and holds their central bank reserves in France. As Rothschild purportedly said, "permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."
Third, the borders in Africa were drawn in such a way that conflict was inevitable. At the Berlin Conference in 1884-85, the European powers simply carved up the continent by drawing straight line borders. African leaders were conspicuous only by their absence at this historic event which shaped the next century. This is why Cameroon, a French-speaking country, has a minority English-speaking territory, ensuring it remains destabilized. Likewise for West Asia/the Middle East, where the Sykes-Picot legacy lives on.
@magattew conflates formal colonial rule with colonial control. Vietnam managed to fully kick out both France and the US, reunified the North and the South, and kept its sovereignty. All African leaders who attempted the same have been systematically eliminated (see Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's divisive leader, for a recent example), ensuring Africa forever bears the open wounds of its colonial legacy.
But Ms. Wade is right on one thing: Vietnam owes its prosperity to overcoming colonial rule. Maybe Africa can become prosperous if Africans do the same.
You can mock Nigerian girls all you want for lacking communication skills, but the truth is that Nigerian society is generally hostile to honest conversation.
The more Nigerians you deal with, the more you notice a pattern: people avoid saying things directly. They deflect, suppress, and sidestep difficult discussions until, seemingly out of nowhere, there's an emotional outburst.
Many of our siblings, parents, lecturers, bosses, and peers exhibit this trait to varying degrees: avoid, deflect, avoid—then suddenly, get mad.
🚨💣 EXCLUSIVE: Denzel Dumfries to Real Madrid, HERE WE GO! ⚪️🇳🇱
Deal in place and all agreed with Dutch right back to join Real Madrid from Inter, Spanish club will trigger €20m release clause.
Dumfries has accepted Madrid, deal closed tonight and formal steps to follow.