Don't mistake healing for being whole

Let yourself heal!

I’m sure some of you wondered why I hadn’t posted for the last 2 weeks. I spent this time travelling for work and some personal commitments which turned out to be fun, productive but also detrimental to my health.

For some of you have been following this newsletter, I once shared how I have to deal with some health-related issues last year, and the lessons I learned.

So I booked my flight, travelled light, was excited about surprising my wife (who was invited to speak at an IWD event and had travelled earlier) and all the fun (and work) I was going to have once I landed.

Guess what? 10 minutes after I landed at the airport I started having allergic reactions 🤣, 1 week later I was rescheduling my flight back home.

Here’s what I learned from this:

We often mistake healing for being whole. On the surface, one may look great, but what you see may be quite deceptive because what goes on beneath is more important.

People are dealing with their own versions of demons and often look great to the world (cue Will Smith) till they unravel. You have to be emotionally intelligent and perceptive enough to look beyond what you see and what is being said to what is not being said, which tends to be more important.

On a personal level, give yourself a chance to be whole too. Stop rushing yourself back to work, take extra time off, spend more time with family and the things you love. It’s also ok to relapse because healing (like success) is not linear. Don’ feel bad when this happens, instead, be grateful for the progress you’ve made and find ways to course-correct.

Course-correcting means focusing on self-care (yes be selfish about yourself!). Self-care is probably one of the most important things you can do. Without it, we often don’t have the strength to become the best versions of ourselves, and to me not being the best version of yourself seems like life’s most wasted opportunity.

To celebrate course-correcting 😉 I spent some time talking with one founder I enjoy conversing with, Tomi Solanke, the founder of Trove. Trove is one of the pioneer apps in Africa that gives access to American and Chinese stocks, bonds and ETFs for a fractional sum of money, think of it as the Robinhood for Africa. Tomi shares his journey into entrepreneurship, the lessons he learned and his mistakes.

Listen here and share with someone.

You can also listen on Anchor, Apple Podcast and Google.