My Strength, MY Power

COOL Coaching®’s journeys of Self-Discovery, Self-Knowledge, Self-Renewal, and Self-Reinvention are not only about stimulating or rekindling creativity and innovation today for constantly better tomorrows. They are also about retrieving, and applying, from your fundamental life education those experiences that lay the foundation for the SuperStarInYou® that you have grown up to be today.

Thursday morning (22/ 11-2012) I crossed a threshold by unexpectedly overcoming a physical handicap due to a long-standing medical condition impeding execution of certain movements relative to heavy and intensive physical exercise workouts. In my elation, the COOL Coaching® Successful Living Through Magic and Wonder® flash came through. Then I realized that since I embarked on a new training routine at the end of June 2012 after a first ever six months’ pause, the words of my Karate teacher, Professor Stephen Chan, 9 Dan, OBE, have been ringing in my head everyday, “The academic mind is a mind of structure, Semmy … Go and read TS Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions!”(Greece, December 1985)

So were also the words of one of my first ever Karate Sensei, Anver Bey, Sho Dan, a year or two later, “Semmy, you must train with an open mind. You must also read a lot. The more you read the more you’ll find that no one has monopoly on knowledge of how to train, and how to live in general. When you know, nothing and no one can fuck with your training and your life”. During my later years in Lusaka, Anver and I grew to be very close friends, and he taught me a lot of things about life and training. The news of his passing on years ago truly broke my heart. He invariably visits me each time I do power training in the gym though.

I do not recall to have ever trained so patiently and systematically before; paying particular attention to, and respecting, my moods and feelings from day to day. The latter have a bearing as to how strong and enthusiastic I’ll get about things. The structure of my training since I started to train with conscious and clearly defined desirable outcomes since I was 4½ years old has been in relation to three important external factors: Self-protection, Competition, and Leadership (as at age 17 years I started to teach Karate and lead my own groups, and subsequently my own clubs in Norway). Both as practitioner and teacher of Karate I simply had to be stronger and better than anyone else. Nothing else mattered, just I glossed in the glory of my personal victories and successes, as well as those of my students. This was very important for my ego; given my constant struggle against outsider/underdog prejudices directed towards my person everywhere I go.

These days I train alone, for myself, by myself. Renewing my Mind, Body, and Soul according to fundamentals of my teachers’ teachings of my once young, wild, and (still) mad me. It’s a new way to work directing my strength and power first and foremost into myself. The older paradigm by which I worked was to primarily think about how to project my strength and power out to the world as intensely as possible. Waste of time and energy. I’m free. It feels good to know and understand that I own my strength and my power inside. So, I can from the outset do with my Mind, Body, and Soul only the things that make sense to me. My self-reinvention visions have never been more vivid, modelled after what I see and feel inside of me for myself alone. I now know that this is the essence of my education in the fundamentals of life and living by all my teachers so far. Thanks to COOL Coaching®’s journeys of Self-Discovery, Self-Knowledge, Self-Renewal, and Self-Reinvention. My life gets better all the time.

SIMON CHILEMBO
November 24, 2012
OSLO
Norway
Tel.: +47 97000488/ +27 717 454 115 (South Africa)