ScHERlet Red

10/03/2019

ScHERlet's Monday Motivation by Temitope Oyesanya ()

Become a ScHERlet Shares Volunteer today. Share this post and help inspire a friend

10/03/2019

Become a ScHERlet Shares Volunteer today. Help share this post and inspire a friend.

10 ways to build new relationships

I’ve been realizing more and more recently the power of connections, networks and friendships. Making a decision to consciously build my own social circle and network, here are the top ten ways I’m learning to do that:

Have conversations with everyone, radiate life out of them. In other words, if you see anyone you’d like to get to know, walk up to them and say hello. Every friend you have now was once a stranger. Once about 2 years ago while in London for an internship, I went on a challenge with a friend to talk to one stranger a week. Then when we meet later, we would discuss our experiences. By doing this, I met quite a number of great people, including someone who recommended me for a job, and a pleasant lady from Kenya (I met in an elevator) who took me out to lunch, and basically took care of me like a son all the while I was in London, down to paying for my cab to the airport when I was leaving. At the end of “hi” lies the start of new relationships beyond what you can imagine. Having said that, if its twelve midnight and you’re walking alone on a dark street, you probably don’t want to start making friends with the dodgy looking guy in the corner. Maybe walk faster. Or Run. Just saying.

Focus on expressing yourself rather than impressing people, by doing this when you meet someone who appreciates your value and you as a person, you’ll have begun on a road of authenticity, a really great relationship.

Get contact details as soon as connect, “it’s been so good talking to you, give me your number I’ll like to keep in touch”.

Say yes…say yes more. At the end of your yes is the beginning of an adventure. Say yes to go for the hangout, or conference or church program, say yes to people when you get invited for things. I’m fond of having an excuse sometimes as my default answer, or saying yes and then cancelling, but when I allow myself to connect with people and just say yes, it opens the door to a whole new world of possibilities.

Talk to people who seem “too cool” for you, you’ll be shocked how they respond. Once I went to the airport to retrieve my sim, my Airtel sim, a couple of years ago. I was about 14 or 15 and in secondary school, I saw former governor Donald Duke at the airport, without security, just in a corner, talking with some other guy in white native who was shaking his hand. I remember thinking, that’s Donald Duke! But then I just went to retrieve my sim, I keep wondering till this day what would have happened if I just said hi, and told him I felt he was an awesome governor and maybe took a picture. Maybe it’s not a public figure for you, maybe it’s someone you’ve just tagged in your mind as “out of your league”. It’s often shocking how pleasant these kinds of people turn out to be if you’ll just walk up to them and say hello. And if they’re not pleasant, just move on.

No risk no story. The more you take risks the more your experience and confidence builds up. I have many stories of awkward conversations and funny moments, I could tell you all about it sometime but I realise though they may be utterly embarrassing at the moment, in retrospect they make you smile and laugh even while you’re by yourself brushing your teeth. You learn, you grow, and you become better.

Make people laugh…if you can laugh with someone, they mentally associate the thought of you with joy and laughter and want to be around you more. Be a joker. Form the habit of cracking a joke at the slightest opportunity you get. Let your presence be associated with laughter. One person I’ve seen do this effortlessly over and over again is Ellen Degeneres. If you’ve seen any of her interviews, you see how this is second nature for her, Jimmy Fallon, Kevin Hart are public figures that do this as well. Watch out for humour opportunities in your conversations, and seize it.

Be a giver. If you want to be friends with a billionaire take a gift. Your gift gives you access. Everybody else is trying to take or ask for something, counter that, give instead. The ancient billionaire King Solomon understood this, he had a popular saying “A man’s gift makes room for him”. Gift meaning actual present. (Even though most people tend to focus on talents and skills.) Another quote by Solomon in Proverbs 19:6 says “Many seek favours from a ruler; everyone is the friend of a person who gives gifts!” Physical present aside, let your disposition be to give the spotlight away, don’t try to have the spotlight on you, give it to the other person, compliment gracefully, focus on making the other person feel good and listening to their views. To be an interesting person, be an interested person.

Know stuff. You’re more valuable to people when you know stuff. You have more to contribute when you read. Learn about sports, pop culture, current affairs, movies, cars, faith, business or whatever else interests you.

Have interesting hobbies and experiences. Whether you love to cook, play sports, an instrument or write poetry. These uncommon hobbies and skills usually lead to deeper conversations than say – ‘Where do you work?’ In my experience most people don’t really like their jobs, start talking about hobbies and passions and you’ll light them up, especially when both you and theirs intersect.

Chijioke Nnamani

08/03/2019

Become a ScHERlet Shares Volunteer today. Help share this post and inspire a friend.

It's not a crime; Eat Breakfast

Most people say breakfast is the most important meal. Even the Strong Lifts Diet recommends you to eat breakfast. But what if your mind tells you to skip it. Should you force yourself to eat breakfast anyway? Maybe or maybe not, read below.

Examining the importance of having breakfast is very beneficial to proper healthy living. Especially if your goal is weight loss or gain. This post will give you 5 reasons why you should build the habit of eating breakfast starting today.

Lose Fat:
Eating breakfast won’t speed up your metabolism. Research shows fasting does not decrease your metabolism, neither do frequent meals increase it. But having breakfast does help fat loss by improving your diet.

Less Binging: An unhealthy breakfast ruins your day: you’ll keep eating junk food thinking “tomorrow I’II eat healthy”. But a healthy breakfast sets the trend: you’ll want to continue eating healthy foods the whole day.

More Healthy Food: The food you buy on your way to work usually isn’t very healthy although its label says so. By making breakfast yourself, you get control over the ingredients and thus over your results.

Gain Weight:
To gain weight you must eat more. Hard gainers usually need at least 5000kcal/day to see weight gain. Eating breakfast is crucial to reach these amounts so you lose your skinny look forever.

More Hunger: Breakfast usually makes you hungrier during the day. This makes weight gain easier since skinny people often struggle to eat a lot.
Less Bloating: The more meals you eat, the smaller these must be to reach your caloric needs. Meaning less nausea’s and less bloating.

Save Money:
Preparing breakfast is cheaper than buying foods on your way to work or school, foods that are often also unhealthy.

Short-term: Healthy, whole, unprocessed food isn’t more expensive. If it is: you’re not doing it right. Read our next article; Eating healthy with less cash
Long-term: Poor diet causes excess body fat and eventually heart diseases which is the top cause of death in developed countries.
Build Healthy Eating Habits:
As explained in point 1, starting your day with a healthy breakfast sets the trend: you won’t ruin the rest of your day with junk food if you begin it with a healthy meal.

Breakfast doesn’t benefit your health directly. Studies that claim otherwise are correlational. But breakfast is crucial to build healthy eating habits – like eating whole foods 90% of the time – which will eventually improve your health.

Avoid Stress:
What you do the 1st hour after you wake up sets the trend for your whole day. You’ll avoid stress by waking up earlier and eating breakfast.

No Skipped Meals: No more stress because you couldn’t find something healthy to eat for breakfast in the grocery store on your way to work.
No Rushing: No more stress because you woke up late again and didn’t have time to eat breakfast and need to rush to make it in time for work.

Mayowa Morgan [Health & Fitness Coach]

02/03/2019

Become a ScHERlet Shares Volunteer today. Share this post and help inspire a friend.

Shadows of the Past

The sky was slightly overcast as he stared ahead through the windscreen of his car. The island before him –his destination, was without doubt the major commercial hub of the city with skyscrapers juxtaposed strikingly with brief sturdy structures. The buildings against the backdrop of sky and water made a picturesque skyline, an elaborate bar chart of some sort.
Alex noticed he had relapsed into a contemplative disposition. And it wasn’t even 7am yet! He still had a long day at work. Who got into such a mood so early in the day!

A significant number of the city’s inhabitants were asleep, but the bees were up and about, definitely. The island beyond was bathed in light, tiny and discrete bits like excited fireflies. “A land of fairies” Alex muttered wistfully. It would cost an arm to own even the littlest morsel of property there, but, by the heavens, he would!

Monday mornings were usually like Monday mornings. Quotidian in every sense; monotonous piles of work lined up and the “yes sir” one paid to bosses as dues. Not for Alex. Of course he yessir-ed his way through such days, but they weren’t boring. Not necessarily because he loved his job, but he consciously formed a habit of setting out of his home high-spirited, ready to tackle and surmount hurdles as they appear.
It was one of those days.

As one of the thousands who lived on the mainland of the metropolitan area but worked on the island of the mega city of Lagos, before the sun thought of yawning awake, Alex was off his bed, got done with his morning ceremonies, and made sure 6:30am met him well on his way to work. With him, it was never the popular dreadful-Monday-morning out of the house approach. It had to be the I’ve-got-my-sling-shotout of the house approach. After all, he never was one to back down from his goliaths.

Hardly had he spent a quarter-hour on the road that the jarring incidence occurred. One that made him realize some things are filed under life’s miscellaneous; they aren’t prepared for or planned. They just happen.
As he decelerated and joined the cars stopped by the red traffic light far ahead, he noticed a woman on the sidewalk across, two lanes away. The lanes were busy with hurtling cars. She looked slightly unkempt.

It all played out in his mind now, slowly.
Her bloodshot eyes looked straight ahead, not left or right, before she strutted almost zombie-like across the road. The traffic light turned green then and cars on his lane began edging forward slowly, affording him ample time to take in gory details he wished he had missed. It all happened in very few seconds.He must have blinked,because the next thing he knew, the woman was airborne, flung by a speeding car. She hit the pavement with a dull thud, nearly inaudible, as cars screeched and honked past. Blood spurted from a gash on her head as she lay sprawled in an impossible position on the ground. Her dirty multi-patterned wrapper had come loose, revealing a black undergarment.
Alex snatched his face away. His lane was now free, the vehicle before him was long gone and the cars behind were honking angrily already. He stepped down on the accelerator and sped away, trying hard to clear his mind. The image of the lifeless woman against the roadside disturbed him. He had seen more gruesome accidents, but there was a specific quality to this one. It reminded him of things he thought or hoped he had forgotten –memories buried deep within his psyche.

As he drove slowly on the lengthy band of linking platform between the mainland and the island, and finally came to a brief stop, meeting his second gridlock of the morning. He stared out at the water body and for a brief moment his eyes traced the connecting line of the cloudy sky and murky waters. It somehow reminded him of his life. He remembered that as a child, he’d wonder why the waters in the movies always had a deliciously blue or green tinge, while the one here was brownish, dirty, and unpleasant to look at, littered with dirty boats and ugly waterweeds.

Just like his childhood.
He smiled ruefully.
He usually wasn’t a brooding soul. Well, he hadn’t been for some years now. But his day just got messed up by that lone isolated incidence. Memories he had tried hard to bury surfaced, voices he’d grown deaf to screamed loudly. His resolve to overcome any challenge the day posed was threatened.
He remembered his childhood.
His father was a very strict man, one who staunchly believed in severe punishments for any wrong done by his children. It was justice. He saw the proverbial rod of correction as a machine –it made work easier and faster.

But that wasn’t the problem.
Although his father’s strictness bordered on cruelty, it might have just been bearable if he didn’t beat his wife almost as much as he beat his kids. It was something Alex never understood.
There was this day he returned from an errand and was welcomed by the loud angry voices of his parents, arguing as usual. The row progressed into their regular marital fisticuffs which entailed his father doing the heavy weight punching and his mom screaming in pain. He heard a dull thud and the caterwauling stopped abruptly. The ensuing silence was disturbing. He was scared. He wanted to tell his mom he couldn’t get the desired item from the store so he peeped into his parents’ room.

Then he saw her.
He saw his mom slumped on the floor. Her bloodshot eyes stared at him blankly, unseeing, blood gushing out of the side of her head, her multi-patterned pleated skirt riding high on her thigh revealing a black undergarment.

Alex clenched his jaw, gritting his teeth and looked ahead. The road would soon be clear. He sidled up to the car in front and made a deliberate effort to recall items of his to-do list for the day. He didn’t need such memories. He had decided long ago not to dwell on them. They were long gone, forgotten, shadows of a distant past–that had no business staining the horizon beyond with their black squelchy tentacles.

So he took a deep breath, exhaled slowly and glanced at his wristwatch. It was a gift from a dear friend for his birthday some days back. He decided that he wasn’t going to allow stupid emotions becloud his good nature, or affect his reason. He needed every bit of his wit about him if he was to make a successful presentation at the office. As he reached the end of the bridge, he employed a ritual he learnt in recent years –one that worked wonders; he muttered as he drove, speaking to his day, telling it to be good and fruitful. He thought of his most recent conquest –his promotion at his workplace, which came with the car. He smiled and almost whooped. The presentation was going to be great!
He glanced furtively at the vehicle at his right; just to be sure no one was looking at him. He chortled. It would be nothing unusual to be thought mad –the city itself was a mad place.

By David Okolie [D.Wordheart]

Become a ScHERlet Shares Volunteer today. Share this post and help inspire a friend

28/02/2019

Become a ScHERlet Shares volunteer today. Share this post and help inspire a friend

From Kong: Skull Island

This is another movie starring King Kong, the fictional ‘monstrous’ ape with a tender heart and a protective inclination. It’s all about a group of scientists, soldiers and adventurers on a mission to uncover the mysteries of an uncharted territory which is said to have claimed so many ships and aircraft – making it a danger zone. Unlike very many other ‘hero-villain’ movies I have seen, this movie doesn’t seem to focus as much on Kong himself as it does on the other characters involved in the adventure and the progression of the adventure, along with it’s lessons.

The part that intrigued me most in the movie was the conversation between the Cole (one of the soldiers) and Bill Randa (the scientist that initiated the adventure for his selfish reasons). Cole explained to Bill that the reason why he is still carrying a gun inferior to M-16 is because he took it off a farmer who was fighting for NVA. The 50-year old farmer claimed he had never seen a gun till the American troops arrived for war. Cole then posited that ‘Sometimes, an enemy doesn’t exist till you go looking for one’. And that is true for a lot of people, companies and even countries.

A lot of times, when we get short of adversaries and everything seems to be going on fine, we end up creating some for ourselves. Could it have been out of the love for adventure or merely being used to the idea of having enemies around, we go suspicious on everyone and everything and fire back at the slightest appearance of antagonism or opposition; because we are so paranoid, we would attack without even seeking to know why the opposition is coming up and also without looking into the major cause of the problem. We take every confrontation personal and react with indignation and sentiment.

Sometimes, all we need to do to experience and maintain peace among ourselves is to recognize other people’s right to their private lives and individuality. We keep pitching up enemies for ourselves when we decide to only see things from our own perspective. We give audience to our opinions alone and even try to impose our will on others. Sadly, subjugating the rights of others to make decisions for themselves only presents you as a tyrant, and every tyranny is ended in rebellion. We need to give others the opportunity to own their space just as we do ours. And if by chance, you get an opportunity to take a peep into their space and probably intervene in their space, don’t evade it. When we get invited or we find ourselves in the lives or environment of others, be careful to tread with caution. Ask questions and get knowledge about how and why things are the way they are, else you will be making a lot of assumptions and errors. You are a stranger to them, not because you aren’t a part of them, but because you are ignorant of a lot of things.

A lot of people have been plunged into depression, unfulfilled dreams, passions watered down, gifts neglected and plans destroyed because their lives were invaded by adults (dominating figures) in their lives before they could stand for themselves. It’s just funny how other people already have plans for other people’s lives without even considering their personal opinions, thoughts or plans, and it would be quite unfortunate if those people have the influence to impose their will on such individuals . How wonderful will it be if everyone is allowed the liberty of self-discovery and empowered to pursue their dreams on their own terms.

Could I be saying we have no enemies that we didn’t create? Far from that. I know that there are people who just set up themselves against you for no reason, you have no control over that. They fall into the category of bad people. In this life, there are good people and bad people. And we need to be guarded against the evil ones who could use whatever means they have to hurt us. But I believe everyone should be given a chance to prove which side they belong. If you have to place them in a default category, let it be the good category. If every other person, by default, puts you in the bad-person category, how easy do you think your life would be. You are where you are today because someone or some people gave you a chance. Give others a chance too!

Caleb Onigbinde

Become a ScHERlet Shares volunteer today. Share this post and help inspire a friend

25/02/2019

'I have been doing a lot of thinking – about this thing we call Giftings – these things that we humans so gallantly pride ourselves in'

Become a ScHERlet Shares volunteer today. Share this post and help inspire a friend to Be More.'

I have been doing a lot of thinking – about this thing we call Giftings – these things that we humans so gallantly pride ourselves in. I mean the thought that my singing could effortlessly enthral …

24/02/2019

ScHERlet's Monday Motivation by Temitope Oyesanya ()

Become a ScHERlet Shares volunteer today. Share this post and help inspire a friend to Be More.'

20/02/2019

I realized that not many people know how to pleasantly and boldly meet people during that first introduction.

It’s only normal to be more comfortable with your own crew...

Like our page to get ScHERlet Red contents directly delivered to you

This world is designed in such a way that we constantly interact with people – day after day. It’s either we are meeting up with someone we haven’t seen for a long time or some person we have never…

19/02/2019

Stacy Brown-Philpot is the CEO of TaskRabbit and a member of the Board of Directors of HP Inc and Nordstrom

Like our page to get ScHERlet Red contents directly delivered to you

18/02/2019

I’m divorced from you Fear
But you want mind custody
Sorry dear
I’m with Faith now

You keep coming around
Stalking
Screaming...

Like our page to get ScHERlet Red contents directly delivered to you

I’m divorced from you Fear But you want mind custody Sorry dear I’m with Faith now You keep coming around Stalking Screaming Kicking over my garbage can I’ve gotten a restraining order You want an …

16/02/2019

‘Bisola from protocol?!’
‘Everybody seems to be getting married these days, I don’t know if I’m weird but I’m not really thinking about it’...

Like our page to get ScHERlet Red contents directly delivered to you

‘Bisola from protocol?’ ‘Big Bisola, fair, the one that sings at Church’ ‘Oh oh I know her’ Chioma said tearing open a Pringles pack lying by the lampstand ‘Ever…

14/02/2019

'In my perspective, the most dramatic scene comes on when Jules mistakenly sent a message intended for her husband to her mum. Hilariously, the content of the message was the type her mum should never see'

With Robert de Nero and Anne Hathaway casting as main actors, The Intern, for me, was just as awesome as expected. At age 70, retired Ben Whittaker (Robert de Nero) finds himself applying for an in…

12/02/2019

'Before, I realized and accepted that I had daddy issues, it took a while and a harvest of heartbreaks. Any man that walked up to me, looked okay in my eyes, with just a “hello” I was already imagining what our love story would be like'

Pining me to the wall, he held me firmly but looked at me with emotions I had never seen before in his eyes “You are special” he said as he planted a kiss on my lips. I was so sure this was wrong, …

10/02/2019

Happy Birthday to our founder, Temitope Oyesanya (). May your day be filled with lots of happiness and joy.
From the entire ScHERlet Team.

04/02/2019

ScHERlet's Monday Motivation by

13/01/2019

http://scherlet.com/10-ways-to-build-new-relationships/

Written by Chijioke Nnamani I’ve been realizing more and more recently the power of connections, networks and friendships. Making a decision to consciously build my own social circle and network, h…

22/10/2018

http://scherlet.com/hey-fear/

I’m divorced from you Fear But you want mind custody Sorry dear I’m with Faith now You keep coming around Stalking Screaming Kicking over my garbage can I’ve gotten a restraining order You want an …

16/10/2018

http://scherlet.com/boy-meets-girl/

'sDiary

“You know what will happen if anyone finds out about this, right?” Yomi asked, his bloodshot eyes staring straight into mine as his pocket radio mildly played the famous Michael Jackson track – Bil…