Break The Cycle

Growing up, you desired to be wealthy. You were lucky enough to go through school, a chance you ought to be thankful for.

 While there, you fought battles in your mind of how you would excel amidst the increasingly competitive world.

Soon enough school was done and you realized one of the ways up the ladder of success was entrepreneurship. You started a business short of a documented business plan but rather one of mental processes where your business model canvas is none other than your mind and BOOM!! You were into business.

Two months down the road you still have to call Cousin Harry for twenty thousand for re-investment into your business. Sister Molly still bails you out on the weekly airtime for your personal phone bills not forgetting Uncle Mark who is now on your speed dial for lunch money. Why?

You did not follow principle. You played dumb to the principle of Record Keeping. You took for granted the importance of documenting your business plan so as to periodically evaluate it.

You despised how imperative it is for your drawer to contain a cash book, stock book and other essential business records. You aren’t unlucky cursed or a failure. Life simply desires that you learn what you do not know for the good of your business.

Many young people venture or even desire to venture into various businesses but often negate the importance associated with proper record keeping systems. At Kyusa, through our Business Development module, keen emphasis is placed on the essential records ought to be kept in business straight from the planning through to the implementation stages with the intention of avoiding major set- backs in businesses thus enabling them thrive.

It is unfortunate that the cycle of many young people falling prone to unsuccessful businesses due to poor record keeping systems goes on and on.

Break the cycle today, enroll for the program today.

Quick Tips To Succeeding In Life By Kyusa Executive Director

As the  Kyusa February class comes to an end, we draw special attention to a talk made by our team leader, Noeline Kirabo to the change agents  at Jable training Centre in Bugolobi on how she has made it this far in life.

·         Know what you want; Not knowing what you want is dangerous and you will never know when you have arrived or achieved it. Therefore everything you want to achieve must be clear and specific. When its clear and specific then it is achievable.

·         Make SMART goals; goals have to be set at every point of our lives and they should be SMART; Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound. For example, a goal to enroll for a hair dressing course for 1 year and it costs 1million. The question you need to ask yourself is how will you get that amount of money, will you need to save up for it

·         Time management; This is a resources that can`t be replaced therefore needs to be used wisely. Schedule out your appointments, tasks at home, with friends and at work. Be productive with your time.

·         Consistency; Develop a culture of consistency .Discipline yourself to achieve tasks and goals. For example, a goal to read a book each month, be consistent and next year the habit will be apart of you.

·         Work within your means; Don`t try to impress people who don`t care. Know what goals need to be achieved and work on them per your budget.

·         Dream big and be willing to start small because you have go to start from somewhere. Empires are not built in one day. When you dream, begin with the end in mind however implement the dream within your means.

·         Be a lifelong learner and not a student. A learner acquires information from anywhere at anytime and is not restricted to a classroom setting. However, the student will most likely learn from a classroom setting which is limiting as there is so much knowledge in books, social media, work places, etc.

·         Be accountable to someone. The notion of having an accountability partner might be new or sound queer to some people however it is a good practice to have someone breathing down your throat. Accountability partners help keep you on course, ask tough questions, bruise you and mend you at the same time for your own benefit.

·         Find the right balance in life; the right balance between life and work, school and home, family and work, etc. The list is endless, at every stage in life; we embrace various roles and responsibilities which should be balanced out to have a more fulfilling life.

·         Put God at the centre of what you do. God reigns supreme and it is important to keep Him at the centre of it all.

Incorporate all the above and watch your life be transformed. At Kyusa, we believe in cultivating disciplines in order to succeed in life.

Winning Attitude

 Awaken the winner in you by choosing to be optimistic at all times!

Winston Churchill stated that “The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity but the optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty”. One of the true secrets to success, not only for top entrepreneurs, business executives and professionals but for people of any profession from all walks of life is attitude. Therefore, the most important victory we need to achieve before we can win life’s many battles is to overcome self-doubts and develop a winning attitude.

Whenever a negative thought about yourself and your abilities eludes your mind, immediately cancel it out and declare it as unworthy, untrue and unrealistic; do not entertain it at all. It is imperative that you hold a picture of yourself as being competent, effective and successful. Hold that image firmly in your mind and do not let any self doubt erase it. Soon, very soon your mental picture will become your new reality. Try it; you’ll see!

KFC founder Colonel Sanders failed 1,000 times before he got a yes. He could have given up but he persevered. Always maintain a winning attitude even when you have failed at any venture that you may be pursuing; do not let failure define you. You can’t choose or control your circumstances, but you can choose your attitude towards your circumstances. 

The Kyusa experience is about positivity, looking within oneself and excavating that passion that is deeply buried; it’s about building onto what already exists and affirming it. Having a winning attitude is an aspect of Self management: this is a core aspect of the Kyusa curriculum covering self esteem, self evaluation, self confidence to mention but a few. Please join us on this journey to self discovery.

Choose a great attitude. Choose to win. Choose Kyusa.

Answering The Call To Greatness

Greatness! This is not a function of circumstance but rather a matter of conscious choice! We can become great if we are interested. Greatness is all about producing extraordinary results in all that we do. It is laying down our lives for the true cause we believe in.

The journey of greatness requires us to have the right people in our circles in addition to being humble. This is a process that calls for the “crawl, walk and run” approaches to life. It also necessitates that we move past the fear and take action.

Greatness is also motivated by deeper creative needs and yearnings for excellence; and not fear. It involves giving up something good for something better.

Having a great life also necessitates that we spend lots of our time doing the things we are passionate about. We need to majorly focus on the things we ably do better than other people even when we are not necessarily living in a great environment; all we can do is keep applying the fundamental principles that lead us to greatness.

Jim Collins in his book, Good to great; encourages us to know the right thing, have the discipline to do it and equally stop doing the wrong thing if we are to move from a mediocre life to greatness. He also says that we cannot remain laggards and hope to be great.

At Kyusa, we put great emphasis on building a culture of greatness within our staff and the change agents. We not only produce the best change agents but also work towards bringing out the best from them through our trainings and enriched curriculum. We also invest a lot in bringing them to a point where they discover their seeds of greatness that is their gifts, creative ideas and talents; and walk with them onto the journey of cultivating these seeds.

It is on this note that I encourage us to put all our efforts together towards helping the youth find their voices and encourage them to help others find theirs too.

Let’s live life to its fullest and die empty!

EUPHORIC STRETCH

“The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” – Michelangelo.

We all have experienced the euphoria of a dream come true. That intense, inexplicable, feeling of sheer pleasure, that comes from the actualization of a desire.  Seeing it take tangible shape from the intangible world of thought and imagination. A castle in the air some would call it. A place many of us have gotten to and stayed. Time goes by and we still talk about it as if it happened yesterday only to realize that alas! It’s been ten years since. You have been stuck in that moment which has now become a monument. So how do we keep in this state constantly? I am glad you asked.

Dreams, desires, wishes, goals, you name it, are part of our lives (or supposed to be) whether we are conscious of them or not. We live for them. We even on occasions postpone living in the now for the then. We say things like ‘I shall be happy when …., I shall do that when …., etc. and when D day finally comes, we glory in it and many times fail to move on. The problem is not the fulfillment of the dream or goal. The problem is in failing to move on to something even more exciting. The dream becomes the ceiling instead of the foundation.

After a while, the thing we lived for is no longer as exciting anymore. We wonder why. It is because when we hit our target, we did not move the bar higher. We gloried in the accomplished task and did not stretch to another level. Celebration cannot last forever. The tide will soon ebb and the music will dull and finally stop. The antidote for this is to constantly desire higher. Raise the bar and do not limit yourself. Acquire a new zeal and become unstoppable in your quest for more, bigger, better.

Set goals and dreams that are out of this world. The kinds that make people say you are out of your mind. And yes, with such dreams, you need to be out of your mind to see their reality. Your mind is a limitation. Do not consult with it. See yourself as limitless and you will begin to attract resources that will take you to places of constant euphoria.

At Kyusa, we encourage our Change Agents to dream big and think out of the box.  If you must eat a toad, go for the juiciest of all!

Allegiance to our nation

“Working with the youth to tackle the unemployment problem in Uganda” was the theme for the Uganda national Labor Day celebrations in May 2014.

In the same month, Kyusa was officially registered with the intention of addressing the lack of economic opportunity among out of school youth, a clutch long ignored and isolated by society.

 Failure to advance with school renders one idle and can have a huge impact on their self-esteem if insufficient guidance is given. This has resulted into the increase of the prevalence of crime especially in the urban slums of around Kampala for “An idle mind is a devils workshop”

Having run our pilot class in June 2014, we are committed to empowering the out of school youth through a holistic program comprising eight modules that tackles life skills, entrepreneurship and employability skills. We turn the participant’s mind of hopelessness into the bliss of having to discover oneself and their passion and using the same passion to start up passion driven careers or even develop the competence to secure employment.

Having achieved a 35% increase in impact as compared to our 2015 annual target, the 80% employability among our program graduates gives us the honor of serving our nation through empowering young people and in turn reducing crime and increasing the country’s productivity.

Everyone is indebted to their nation! We are progressively paying our debt in the best way we know how.  We are very positive that reviewing our country’s education system at all levels by fixing life and soft skills into the curriculum will be a major step into defeating the Goliath of unemployment.

Our goal this year is to empower 200 youth with entrepreneurial, life and soft skills. We encourage you to partner with us in exercising our loyalty to our country. Contact us at Kyusa.uganda@gmal.com and together let us partake in “raising generations of change agents”.

For God and My County!

Why Goal Setting?

``A goal is an end toward which you direct specific effort, ‘according to Gary Ryan Blair in his book Goal setting 101.

According to John.C.Maxwell,90% of successful people set goals and 90% of people who feel they have failed did not set goals.’’

We simply can`t go through life without a plan. Our lives are precious and so are our resources that to get the best out of them, we must set goals. Every area of our lives deserves to be planned for in detail.

Goal setting establishes direction for our lives because it forces you to be specific. It also challenges you to grow, boost confidence, identify results and helps you organize resources. Every individual has a pool of resources that should be harnessed to get the best harvest.

Gary Ryan Blair in his book goal setting 101, talks about the ten crucial life dimensions. Our lives encompass all ten dimensions and we ought to set goals under all. The ten dimensions include personal, health, recreation, family, friends, community, career, financial, household and spiritual. Setting goals under each dimension helps you to balance out your resources and achieve more for your life.

The goals set must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time bound) .A goal has to be specific, measurable, achievable,  realistic and have a time line. For example, our change agent Joan Nampijja set a goal to open an account in one of the local banks in June last year. She opened up the account in June as planned and deposits on it money from her restaurant.

Goal setting is a crucial segment at Kyusa and even staff is encouraged to set goals always. Every module taught to change agents is first taught to facilitators .They pass on what they too have experienced because experience is the best teacher.

At Kyusa we believe that journeying without SMART goals is journeying for failure and settling for mediocrity.