Finding peace so your intuition faces north like a compass is incredibly powerful

Aspiring business leaders, students and executives got expert lessons in the art of leadership and goal setting from two popular life coaches-turned-authors at the Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF 2023), as Kuwaiti content creator Saad Alrefaei and Irish-born keynote speaker Vivian James Rigney spoke at length about self-help in an ever-changing world.

Saad Alrefaei, who’s written six books focused on behavioural therapies to help achieve personal milestones, said: “It’s important to live life the right way. The idea of depending on good luck doesn’t work because when you fall, you fall down very quickly – in the blink of an eye.”

Refaei then encouraged the roomful of listeners to dig deep into themselves for motivation rather than trusting others, including life coaches, blindly. “Good counsel is important, but what you really need are good angels that help you up the right path. The inner drive should come from within because after all only you know yourself the best. Set goals because you develop them to mitigate your efforts,” he said.

Meanwhile Rigney, the President and CEO of Inside Us LLC, an executive coaching consultancy, operating throughout five continents, spoke about effectively cutting out ‘noises’ that distract. “We tend to be influenced so much by emotion, by what’s happening around us. We care too much about what other people think of us, and we forget. But we must listen to our intuition, because our intuition is our greatest gift. And when our peace is there, the intuition faces north like a compass, and it’s incredibly powerful,” he said.

Talking about how to achieve personal milestones, Rigney offered a three-point formula. “The first thing is clarity. It’s really understanding the meaning of that goal. Because if you don’t, if the meaning of the goal is not clear to you, it’s not going to be clear to other people. The second thing is to never underestimate the power of subtraction, meaning we tend to choose way too many goals, lists of goals, all these aspirations, all these ideas. And in the real world, focus is incredibly important. The third tip is this idea of measuring progress,” said Rigney, who signed copies of his book following the session.

The 2022 book is a compelling and often harrowing true account of summiting Everest and one that offers, in his own words, a unique window into lessons on leadership and what it takes to succeed in any circumstance.