Before the Journey Begins
SDSI – DOSE 01
Becoming your best self rarely begins with a dramatic transformation; more often,
it begins with one meaningful idea put into practice.
Why did I write a book on self-improvement and create this program – “A Steady Dose of Self-Improvement”?
Not to sell you on overnight transformation — there isn’t one, and I’ve never believed in the ones sold in the self-help aisle. I wrote this book because if even a single person reads it and becomes who they were truly meant to be, that’s a life genuinely changed. That, to me, has always been reason enough.
My own path into this started long before I called it self-improvement. My mother instilled in me the values of faith and self-belief. My parents taught me the importance of education and the discipline of always striving to be the best version of myself. I believed them — enough that I explored them in full in the Introduction of A Holistic Approach to Self-Improvement. After I’d earned the degrees I wanted, I kept looking for a new jar of knowledge to dip my fingers into.
Along the way, I found myself drawing from teachers I never met in person — Jim Rohn, Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale, and many others whose ideas reached me through books, recordings, and screens exactly when I needed them. I came to think of them as professors in what I call my “Virtual University” — a classroom without walls.
Jim Rohn said it plainly: “Those who seek a better life must first become a better person.” Everything in the chapters ahead stands on that one sentence. Self-improvement, done right, isn’t a single skill or habit fixed in isolation. It touches your beliefs, your abilities, and your daily practices — all at once, all connected.
If you’ve ever doubted yourself, felt overwhelmed by your circumstances, or questioned whether you have what it takes to reach your goals, I want you to know something plainly: you have the capacity to grow, to improve, and to become the best version of yourself. Your journey doesn’t need to begin when everything is perfect. It begins the moment you decide to take the first step.
Pause and Reflect
What part of yourself or your life do you most sincerely want to improve, and why does it matter to you now?
One Step Forward
Identify one area of your life that you want to improve. Write down one small but meaningful action that can mark the beginning of that change.
Explored in full in the Introduction of A Holistic Approach to Self-Improvement.
Better Self… Better Life… Better Nation.
A Steady Dose of Self-Improvement
As Jim Rohn said, “Those who seek a better life must first become a better person.” You don’t need a magic pill to become a better person. That pill does not exist anyway. What you need is “A Steady Dose of Self-Improvement.”
“A Steady Dose of Self-Improvement (SDSI)” is a continuing educational and reflective series. My objective in launching this project is to present, through concise and accessible installments, the central ideas of my book, A Holistic Approach to Self-Improvement: A Practical Guide to Becoming Your Best Self.
What’s For Dinner
(A Declamation Piece)
A Note Before the Piece
I wrote pieces like this once for young voices that weren’t my own — contestants I coached, trained, and sent to the stage carrying words I’d written for them. There was no greater satisfaction than hearing them reach the final line and say the title, and then my name, before the room. Those days shaped how I write even now: always for a voice, always for a stage, always for someone who will make the words theirs the moment they say them aloud.
“What’s For Dinner” continues that tradition — written in the spirit of BULPRISA’s declamation seasons, for whoever is bold enough to stand up, look their audience in the eye, and ask the question this piece asks.
Through this piece, I want to appeal to my countrymen with one question: Does taking sides in our country’s political upheavals bring food to your table?
_____
Same fight. Different night. Different bill, different senator, different hashtag — same two people, standing in the same kitchen, screaming across the same table I do my homework on.
“You still support that? After everything?”
“At least my side isn’t stealing us blind!”
“Your side wrote the book on stealing!”
I stood between them tonight. Again. Like I always do. But tonight, for the first time, I didn’t just stand there.
I picked up the rice pot — still half full, still warm — and I put it down on the table, hard enough that it rattled the plates.
“Is this what we’re eating tonight?” I said. “Or are we eating your outrage instead? Because I’m hungry, and outrage doesn’t have any calories.”
They both looked at me like I’d slapped them.
Good.
Do you want to know what I know about politics? I know plenty. Don’t mistake my anger for ignorance. I know what Papa’s senator promised, and I know he hasn’t delivered half of it. I know what Mama’s congressman voted for, and I know who paid for that vote. I’ve read the same news both of you scream about. I’ve seen the same corruption — on both sides, in every color, behind every podium. You want to know my political position? Here it is: everyone up there is stealing from us. Every single one. The only difference is which thief you’ve decided to defend like he’s family — which side has enough power to bury the other.
Meanwhile, your actual family is standing right here. Getting smaller every night.
Do you remember Lola’s wake? Six months ago? I do. I remember it because it’s the last time I saw both of you in the same room and not fighting — because for one week, grief was louder than politics. Then the week ended, and you went right back to it. Over her own casket, practically. I heard you, Papa, bring up the drug war while we were still folding the funeral programs. I heard you, Mama, answer back with the same three names you always bring up. Lola wasn’t even buried yet.
You want to know what I lost that week? Not just Lola. I lost the only proof I had that you two still remember how to be quiet together.
Last month, tuition was due. You know this. I know you know this, because I heard you both say, separately, on separate nights, that money was tight. And yet — Papa, you drove four hours to a rally. Gas money, food, a shirt with a name on it that isn’t ours. Mama, you spent six hundred pesos boosting a post. Six hundred pesos. That’s my project money for next week. That’s food for three days. That’s not a small thing to me, even if it’s small enough for you both to forget by morning.
Tell me — what did that rally buy us? What did that post feed us? Did the senator you cheered for pay our electric bill? Did the congressman you defended send rice to this house? No. He didn’t. He doesn’t know we exist. He doesn’t know my name. But you’ll fight for him like he’s blood, and fight against each other like you’re not.
I am so tired of being the only adult in this house.
I am tired of choosing which parent to sit next to at dinner based on who’s less likely to bring up politics tonight.
I am tired of loving two people who love their political tribes more than they love being married to each other.
So here is what I need from both of you — not a compromise, not a ceasefire, not “let’s agree to disagree.” I need you to look at this table. Look at what’s on it. Or what isn’t. And ask yourselves — what has taking sides ever once put on this table?
Nothing. It has cost us. It has never once fed us.
So choose a side tonight, if you must. Choose this family’s side. Because that’s the only side that’s ever once needed you to show up.
How Colonialism Shaped the Filipino Character
Ask a hundred Filipinos what makes a Filipino a Filipino, and you will likely get a hundred different answers — hospitality, resilience, family, faith, humor, an uncanny gift for finding joy in hardship. Ask a hundred more, and darker answers will surface too: a fatalism that shrugs at misfortune, a habit of measuring themselves against foreigners and coming up short in their own eyes, a suspicion of the next province that borders on hostility. Both sets of answers are true. Neither tells the whole story on its own.
This four-part essay is an attempt to tell that fuller story — not by cataloging Filipino traits as though they simply exist, the way eye color or height exists, but by asking where they came from. A people’s character is not accidental. It is built, layer upon layer, from the specific things that happen to them over specific centuries, under specific rulers. For the Filipino, those centuries were largely colonial ones: 333 years under Spain, nearly half a century more under the United States. To understand the Filipino today without reckoning with those years is to admire a house’s furniture while ignoring the foundation on which it was built.
This essay draws on historical record as much as personal reflection — the documented mechanisms of colonial administration alongside the lived, inherited patterns still visible in Filipino life today. Where the two meet is where this essay lives.
Part One lays that foundation, tracing the Filipino from a people already possessed of their own culture and governance before any galleon arrived, through the long violence of Spanish rule, to the betrayal that followed when a nation Filipinos had mistaken for an ally simply became their next colonizer.
Part Two turns to what survived — and what may have even been strengthened — through all of it: the hospitality, the resilience, the family loyalty and communal spirit that colonization tested but did not break.
Part Three turns to the cost — the fatalism, the regionalism, the colonial mentality that took root during those same centuries, planted deliberately by rulers who profited from a people divided against themselves and unsure of their own worth.
Part Four brings both halves together, arguing that the strength and the wound were never separate stories. They came from the same three hundred years, visited on the same people, and they live on, side by side, in the same national character today.
The writer does not pretend to have the final word on Filipino identity — no single essay could. But for a people whose history has too often been written by outsiders, and too rarely examined by themselves, even an incomplete reckoning is worth attempting. As you read what follows, you might find it useful to ask the same questions of your own family, your own province, your own habits of thought — because the history in these four parts is not abstract. It is, in some quiet way, still writing itself through each of us.
Understanding the wound is the first task. What a Filipino chooses to do with that understanding — for himself, his family, his country — is a separate reckoning, for another time. But understanding why we are the way we are remains the first step toward deliberately deciding who we choose to become next.
Betting on Ourselves
I have a section on my website that I christened “Road to Self-Improvement.” That section was born of my advocacy for self-improvement — and it is where the idea of writing a book on the subject first took shape. But the advocacy itself is older than the website, older than the book. It started years ago, when a friend asked me a simple question: what is the best national development framework for the Philippines?
I told him this — for the Philippines to develop as a nation, Filipinos need to abandon the mindset that a messiah will come to save our country from the socio-political and economic quicksand where we are currently drowning. We think we can pin our hopes for a better future, a better life, on a leader or politician we believe in and support — most of the time, blindly. And yet whoever we elect to the seats of the Executive and Legislative branches has consistently failed to move the needle of progress and peace.
So what, then, is the framework? I believe it begins smaller than any election, smaller than any administration — it begins with the individual. If every Filipino embraces self-improvement and pursues their full potential, they can grow in every aspect of life: mind, character, discipline, livelihood, health. When that happens, they succeed — and with that success comes the capacity to lift not only themselves, but the families they belong to. When every Filipino and every family commit, simply and consistently, to becoming better, imagine what their community becomes. And if every community in our towns, cities, and provinces reflects that same commitment, we will have built — not waited for, not voted for, but built — a stronger Philippine society. A stronger Filipino nation.
It is time for Filipinos to abandon the mindset that we can pin our hopes on a strong politician or leader — a messiah, a savior. Every Filipino should pin their hopes on themselves. We must bet on ourselves, not on someone who promises us the moon and the stars during an election. Betting on a leader to single-handedly bring our nation to paradise is like betting on a lottery with 45 numbers to choose from — your odds of winning are 1 in more than 8,000,000. It’s like fishing for one single fish in a fishing area the size of the entire Pacific Ocean.
One need not look far for proof. As I write this, the nation watches its vice president stand trial for corruption and misuse of public funds, while senators allied with one camp or another are arrested, disappear, or resurface depending on which side of a political feud they happen to stand. Officials once inseparable allies now accuse each other of the very crimes they once campaigned to eradicate together. This is not an aberration — it is the lottery working exactly as it always has: fortunes made and unmade not by the merit of public service, but by the shifting arithmetic of political alliances. Whoever wins this particular round of the game, the game itself remains what it has always been — a gamble the ordinary Filipino never gets to place a real bet in, only to watch.
Betting on ourselves, on the other hand, is not a bet on chance at all — it is a commitment to effort, and effort is not drawn from a bin of eight million balls where luck alone decides the outcome. When a Filipino bets on a leader, he marks a ballot once, then waits — powerless, passive — for a stranger’s decisions to shape his future. When a Filipino bets on himself, there is no waiting and no ballot box; there is only the next skill learned, the next hour of work invested, the next discipline practiced. These are not draws from a lottery machine — they are deposits, and, like any deposit made consistently, they compound. A leader may fail to deliver even after winning every vote in his favor; a Filipino who invests in his own competence, character, and resilience cannot be defrauded of that investment by any politician, any administration, or any election cycle.
This is exactly the mechanism by which one Filipino’s discipline becomes a family’s stability, a family’s stability becomes a community’s strength, and a community’s strength becomes a nation’s foundation. No leader can legislate that chain into existence. No election can manufacture it overnight. It has to be built — person by person, family by family, town by town — and the beauty of it is that, unlike the lottery of politics, every single one of us holds a winning ticket the moment we decide to act on it.
This is the difference between hoping for a miracle and building one. It is why I stopped asking, years ago, who will save our nation — and started asking instead what I myself was willing to build. That question became a website section. It became years of writing. It eventually became a book. But long before it became any of those things, it was simply a decision — the same decision I believe every Filipino is capable of making, the same decision that, multiplied across a hundred million of us, could move the needle that a hundred years of elections never did.
We do not need a messiah. We need each other, choosing, one by one, to bet on ourselves.
A Holistic Approach To Self-Improvement
Self-improvement is often treated as a collection of isolated goals—building confidence, learning new skills, developing better habits, or becoming more disciplined. But lasting transformation requires something more. It requires a holistic approach.
This book presents a practical framework that brings together the essential dimensions of personal growth into one integrated system. Rather than focusing on a single aspect of development, it shows how genuine and lasting change occurs when your beliefs, abilities, habits, and actions work together.
Through this book, you will discover how to:
• Build a strong value system that shapes your character and guides your decisions.
• Develop the competencies needed to navigate life’s personal and professional challenges.
• Establish a habit scheme that transforms good intentions into consistent action.
• Cultivate the self-discipline that binds every element into a sustainable way of life.
• Pursue lasting health, success, happiness, and fulfillment through balanced personal growth.
Grounded in research yet written in a clear and practical style, this book combines timeless principles, scientific insights, reflective exercises, self-assessments, and real-life examples to help you understand not only what to improve, but how meaningful transformation actually happens.
Whether you are a student, educator, professional, leader, entrepreneur, or simply someone seeking a more purposeful life, A Holistic Approach to Self-Improvement offers a complete roadmap for becoming your best self—one intentional step at a time.
Grow with purpose. Live with meaning.
Lessons on Perspective
I have a friend who is regularly mistaken for me. We teach at the same university, share a similar build and height, and have the same rounded face — though I have a more defined nose and he has fairer skin. One day, visibly bemused, he asked me, “Why would they think I am you? Do I look as old as you?” I paused, smiled, and replied, “No. I look as young and handsome as you.” He laughed. And in that small exchange, I noticed something larger than the joke: the same mix-up, the same mistaken identity, had produced two completely different reactions in two different men. He heard an insult about age. I heard a compliment about my looks. Nothing about the situation had changed. Only the lens through which each of us chose to receive it.
That, I think, is the simplest definition of perspective — not what happens to you, but the angle from which you decide to look at what happens to you. Two people can stand at the same window on the same morning. One sees the smudge on the glass. The other sees the sun rising behind it. Neither is wrong, exactly. But one view will serve the viewer far better than the other.
I was reminded of this again in a conversation with a colleague, an expat teacher like me, who was frustrated about his salary. He told me, with some bitterness, that a truck driver back in his home country earned more in a year than he did. I listened, then asked him to slow down and look at the bigger picture. How many hours did that truck driver work to earn that figure? What were the physical demands of long-haul driving, year after year? And what about our own schedule — the fact that, as university teachers, we are paid in full through both winter and summer breaks, which together amount to five months of the year? During those five months, our only real obligations are a handful of meetings at the start and end of each semester. The rest of the time is simply ours.
When he ran the numbers on his actual hourly rate, his frustration lost its footing. He was earning more per hour than the truck driver, under incomparably gentler conditions. His complaint had been built on a true fact — the raw annual figure — but an incomplete picture. He was not wrong about the number. He was wrong about what the number meant because he had left out everything around it.
This is the most common failure of perspective, and the most forgivable one. We are not lying to ourselves on purpose. We simply stop looking before we have gathered the whole view. The fix is almost always the same: pause, and ask what else belongs in the frame.
But there is a second, less innocent failure of perspective, and a different colleague handed me a clear example of it. He told me, flatly, that he considered motivational quotes to be nonsense. To prove his point, he gestured at a small bulletin board bearing a quote that read, “Whatever you are, be good at it.” Then he delivered what he clearly believed was the knockout line: “So if you are a rapist, be a good rapist.”
I told him he had chosen the worst possible illustration he could have picked. More importantly, his example revealed the lens through which he had chosen to interpret the quote. You cannot be good at doing something that is, by its nature, an act of harm. Goodness and harm are not two settings on the same dial; one cancels the very premise of the other. I asked him the obvious question: Why a rapist, of all the things a person could be? Why not a teacher? A father? A leader? Each of those would have proven the quote’s point beautifully — that excellence, applied to a worthy role, elevates both the role and the person in it. Instead, he reached for the most grotesque example available, not because it was the most honest one, but because it was the most useful one for the argument he had already decided to win.
That is the difference between an incomplete perspective and a distorted one. My colleague with the salary complaint was missing pieces of the picture, but he was not hiding from the truth — he simply hadn’t gone looking for it yet, and once he did, he changed his mind. The man at the bulletin board was doing something else entirely. He was not missing information. He was selecting the most damaging frame available and presenting it as the obvious one, so that the quote — and perhaps optimism itself — would look foolish by comparison. One man’s perspective needed completing. The other man’s perspective needed correcting.
I think about these three exchanges together because they map out the territory so well. The mistaken-identity story is perspective in its lightest form — the same fact, received through two different temperaments, producing two different emotional outcomes, both harmless. The truck driver story is perspective in its most repairable form — a real grievance, resting on a partial view, that dissolves the moment the missing pieces are added back in. And the bulletin board story is perspective at its most dangerous — not an honest gap in the picture, but a deliberate choice of the worst possible angle, used to discredit something that did not deserve it.
Obi-Wan Kenobi was right when he said that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. But that is not an excuse to pick whichever point of view is most convenient, most cynical, or most self-serving. It is an invitation to be honest about which direction you are choosing to look — and deliberate enough to ask whether you have actually seen the whole field before you decide what it means.
Perspective, in the end, is not something that happens to us. It is something we choose, conversation by conversation, frame by frame. The only real question is whether we are choosing it carefully — or just reaching for whichever lens lets us win the argument we already wanted to have.
M.A.D. LIGAYA
M.A.D. L I G A Y A 