About Dr Shadrick Mazaza

Dr Mazaza is a specialist physician in Family Medicine. He obtained his medical degree at Victoria Manchester University of Manchester in England where he commenced specialist training in internal medicine before coming to the University of Cape Town, Groote Schuur Hospital. Upon completing his specialist training time, he began private practice in family medicine and obtaining a Masters Degree in family medicine.

As a specialist family medicine physician, Dr Shadrick Mazaza has dedicated his life to studying and researching personal effectiveness and advancement of human potential, combining his depth in medical science with his vast exploration in physical sciences and the wisdom traditions.

So, what is ‘Personal Transformation? Research in human consciousness, human potential, and developmental psychology has shown that there are levels of awareness and that each individual human being is at some level of awareness.

Your degree of awareness determines your experience of life and your worldview. No real change in your life can occur while you remain at the same level of awareness. Personal transformation is moving to another level of awareness and to go with it a new worldview and different experience of life. Think of it like walking up Lion’s Head– you get different views of Cape Town as you climb.

Through personal transformation, you get to know for certain you are the author, director and producer of the movie you call “your life”. Your experience of life is not determined by material things, events or people out there. Knowing this is liberation, freedom and true empowerment.

Personal Transformation help you reach your potential as an all-rounder, and as ‘William Glaser’ in his ‘Choice Theory’ describes fully explore your five basic human needs of Survival, Freedom, Power (and Recognition), Love (and Belonging) and Fun

All forms of human behaviour are geared towards meeting these basic needs. Our values – the things that are important to us (not just ethical or moral), are what we use to seek things and people that enable us to satisfy these needs. Whatever ranks highest in our hierarchy of values is what we perceive will most efficiently satisfy our basic needs.

A few decades ago, work was for most professional people aimed at satisfying our most basic need – survival. We worked to ensure we had food, clothing and shelter to guarantee our survival. Once people found a job that guaranteed this, they were quite happy to look no further and stayed there until retirement waiting to reap the benefits of a pension. The other four “psychological” human needs were not pursued in our vocational contexts.

Today more and more professional people have their survival needs more than taken care of and with the corresponding rise in our levels of awareness, we are aware and able to pursue our other needs. It is for this reason that for professional people above a certain income bracket, money is not a motivator as it is in low-income earners. Autonomy and being able to exercise freedom, power, a sense of belonging and fun (in the form of continual learning and personal growth), are big motivators.

Pursuing and excelling in other vocational fields provides people with the expansion in their level of awareness with continual learning and personal growth. They become broad in their thinking and lead more integral lives. They gain tremendous fulfilment from working and playing hard.

African Consciousness Institute (ACI) was formed out of this realization that the continental transformational agenda has to begin with personal transformation of Africans. The Institute is an educational-cultural institution dedicated to the true empowerment of Africans by instilling self-knowledge, self-worth, self-esteem and self-confidence to co-create the Africa they desire.

ACI programmes pursue two main objectives:

• Personal and societal transformation programmes: Transformations for personal growth and maximization of potential. This is a prerequisite for the maximization of Africa’s potential growth and development.
• Cultivating a unitary African consciousness through transformative conversations, cultural and media events.