The beliefs that we hold are just patterns that we’ve learned and developed over the years. There are a number of things throughout our lives that play a role in shaping our beliefs. Some of these might be supporting and nurturing, while others might be roadblocks on our paths to achieving happiness. Positive affirmations are a great way to change the barriers into supportive and encouraging truths. You can use positive affirmations to keep you moving forward. Here are four useful tips for writing positive affirmations that work.
Write Down Your Ideas
You need to take the time to determine what areas of your life you want to improve. Write down your ideas on how you would like your life to look and areas that you want to improve. After you’ve written down your thoughts, take a look at each of them and write down a few positive statements that reflect your vision for your future life.
Use the Present Tense
When you write down your affirmations, you want to be sure to write them in the present tense. Write them down as though you are experiencing everything you desire right now. You want to avoid using words like, within the next two months. . . because every time you use this affirmation you are saying to yourself and the universe that you are still two months away from achieving your goal. After you use this affirmation for one month, you will still be saying, within two months, which tells the universe and your mind that you haven’t gotten any closer to achieving your goals.
Focus on What You Want
You need to write your affirmations in a way that forces them to focus on what you want in life, rather than what you are trying to eliminate or avoid in your life. For example, rather than writing I’m not addicted to alcohol, a better option would be to write something like, I am completely free from alcohol. If you aren’t sure about how to write an affirmation in the positive, then you can imagine that you’ve already accomplished whatever it is that you want to achieve and describe yourself in that positive light.
Writing positive affirmations is both an empowering and exciting experience. Learn how to enjoy the process and try not to get caught up in the details of what you’re writing. Have fun with the process and try to relax.
Feel Gratitude in Challenging Times, The Top 5 Ways.
Life is unpredictable and often very challenging. So learning how to feel gratitude in challenging times takes some practice. Each day we’re faced with obstacles that test our ability to cope well with difficulties. It’s easy to get angry, scared, or resentful and forget about gratitude for the good things in our life. If we don’t cherish and feel grateful for the good things, how can we justify wanting more of them?
Consider these easy gratitude practices when you need support in challenging times:
1. Include an act of kindness in your day.
When we’re going through a stressful or difficult period in our life, we get so self-centered and focused on self-pity that we rarely stop to think about others. This is precisely why we need to break away from this negative mindset by doing something kind.
Who is the most deserving of my simple act of kindness today? And who has shown me support and love lately? Or what can I do to honor their support and affection?
By being kind and generous to others, you create a greater sense of connection that generates a more positive outlook on life. You feel better about yourself.
When things don’t go your way and you feel like a victim of life, it can be extremely hard to feel grateful and notice things to be thankful for. Yet, there are plenty of small joys around you even on the most difficult of days. You can notice them by shifting the point of your focus.
What kind of blessings have I received lately? How can I show my gratitude for those blessings? Is there someone who deserves a thank you note from me?
Being able to say thank you for the small things helps you in shifting your focus from life’s challenges to life’s pleasures. This way, your mind expands and supports you in finding solutions and ways to get unstuck and move forward.
3. Re-frame your negativity.
Challenging times bring on lots of negativity. If you struggle for any reason, you will likely start to sabotage yourself by creating sadness, falling into despair, evoking regrets, and generating tons of unproductive negative thoughts.
Changing your perspective is the best way to re-frame negativity. Remember that everything in life comes in the form of duality. Nothing is purely good or bad. Look at the goodness and benefits in your current struggles and try to learn from them.
Negative thoughts only have the power to hurt you if you let them.
4. Keep a gratitude journal.
This is likely the most popular gratitude practice. It comes with a variety of benefits, including better quality sleep, increased immunity, greater levels of resilience, and improved mood. All these benefits are needed when you’re going through a tough time in life.
To start a gratitude journal all you need is a few moments of undisturbed time, willingness to reflect, and a way to capture your thoughts (notebook, phone, laptop). You can start by reflecting on the following questions:
What experiences in my life can I be grateful for? And what happened lately that makes me feel thankful? Or what opportunities do I have today? In addition, what have the significant others in my life done that I am grateful for?
The practice of loving-kindness meditation is designed to emphasize the practitioner’s strength and capacity to feel unconditional gratitude. Besides opening your heart to appreciation, this tool is great for building lasting compassion towards yourself and others. Compassion is crucial if you’re looking to reduce stress and overcome obstacles in your life.
Loving-kindness meditation serves as a tool for creating unconditional, inclusive love that leads to true wisdom. The love created this way has no conditions and it doesn’t need to be deserved in any way. Everyone struggles, gets stuck, and experiences difficulty. Next time you find yourself having a tough time, remember that crisis is also a wonderful growth opportunity. Embrace the challenge, enrich it with gratitude, and you’ll experience genuine growth.
I hope that with practice these tips will help you experience gratitude in challenging times.
You may not know this but giving a compliment requires you to frame your words. Have you had someone who doesn’t know how to take a compliment or someone who doesn’t know how to receive a genuine compliment? This was a great article with really helpful advice on how to make a compliment land the way you intended. It requires some emotional intelligence and structure. Compliments given the right way may just change someone’s world. “you might not know this but…”
So consider Bill Murphy’s examples below;
“You might not know this, but people really appreciate how calm you can be in a crisis.”
“I’m not sure if you appreciated your impact, but your comments in the meeting last week reassured the whole team.”
“I hope you didn’t think you were alone; when you asked that question in class, you spoke for everyone.”
“You’re never going to believe this, but I took your advice and it worked out.”
“Would it surprise you to know how much the newer people on the team talk about you as a role model?”
Emotional intelligence workshops with horses. Sounds like a crazy idea for leadership but it works. Now that emotional intelligence is an essential skill in leadership and the most sought after skill. It is something we all need to learn and master to become effective leaders.
What is emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is simply put the ability to control your emotions and others in the present moment. It sounds simple but has a number of key factors. According to Daniel Goleman,
Self-awareness.
Self-regulation.
Motivation.
Empathy.
Social skills.
Why is it important?
Developing emotional intelligence is the one factor that will make you successful in almost every area of your life. At a professional level is the one factor that sets high performing leaders above others. At a personal level, it means your relationships around you will feel more connected. Allows for improved communication skills and increases your resilience. It turns out it is one of the most important life skills and increases your chances of success in every area of your life.
Can it be learnt?
Emotional intelligence is something you can learn. However, I believe it is something you need to experience it to understand it. Staying curious and responding appropriately to what is happening around you. Emotional intelligence is a skill that is challenging to learn from a book. Yes, you can get an understanding of the theory but until you practice it in real life you don’t know how to use it. It is a bit like trying to be a bodybuilder from a textbook. You can learn the theory but unless you lift the weights and practice you can’t develop those muscles.
Why does it matter to leadership?
Leaders without emotional intelligence can be very costly to any organisation.
All of us at some points in our career have worked for a manager we didn’t like and/or didn’t like us. We may have felt that they were unreasonable, not fair or at the extreme end they were a bully. These are all feelings of no connection or low emotional intelligence.
Leaders and managers with high emotional intelligence generally will have staff that want to come to work. They will have staff that will often feel heard and respected. A team that is motivated with less technical abilities will always outperform a highly skilled team going through the motions. So if this is the case why is emotional intelligence not taught?
We have all read the leadership textbooks talking through different models of leadership. As a leader, your leadership style should move change and respond to what is happening around you. If you only have one style you are still in the manager phase and each skill takes time to learn and develop.
There are many documented styles of leadership;
Autocratic – commander style
Bureaucratic – administrator style
Charismatic – the charmer
Democratic – the motivator
Laissez-Faire – the delegator
Servant –the steward
Transactional – the standardiser
Transformational – the inspirer
A leader who has developed their emotional intelligence will be able to transition through many different types of leadership style. They move and flex with the situation and may actually manage each person in their team with a different technique.
I accidentally found out through training horses that I was strengthening and developing my emotional intelligence in all aspects of my life. I found that incredible horse trainers who were rehabilitating troubled horses all had high levels of emotional intelligence. It was their empathy, self-regulation, and incredible awareness level. It almost felt like a heightened sense. This started my curiosity and openness to explore why it felt better. I felt like I was being genuine with relationships and with my leadership. It was a light bulb moment and realised I can also help others to understand and engage with it.
You don’t need to be a horse person to gain something from the workshops. It is made for people who have little to no experience with horses, and even those who have lots of experience will also gain some personal insights.
If sounds like something you might want to try then get in touch
Has anyone told you not to do something or not to behave a certain way and that is the one thing you are focusing on? Dieting is a great example for me. Don’t eat sugar its bad for you. So I am thinking all day about a packet of lollies and how I am not allowed to eat it. Guess what the first thing is I grab for when I am tired. Or currently, because we are not allowed to travel, so I am thinking about all the amazing destinations and things I am missing out on. I call it my FOMO (my fear of missing out). COVID is certainly testing my FOMO.
I had my Aha! moment teaching someone to ride on the weekend and they were focusing on “the don’t”. So when I asked “what are you thinking about?” and they responded, “I am thinking about not using my spurs”. They could do that for about 6 or 7 strides and then they would be doing the precise thing that they were trying not to do. “So, try replacing your don’t with a do. Let’s try thinking about using our calf and upper thigh”. It worked.
My inspiration came from listening to two podcasts only days apart about this exact thing from two different horsemen telling the exact same story just from their own point of view. Warwick Schiller’s Performance Horsemanship and Double Dan Horsemanship told the story of the blue tree. Don’t think about the Blue Tree – anyway the only thing you think about is the blue tree. Highly recommend both of their podcasts, great storytellers.
Do…
When you fill your mind with what you want and the stronger you can make the visual the easier it is to do. Try a vision and fill in the feelings, sights, sounds, and smells. The clearer the image the easier it is to create that end result. That is why sports psychologists talk about the visuals and a clear focus. Visualise the ball going through the hoop no net. If it works for elite athletes why can’t it work for you or me?
Our brains are wired to do only one thing at a time and when we create a mental picture they are brilliant at filling in the blanks and making it happen.
So I am going to practice focusing on what I want. I am going to try and replace my don’ts with my do’s.
