Here are five tips for successful affirmations that can take you to the next level. Affirmations can be an incredibly powerful tool to help you manifest all your desires. However, if they aren’t done correctly, they can be a complete waste of time. The key to finding success with your positive affirmations is to have an unshakeable confidence that what you are stating will happen.
Tip #1 – Be Specific
The more detail you can include in your positive affirmations the more real it will become, and the more believable it is. Just like when you are setting your goals, you need to inform your Reticular Activating System what it is you want to achieve. You need to aim to be as specific as possible. When you can be specific with your affirmations, they can provide you with the motivation and opportunity to get everything you desire.
Tip #2 – Use Active Visualization
It isn’t enough to merely read your affirmations off of a card and then quickly move onto the next one. You have to visualize the affirmations. You have to read each affirmation and then spend a few minutes imagining what it will be like when the statement is achieved. Think about what you will see, what you will hear, what smells you’ll experience, and what feelings you’ll have about the achievement.
Tip #3 – Utilize Audio Motivation
Music can be a potent tool to use with your affirmations. When you read your affirmations, consider listening to some motivational, stirring, or upbeat music. Listening to music can help to stir up the feelings inside you. It is your feelings that generate the internal vibrations that will ultimately move you closer to your desires.
Tip #4 – Use Images
Take the time to overlay your affirmations over some appropriate background pictures. If you aren’t skilled in Photoshop, you can just look at relevant images after you’ve read your statements out loud. When you look at images that are congruent with your affirmations, it will generate some excitement. This excitement will get your vibrating in a positive way that will help you attract your desired outcome.
Tip #5 – Believe That They’ve Already Been Achieved
You always want to state your affirmations in the present tense. For example, instead of saying, “I will lose weight by the end of the month,” say “I’ve reached my ideal weight with ease.” With the Law of Attraction if you say “I want to lose weight,” it hears the words “I want” and will leave you in a constant state of wanting.
Affirmations can work for you when done correctly. Consider these tips when you’re creating your affirmations to be successful and manifest all your life’s desires.
Practicing gratitude at work may require taking some risks, but the results are worth it.
If you like how gratitude makes you feel, you might want to bring those effects with you to work. Some big companies are experimenting with the idea. Recent studies show that employee appreciation programs can increase team spirit, morale, and productivity.
On the other hand, the workplace can be a difficult environment for cultivating gratitude. How can thankfulness coexist with competition and ambition? Do you feel comfortable expressing emotions in front of your colleagues?
Start with these ideas that will help you find more opportunities to count your blessings and say thank you at work.
Cultivating Gratitude on Your Own
You control your attitude and experiences. Regardless of your job position or industry, there are many things you can do to feel more grateful.
Try these strategies:
Pay attention. Appreciating your coworkers starts with getting to know them. Make time for small talk and follow up to see how things turn out when they have a sick child or they’re buying a new house.
Remember special occasions. Congratulate others on birthdays and work anniversaries. Wish your colleagues a Merry Christmas or Happy Diwali.
Communicate in person. Thanking others in person makes a deeper impression than sending an email. Drop by their office or invite them out to lunch.
Be inclusive. Reach out to employees who tend to be less visible. Acknowledge the cleaning crew and think about how their efforts make your life more pleasant.
Personalize your approach. Each of us has our own preferences for how we like to be thanked. You may enjoy public praise while your colleague would rather receive a pat on the back in private or be offered an afternoon off.
Keep a journal. If you’re struggling to come up with something nice to say, try writing down your positive experiences as they happen. You can use a notebook or an app on your phone.
Bring in treats. Give your office mates donuts or chips and salsa. Sharing food is one way to develop relationships.
Cultivating Gratitude with Your Colleagues
Help your employer encourage a culture of gratitude. Do your part to help yourself and others feel more appreciated.
Use these techniques to encourage gratitude at work:
Build a website. Go public with your gratitude. Ask your boss about creating a website page or bulletin board to post messages of appreciation.
Speak up at meetings. Open or close staff meetings by inviting the team to thank anyone who made a special contribution recently. Another helpful item for the agenda might be a few minutes to meditate about gratitude or empathy.
Throw parties. Get together to celebrate milestones like completing a major project or landing a new client. Recognize the individual and combined efforts that go into each success. Make a toast or hand out awards.
Exchange gifts. Thoughtful gifts can express gratitude even if your budget is limited. Give each team member a little something. Make it a habit to return from vacations and business trips with a box of salt water taffy from the Jersey shore or chocolates from Belgium.
Share support. The most authentic and meaningful way to show gratitude may be to help your coworkers out on a consistent basis. Lend a hand when someone is facing a tight deadline. Volunteer to cover their tasks while they take a mental health day.
Focus on the positive aspects of your job and let your coworkers know how they brighten up your working life. Experiencing more gratitude at work will increase your job satisfaction and may even help you to advance in your career.
Here’s how to create positive affirmations that you can believe in and achieve all your life’s greatest desires. Whether you believe it or not, you can attract anything in your life that you give attention to, because like attracts like. Positive affirmations are a powerful tool that can make the opposite happen. By believing in a thought or sentence and repeating it to yourself regularly, you have the power to attract more positivity to your life.
Your words are incredibly powerful, and when done correctly, positive affirmations can be an impactful tool that will help you find the power to accomplish things that you didn’t think was possible. However, they only work if you believe them.
Identify What You Want
To get started writing a positive affirmation for your life, you have to think about what you really want. Think about what would make your life happier and write those thoughts down. The essential part of creating positive affirmations is ensuring that you are completely clear about what you want without worrying about the when or the how.
List the Attributes You’ll Need
When you’ve identified what you want, the next step is determining the attributes that you’ll need to achieve your goal. You should list between four and six things. You attributes are the things that you need to be, rather than the things that you need to do. Once you’ve written these out, circle a few that you believe to be the most essential attributes that you will need to embody to reach your goal.
Write Your Affirmation
Once you have your desires and attributes written down, it’s time to create your affirmation. You want to create a statement that is between one and two sentences, and that states the goal and attributes in a positive and empowering way. This can be challenging, so you should write down some ideas as they come to you and repeat them out loud.
Practice Your New Affirmation
Now that you’ve created an affirmation, it’s time to practice it and repeat it often. You want to be sure to repeat your affirmations every day. To help you remember to say your statements you set a reminder on your phone, you can set your phone’s background to a picture of your affirmation, so you see it every time you use your phone, or you can put them on Post-Its and place them around your home or office. Do whatever works for you.
Affirmations are incredibly helpful in helping you achieve your desires as long as you do them correctly. You have the power to use your mind to create the future you desire.
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.
A Time Marker is how we remember and mark the passing of time. This has shifted for so many of us in 2020. Was 2020 fast or slow? I really can’t say. I was reflecting with a group of leaders on 2020 and talking about Time Markers. When I got a lot of puzzled looks I thought I should explain myself.
What is a Time Marker?
A Time Marker is an event or something that happens to us, that makes it easy for us to remember that moment in time. Our rites and rituals are important Time Markers. If you remember moments in your childhood they are often around significant events. Do you remember the graduation ceremony from school? Do you remember a birthday party? Your first kiss? Your first concert? A wedding? These rites and rituals of how we celebrate and mark time create moments for us to reflect on the passing of time.
Why are Time Markers Important?
They are opportunities for us to come together, create connections and engage with each other. They offer opportunities for things to look forward to, provide hope and celebrations.
One of the important functions of our Time Markers is to be our reference point and understanding of time. It also creates opportunities for change, rites, and social phases like “schoolies”, “weddings”, “significant birthdays”, “funerals”, “honeymoons”, “retirement parties”, “first days at school/jobs”, “sporting events”, and “graduations” these rituals mark a point in time where we expect change and our structures determine that this is a different phase in our life. Those more significant Time Markersare our rights of passage. Those first moments, and final moments like schoolies which marks the passage from a schoolchild to adulthood. Those significant Time Markers don’t just mark time but create our sense of time.
How many times have you said, “I am looking forward to… (holiday, birthday, celebration)”? The things we count down days until. We build anticipation and excitement around time markers. We use them for our delayed gratification. Delayed gratification is essential for motivation both personally and professionally.
Delay of gratification, the act of resisting an impulse to take an immediately available reward in the hope of obtaining a more-valued reward in the future. The ability to delay gratification is essential to self-regulation, or self-control.
For me, 2020 has been plans, plans, and disappointments. I have attempted to plan so many things only for them to be continuously changed or canceled. I have paid for tickets to events, to be postponed and changed. Parties have been canceled. Family events canceled. Events of all sorts canceled. Even holidays canceled.
Without Time Markers
So what is the impact if we don’t have transitions or Time Markers to signify important moments in our life which allow for transitions? We feel a sense of flux and grief. There is a collective sensation of emotional disorientation.
Sense of Flux
They feel disconnected, unmoored, isolated, lost. Some can’t sleep; others sleep too much. Some obsess while others tune out. For some, anxiety spikes or depression deepens; others report feeling numb.
It is important to remember that all of these are reasonable and responses to a highly unusual situation.
When we can’t plan or plans are canceled we need to acknowledge even as leaders we are also experiencing these emotional responses.
Leadership and Time Markers
In the workplace, it means we have people who are experiencing anxiety and depression or feeling disconnected and searching because they don’t understand the loss they are feeling. There is a shared experience when we lose our Time Markers and a sense of feeling disorientated. We haven’t experienced this before and we don’t have the language to even talk about it.
What are our Leadership Lessons?
Talk about what it is and what you are feeling. As leaders, we need to acknowledge that 2020 has created new challenges and we need new tools and language to deal with the constant change and loss. A shared language to describe things allows a space to describe and talk about these issues. Compassion and empathy are key whilst everyone is going to handle their grief very differently.
However, if you can find space to share what and how you are feeling it creates a sense of team and ‘we are in this together’. It allows an understanding of what we are feeling and acknowledgment of those emotions.
I have managed my plans, plans, and disappointments by trying to use mindfulness and gratitude. When I have another Time Marker lost I simply ask myself a number of questions to think about the situation differently. It has been a game-changer.
“What is it that I can learn?”
“What space does it create, or what is the opportunity here?”
“What can I be grateful for at this moment?”
The simple act of reframing the situation has made me less frustrated and reactive to what is going on around me. It has also given me a sense of control.
If you can continue this practice, it also starts to harness innovation. Imagine if you can, what happens when you have a culture of looking for an opportunity in change, you begin to build a team culture of innovation and growth.
