With life more overwhelming than ever it has never been more important to recognise yourself as you are, right now. To be grateful, to celebrate your individual story and applaud how far you’ve come.
Consistently we face the pressures of striving for ‘new/next/better’ and yet we don’t take the time to truly honour that today is where it’s at and all we have is right now. Self-Celebration directly tackles this. Self-Celebration is celebrating the person you are now; not your future self or not the person you wish you could be. It is about accepting, encouraging and empowering yourself in this moment. And you can celebrate who you are, anytime or any place and for any reason. Self-Celebration opens up the potential for what we allow ourselves to honour and therefore how we experience our lives. WHAT IT IS…
WHAT IT IS NOT:
Through all of your challenges and successes, I invite you to Stop. Breathe. Feel. and to give yourself credit. See, it is not just the “big” things that you can honour, it’s every step you take in your journey. This is what celebrating yourself is all about– slowing down, noticing your experiences, and acknowledging yourself. Life can feel like a whole bunch of to-do lists and deadlines and requirements. But, you have the opportunity to witness yourself and the incredible journey you are on. This is how you begin to celebrate yourself! When you pause and check-in, you’ll start to recognise the steps you’ve taken over the last day or week or year to get where you are at this moment. There is so much power and strength in naming! Naming the progress you’ve made, the skills you’ve learned, the habits you’ve formed, and so on. While there are no right or wrong ways to celebrate yourself, I recommend doing it often and consistently. This practice will support you in developing awareness, gratitude, and self-love.
0 Comments
As a leader, you may try all sorts of methods to give your team motivation such as giving praise, using inspiration, organising seminars, and rewarding good performance with awards, but it’s not always enough.
Besides, these kinds of motivation can be expensive and may not always work as you hope. Organising seminars requires money which may not always be available. In most cases, your team members may be all fired up after the workshop but a week later, the fire dies, and you are back to an unproductive team. Awards may leave some members feeling unappreciated, and this can affect their performance. The right kind of motivation should flow from within the members. All you need to do as the leader is stir it up with the right words. Show your team members that you believe in them, and they will believe in themselves. Show them that they are an essential contributor to the team’s success and they are sure to act the part. Empower them through positive affirmations. Why give positive affirmations to team members? Appreciate your team members for doing a good job. Although one person may appear like they are directly linked to the team’s success, the truth is everyone played a part. Take for instance a football match, the striker may appear as the primary person responsible for the team’s success, but they could not have done it on their own. If the member who passed the ball had done it wrong, there could have been no goal. Every member needs to be appreciated. The right affirmations can build an emotional connection within the group and bring the members closer to you as their leader, and this is when the performance can improve significantly. Your Members Want to Feel Loved As the leader, you should be a nurturer to your team members. They want to feel that you care about them and their feelings. They should feel more than just tools to get you to your goals. The affirmations should, therefore, come from your heart and feel real. They should show that you truly believe in them and are not just saying the words. They should display the affection you feel for the members. They Want to Feel Recognised No one likes to feel that everything would go on the same if they were or weren’t part of the team. Every member wants to feel recognised for the part they play and feel that you intentionally chose them for that role. Make them feel special, like the group’s success depends on their skills. Having the feeling that they matter, makes them want to put in their best effort. Show them Admiration Each of your members has a unique set of talents and skills. One member’s unique set of skills coupled with the other’s different set of skills create the magic. But for this magic to happen, they each have to give their best. No one can give their best if they are consistently ignored and taken for granted. Shower them with praise and bring them out as people worth emulating. Give Them the Feeling of Security Everyone fails at one time. Your members need to feel that one slip-up does not mean the end of a career. Assure them that you believe in their ability to gracefully rise from a fall and achieve more than they did before the failure. Tell them that you still believe in their abilities and strength to rise. Make Them Feel Accepted A team includes their leader, and there’s no separation between you and the members. You are all one. You all have a common objective that holds you together. Every member should feel part of that family. A family lifts each other, and that is what your affirmations should give to your members. Make them feel loved, accepted, and significant. Show your team members respect and don’t present yourself as better and above them. How to Give Affirmations to Team Members Giving the affirmations to your team members individually gives the statements more meaning. You can personalise the affirmations by mentioning the member by name, stating their achievements and giving specific details on their unique skills and contribution to the group’s success. Here are 20 positive affirmations to get you started.
A leader’s words are very powerful at motivating his/her team members. The words can break or build the members’ morale to work. The right words can promote cohesiveness within the team. Use the above positive affirmations or create your own, tailored to your team’s needs. Ensure your words come from within you and make the members feel loved, recognised, admired, secure, and accepted. These affirmations, in turn, provide trust and support within the team. Members develop positive attitudes that promote forgiveness and unity. At FD consultants we can help you or your team challenge negative thoughts, build resilience and promote wellbeing. If you want to reach out for our individual support, team workshops or management training please do get in touch. As part of our positive affirmations month we wanted to share the benefits of smiling and why we should all smile more often! Many see smiling simply as an involuntary response to things that bring you joy or laughter. While this observation is certainly true, what most people overlook is that smiling can be just as much a voluntary response as a conscious and powerful choice. Countless scientific studies have confirmed that a genuine smile is generally considered attractive to others around us. Other studies have shed light on how the act of smiling can elevate your mood and the mood of those around you. Still, others have found a strong link between good health, longevity, and smiling. Most importantly, studies have shown that just the act of smiling (making the physical facial shapes and movements), whether the result of real joy or an act, can have both short- and long-term benefits on people's health and wellbeing. Still not convinced? Here are the top 10 reasons you should make a conscious effort to smile every day.
Even when a smile feels unnatural or forced, it still sends the brain and ultimately the rest of our body the message that "Life is Good!" Stay away from depression, stress, and worry by smiling. At FD consultants we can help you or your team challenge negative thoughts, build resilience and promote wellbeing. If you want to reach out for our individual support, team workshops or management training please do get in touch. You can use positive affirmations to accomplish anything imaginable. Most people use positive affirmations to shift their attitudes about themselves. Confidence and self-esteem are certainly the number one reasons people use positive affirmations, but you don’t have to limit yourself to these uses. With positive affirmations, you can:
By training your brain to get used to a thought, emotion or behaviour, you set yourself up for success. This success can come from any part of your life. How Do You Write Positive Affirmations?
What is an example of a positive affirmation? Here are a few general examples for you to consider trying:
But the key to a successful affirmation is – belief! At FD consultants we can help you or your team challenge negative thoughts, build resilience and promote wellbeing. If you want to reach out for our individual support, team workshops or management training please do get in touch. November is positive affirmations month so what are they and how can they benefit you? Positive affirmations have become really popular, especially with the rise of social media, you’ve probably seen Instagram, Twitter and Facebook posts that quote positive affirmations. But what are these magic words that claim to transform your mind and your life? As it turns out, there’s a lot of science to back up exactly how a set of positive words can dramatically improve your mind and body. Positive affirmations are so much more than just feel good quotes and positive statements. In short, positive affirmations are statements that are repeated to encourage and uplift the person speaking them. In reality, a positive affirmation is actually part of the language of the brain. 3 Elements of Successful Affirmations Because positive affirmations are written in the language of the brain, they follow a specific formula. It turns out, our brains are pretty strict and straightforward about their language rules.
How Do You Effectively Use Affirmations? Your brain is a complex and complicated network of information that is always sending and receiving thoughts and instructions at lightning speed. Every simple action you take is really a set of complicated communications between cells called neurons. Because of the amount of information your brain has to process every single second, it takes everything you think and say in a very literal way. When you understand how this literal communication works, you begin to see how this affects your emotions, behaviours and even physical wellbeing. When you think a thought, your brain processes the information literally and prepares you for the action that should immediately follow the thought. For example, if you think to yourself, “I’m going to have a great time on my date this weekend,” your brain essentially hears “good date” and starts firing off all the connections to make your date amazing. The problem is, it starts firing off those connections in the moment. You may get a boost of confidence and even start sending off some feel-good pheromones, but it will be in that moment, right then and there. This effect is highlighted when you start to fear something that might happen in the future. Have you ever thought about why you can have such a strong physical reaction to things you know are fake? Take a scary movie for instance. Your heart may pound and you might even sweat and feel dizzy. This happens because your brain can’t tell the difference between what you’re experiencing right now and what you’re imagining you might experience in the future. Your brain reacts to your thoughts in a very literal way, in the present moment, and prepares you for the perceived danger. This is why it’s really important that your positive affirmations are always in the present tense. “I will do great in my job interview,” tells your brain to set you up for success now, but not in the future. “I am a great interviewer. I am a great employee,” strengthens the neural connections that make you feel confident, determined and prepared for your interview. Have you ever had an experience in which you’re overcome with emotion? So, you tell yourself, “don’t cry,” or, “don’t get angry,” only to find you become more upset? There are actually two things happening in the brain that make phrases like “don’t cry” increase your negative emotions. First, when you tell yourself “don’t cry,” you are giving your brain two different commands. The first command is don’t and the second is cry. You can process the two words together and understand their meaning, but your brain hears the word “cry” and begins to activate the neural connections for that command. In the end, you’re essentially telling yourself to cry, over and over again. Second, a simple command like “cry” takes one small process for your brain to interpret. It’s straightforward and simple. A command like “don’t cry” takes further interpretation. While your brain is busy firing off the processes to follow the command “cry,” it’s also going through a multi-step process of following the “don’t” command and then negating the entire command of, “don’t cry.” Unfortunately, after all that work, you haven’t given your brain an action to take instead of crying. It searches for something else to do, but you haven’t told it what to do. So, the next time you’re in a situation where you want to experience the opposite emotion, think of that opposite emotion and command yourself to do that instead. Instead of, “don’t cry,” try, “I am calm,” and see what happens! Repetition is the key to success To understand how positive affirmations work and why they’re an excellent tool for creating the life you want to live, it’s important to understand why repetition is so important. As you start using positive affirmations, you may feel like repeating them over and over again is a waste of time. If the brain responds to positive, present tense statements, then why is it necessary to repeat them several times every single day? The processes inside your brain are set up to help you succeed. To run efficiently, your brain strengthens its connections every time you think, feel and do. This helps you perform tasks with less energy and more focus. Think about driving a car or riding a bike. It can be awkward at first, when you’re learning, but after you figure it out, it comes naturally. This is because your brain strengthens those connections every time you repeat the action and thoughts. Break the tension Sometimes positive affirmations can feel like a lie. If you’re not happy with your weight, repeating the phrase, “I love my body,” and, “I maintain the perfect weight,” may feel like an outright falsehood. For many people, this is where affirmations take a wrong turn. It seems unnatural to repeat something that is completely untrue. Because of this, you may be tempted to change your affirmation into a more comfortable phrase like, “I can lose weight,” or, “I can keep up with my diet.” These affirmations won’t be effective for all the reasons we discussed above, but there’s also something else to be said for the discomfort of repeating a false phrase. We don’t like tension. Most of our life is spent avoiding, preventing and fixing discomfort. So, it’s no wonder that people use ineffective affirmations, because effective affirmations are often uncomfortable. Yet, it is exactly this discomfort that makes them work so well. When you come across an affirmation that makes you squirm in discomfort, it’s a good sign that it’s probably exactly the affirmation you need to repeat. If you feel uncomfortable about lying to yourself, you’ll want to fix it. At FD consultants we can help you or your team challenge negative thoughts, build resilience and promote wellbeing. If you want to reach out for our individual support, team workshops or management training please do get in touch. |
CONTACTArchives
April 2022
Categories
All
|