Lately, I have felt that a lot of my clients were struggling with self confidence and believing in themselves. Not only in processing their traumas and issues, but in their daily lives and work. I thought it might be a good time for a little bit of confidence boosting quotes post.
Speak confidence to yourself. Speak love to yourself. Speak belief in yourself.
Talk back to negative thoughts. Talk back to negative beliefs.
Replace all negative words with positive words, every single time.
Place boundaries against those who disrupt your self confidence and belief in yourself.
Let go of the past – all of the past. Live in the present moment.
Let go of fear.
Manifest your confident self through your words, thoughts, and actions every moment of every day.
Begin with the end in mind is habit number 2 in Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. We must have the end in mind in order to successfully navigate your goals.
It is unlikely that we would start building a house without a plan or at the very least a rough draft of design ideas. Why should our lives be any different?
If we do not consciously have a plan for our lives, we give the power to shape our lives to other people and other circumstances. Instead of being the hammer, we become the nail being forced into whatever someone else’s will or the force of other circumstances desires.
So how do we begin with the end in mind? We construct a personal mission statement. A blueprint for the building of our lives so that we are the hammer.
To start a personal mission statement, we must carefully, deeply examine what values, beliefs, and morals are. What is it that we want our lives to truly represent?
To fully understand that question, we must look very carefully at all the roles we play in life. There are many and over time they also change. A personal mission statement will also change based on the roles we are filling at the time. Some of those roles might be spouse, parent, child, sibling, entrepreneur, employee, writer, teacher, counselor, friend, etc. Whatever roles you fill in all aspects of your life.
Now take those roles and find the five most important ones in our lives at the moment, and this can change as time goes on. Write out what values we want those five roles to embody. The highest-level purpose for each one. The things we would want the people affected by those roles to say about us when we are dead. Be idealistic but always focused on aligning each role with our values, beliefs, and morals.
Refine each one, make them simple and concise. Do that for each of the top five roles currently. Put them together in one document and this results in our personal mission statement.
Review it frequently, daily actually. When making big decisions for our lives and when planning out our week. Do the things we are doing and planning align with our mission statement for our defined roles currently? Or are they being shaped by other people and circumstances? Do they align with our defined values and the end that we have in mind?
Keep a copy available to you at all times. Take a photo of it and have it on your phone so that it can be referred to whenever you need. Print it out and have it where you can see it every single day as a reminder to check your alignment.
Remember it is okay and necessary to amend your personal mission statement as time goes on. Roles change, new roles may appear (grandparent, retiree, etc.), different milestones are accomplished. Attune yourself to where you are in every moment and what roles are your highest priority and amend your mission statement accordingly.
In creating your personal mission statement and utilizing it daily, you become the leader and builder of your life. It is you who create your destiny and you who is working toward the future that you want.
Growth is painful. Change, transition, metamorphosis, becoming can all be painful. Moving from who you were to who you want to be can be uncomfortable for you and for others. But growth is the only way to survive and thrive.
Anything that remains stagnant or stuck in place will die eventually. If we remain as we have always been doing the same things reacting in the same ways, we will never grow. And we will certainly never thrive.
If you planted a seed and it stayed in the soil as a seed, eventually it would decay and die in the soil. If you stay in the same place of trauma responses, anxiety, depression, anger – you will not grow, you will not thrive.
But growth is uncomfortable. It causes us to change our responses and this causes others to respond to us differently. Some will respond with encouragement and kindness while others will respond with anger and blame because we are no longer doing what they want us to do.
Growth is painful because it may cause you to lose relationships that are toxic and you may even be alone, for a while. Growth is painful because it takes time and energy to transform ourselves into something new.
Growth is painful because it may cause you changes in where and how you live, where you work, what your goals are, and the things you have to let go of in order to grow. Growth can be scary and yet, it is also beautiful.
To truly thrive, growth is a continual process. Always changing, always learning, always becoming the person you want to be, the person that makes you happy.
In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety. ~ Abraham Maslow
Regrets should only ever serve one purpose in our lives. To help us learn something and make changes for future decisions.
Many of us go through life filled with regrets. The should have, would have, could have thoughts dominating our thoughts. The what ifs and I wish thoughts consuming our minds.
These thoughts generally only lead to one place. Negative feelings about ourselves and negative thoughts that come with those feelings. We can sink into the quicksand of self blame and living in the past.
If we allow ourselves to have regrets at all, we should be sure that coupled with the should, would, could, what if and I wish we have the what can I do differently going forward. How can I work to not repeat this choice or behavior in the future.
This is truly the only positive purpose of regrets in our lives.
We should also strive to have very few regrets. Regrets are a result of an inability to accept what has already occurred. To know that there is no changing the past and that living there does nothing to move us forward.
But we are human and as such we will sometimes have regrets that make their way into our daily thoughts. These are the ones that need to serve a purpose. A path to knowing better so we do better.
when we know better, we can choose to do better.
Regrets can be all consuming if we fall into their negativity and wishing we could change the past mentality. We can find ourselves stuck in wanting to undo what has been done. Beating ourselves up for choices and decisions we made at the time. Feeling as if we are a failure every day after these choices are made.
We only fail when we do not learn. We can turn regrets into success by knowing our regrets and doing better when we have the choice now.
You do not have to live in a world of regret and self blame. Learn, grow, know better, do better.
Every regret is a chance to learn something and apply that lesson to our lives going forward.
The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. ~ Robert Burns
Many times, we can start something, make plans, try to help someone else, and yet it doesn’t go as we had planned. In fact, sometimes it can end up as a huge failure.
Our intentions can be absolutely good and worthwhile. We can feel that what we are planning and doing is the right path. We can even convince ourselves that it is going much better than it actually is because it’s hard to admit we have been wrong.
In some of these instances, our well-meaning errors only affect ourselves. However, in other less fortunate circumstances, these best laid plans affect others and that is when we can feel even worse.
The effects on ourselves can still be costly. If not in money, in other ways such as on our emotions, which can affect our physical health and on our thoughts about our ability to make good decisions. So we can begin to question ourselves, our intelligence, our intentions.
The effects on others can be more costly. Best laid plans may seem the right path to us, even for others, but when we try to decide or guide the paths of others and they are unable or unwilling to follow them, the cost can be high. Anger, loss of trust, loss of relationships, and emotional turmoil. Even with the best of intentions, we have to remember that others need to choose their own paths.
So what happens when our best laid plans go wrong? Outside of the things mentioned above, we are usually presented with some choices. The choices of how to continue now that we realize our error and the choice to learn from making the error so as not to repeat it.
Choosing to continue isn’t really a choice, life goes on. Choosing in what way we continue, however, is a choice. We can continue with trying to be better and do better or we can continue with being angry or depressed about our errors.
Choosing to learn and not repeat is a full on choice that we have to make ourselves. We can choose not to learn and ignore our responsibility in the error and we can choose to continue to repeat it suffering over and over and possibly causing others to suffer as well.
The best laid plans with the sincerest of intentions can look and sound brilliant to us, but in reality our perceptions can be wrong. Errors are unavoidable in life. We humans are flawed and we make mistakes. But we are also able to learn and grow and that is the beginning of every mislaid plan.
Mistakes come in two categories. Those we do not realize we are making and those we choose to make. Both can be life changing and education, if we let them.
The mistakes we do not realize we are making can be the hardest to manage. They sneak up on us when we think we are doing the right thing or making the right decisions. It can take time for it to play out and for us to see that maybe it wasn’t a good idea in the first place.
These mistakes can be sometimes hard to accept. The ones where we think we are being smart but it ends up that we might not be as bright as we thought we were or that we didn’t do enough research or moved too hastily.
These mistakes can also be the ones where we are unaware of the issues driving us to make them or that we have not acknowledged those issues. Getting into bad relationship after bad relationship out of a fear of being alone but wondering why we keep doing it.
These mistakes can teach us lessons and can provide us with the knowledge of what not to do again – IF we let them. Recognizing the mistake and why it was made and working towards not repeating it can be life changing especially if it’s one that we have made multiple times.
The other kind of mistake, one we knowingly choose, is much harder to manage. The one where we know it’s wrong, or we know why we are doing it and do it anyway, or the ones we make out of anger or sadness but we know we are doing it. These can make us feel worse about ourselves after. These can cause us to seek out self-medication for the guilt. These can hurt others as well as hurting ourselves.
Acknowledging our responsibility in chosen mistakes can be very painful and something we try to avoid. We can try to tell ourselves that it was not our fault and blame others. But the truth is in us and it can make us feel like crap about ourselves but we may not know how to stop repeating them.
Both types of mistakes require self examination. Really looking to see how these mistakes happened. Were they the first kind or the second? Why were they made? What is our responsibility in them? And how can we learn from them, not repeat them, and grow? If the mistakes are choices, how can we work through the things that are causing us to continue to make that choice?
Mistakes are not the end, but only the beginning of learning, growing, acceptance, and healing. IF we allow them to be those things. The next mistake you make, stop, examine, don’t blame yourself or others, learn, grow, heal and keep walking.
Goal (noun): the object of a person’s ambition or effort; an aim or desired result or the destination of a journey.
The new year brings many things including the desire for many to make changes in their lives. We often hear about making new year’s resolutions. Resolutions always sounded like something congress does when they decide to make or change laws. It doesn’t really sound like a goal the word resolution.
To be successful about your goals you have to be SMART, not smart. Goals need to be:
S – Specific – Drill down to the most specific description of your goal. State exactly what you want to do.
M – Measurable – You need to have a way to measure your progress. Without measuring how do you know anything has changed?
A – Achievable – If you have no chance of success why would you start? Your goals have to be something you can actually do. If your goal is change someone else in your life, it is not achievable.
R – Realistic – Your goals need to be realistic meaning can you do what you want in the time you have specified for achievement. If you have smoked for 40 years is it realistic you can completely quit in 4 weeks without relapsing?
T – Timely – There has to be an end date of achievement for your goals. A goal that goes on forever is just a plan or a wish. The destination of a journey.
If you are thinking of making goals for the new year, really take time to think about them in terms of being SMART and also in terms of what you want your result to be. Consider all the areas of your life – mental, physical, spiritual, relationships, career/school, etc.
Also remember that if you start a goal and find yourself struggling, remember you can set a new timely end to your goal and hit the restart button. Some goals are daily, some weekly or monthly, and some are for life. An every day goal can be restarted every day. Make sure you pay attention to the successes, however small, they are important.
Mindful Montana Wellness, LLC Professional Counseling 