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A while back I saved an article I read about a girls college softball team that did something amazing. They identified with positive motivating statements and started winning games. This is a perfect example of how self-talk and affirmations can affect your actions.
It started when coach Kathy Straham of Sacramento State looked up 10 motivational sports related sayings and asked each player to pick two that they could relate to. The girls took this to heart and after receiving the sayings they started to win games, in fact they logged 8 consecutive victories ending the season as winning their conference.
Here are a few of the sayings that helped motivate the players into believing in themselves;
“The best way to predict your future is to create it.” – unknown
“Ask not what your teammates can do for you; ask what you can do for your teammates.”
– Magic Johnson
“Champions keep playing until they get it right.” – Billie Jean King
“If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way; if you don’t, you’ll find and excuse.” – unknown
If you say these statements to yourself and allow yourself to get excited about the meaning, your motivation will increase. When your motivation increases, you will do more, do it better and with more energy. Then you will see some success, which in turn increases your motivation, your energy and your desire to take actions. With more success comes more motivation, more energy, more action . . .
See what happens – all from a statement that you choose to internalize and get emotional about in a positive way. Many think that repeating positive phrases does nothing towards success. I know different and so does the team described above.
The power of doing this is in what it does to your thinking, then your feelings – that’s where the power is. If you are not experiencing what you want, your thinking is not supporting what you want, it can’t be any other way. By repeating a positive supportive phrase that is in alignment with what you want and who you want to be, you are essentially retraining your minds default thinking. Default thinking is those thoughts that just come up on their own, you can change that with better more supportive thoughts.
What statements can you come up with that support what you want?
What statements can you get intense feelings about?
Find them, read them, think about them, and imagine through them.
It starts with ‘I think I can’
As you make attempts with this mindset it will get easier to do and you will start to see more ways to align your thinking with the life direction or accomplishment you desire.
John Halderman
Are you actively expressing gratitude every day? You should be. Expressing gratitude is one of the most powerful acts you can do to support your personal growth. There are always even minor things around and in your life that you can start to feel grateful about. The act of focusing on what you are thankful for places those things to a high value in your mind. And what you think about greatly affects your life.
Is your gratitude as potent as it can be? We know that thoughts are powerful, but what is even more powerful? Thought that has emotion added and focused thoughts are far more powerful than plain thought. This is why we tend to see more of what we fervently dislike in our lives, because there are strong emotions attached to the thoughts.
So how do we add emotion and focus to thoughts about gratitude? Write down your thoughts, in a gratitude journal, to engage more of your senses. Your mind is using many more brain cells with the act of writing, thus more of your brain is engaged.
First, Your emotions will greatly increase when there is more brain involvement. And your brain will better be able to link multiple related positive thoughts to your gratitude statements enhancing positive emotional feelings. The number and strength of the neural connections in your brain actually increase with the added activity with writing. The more attention given to anything, the more it will affect your life. The addition of positive emotions will supercharge your gratitude.
Second, your mental focus is enhanced as it takes more of your mind to do the writing. Your mind is pumping out thoughts all the time, how would it know that you want specific thoughts to be more important than all that chatter? You add this importance by giving the thoughts more attention. Writing down what you are grateful for and allowing your related emotions to develop clearly moves other thoughts out of your awareness. You can truly only think one thought at a time. The act of writing helps keep you from bouncing from thought to thought. Gratitude thinking is the kind of thought you want to spend your time with, it is positive and uplifting.
Start a gratitude journal. It can be anything from a fancy hardbound journal to a simple spiral notebook, all you need is blank space to write. With a physical journal it is easier to set up a routine to use it, and it is easy to review when you want a little boost or motivation. You can establish a time of the day to pick up your gratitude journal and express your thoughts and feelings. This helps create a good habit that you will follow over time.
John Halderman
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