Category Archives: Inspire

COMBAT STRESS WITH AFFIRMATIONS

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Many people use affirmations for personal development and to help them meet their life goals. But did you know you can use affirmations to build resilience and combat stress? Yes, we can combat the stress in our lives with affirmations.

Whether it’s a one-off stress, like having to give a presentation or an ongoing stressful issue, you can create the right affirmations to support you through. Affirmations will help you deal better with current stress, and over time, prevent future anxiety.

  1. Know Your Negative Enemy

Identifying your negative thoughts is the first step in working out the best affirmations for you and your situation.

Take a moment to think of all the beliefs that come up when you think about your stressful event. Do you worry about not knowing what to say at a party, or freezing while you try to give a presentation? Record any negative thought that pops into your head. Make the conscious decision to move away from those negative beliefs.

2. Turn the Negatives into Positives

Now you have your list of negative thoughts; you can take each one and turn it into a positive. Make strong positive statements and remind yourself of times in the past when you coped well in similar situations.

When you develop your affirmations, tie them back to times when you have succeeded in the past. If you can’t think of any, ask your partner, friend, or colleague to help you. Likely, they’ll have a much more positive view of your skills and achievements than you do!

Write down some encouraging phrases to get you through, like ‘I’m feeling stressed, but I will be ok,’ ‘I can do this,’ ‘When this is over, I will be so proud of myself.’ Use a journal to track your progress. Need more information about journaling? Try this previous post.

3. Keep Your Affirmations Realistic

Affirmations are not magic. Keep your affirmations in proportion to what you can do and how you feel. If they are too ambitious, they can make you feel more anxious than before. And if you have a misstep or you fail, then you’ll feel even worse than before.

Maybe you get anxious about public speaking, whether it’s giving a presentation or having a job interview. Your affirmations will help you even more if you know you have done everything possible to be prepared.

If you worry about getting stage fright or going blank, prepare every aspect of your speech or presentation. Remind yourself that you know how to do this, you know your subject.

Anticipate what might go wrong and work out strategies to prevent or deal with it, from having spare notes in case the technology fails to having a glass of water nearby if you feel faint.

Affirmations work. Try some small tests if you are a skeptic to build your confidence. Remember to breathe before moving into your stressful action. You’ve got this.

30 MINUTES TO STOP WORRYING

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Worry can derail an entire day if you let it. But did you know you had the power to stop it in just 30 minutes of your time, freeing up the rest of the day to live your life? The answer is more straightforward than you think.

When you become accustomed to worrying, you gain a constant stream of negative feedback and information in your brain. It’s like leaving the TV on to a channel designed to inform you of every worst-case scenario, only personalized to make all those dire predictions all about you.

Doesn’t sound like much fun, does it?

But by designating 30 minutes every day for worrying and allowing yourself to worry only during those 30 minutes, you gain back your day and your life simultaneously.

You start by setting a ‘worry time.’ Once you have this half-hour firmly in place (put it on your calendar if you need to), you can start kicking every worrying thought to the curb. You tell it, ‘later.” and then refuse to let it near you again until it’s your designated worry break.

How do you do this? Try these quick steps:

Pick a Time

Grab a half hour when you’re not going to be busy. Be careful not to pick one too near bedtime, though, as it might interfere with your ability to sleep.

Become Conscious of Your Thoughts

Every time you have a worrying thought, tell it to go away until later. If it helps, jot the worry down somewhere, so you have a list to look at during your break.

Use a Timer

Worries can quickly take over as much time as you give to them. By setting your timer to 30 minutes, you’re keeping control of just how much time you’re going to spend worrying.

Record Your Thoughts

Either write down your worries as you think about them, or if you like, journal about your thoughts during this time. Create as much detail as you like. This might also be an excellent time to examine your worries, to figure out if there’s a recurring pattern or theme. Dig down into the heart of what’s really troubling you.

Stop When the Timer Goes Off

At the end of 30 minutes, you’re done. Any additional worries now have to wait until tomorrow. Close the journal, throw away the paper, do what you need to close off the worrying for the day.

Repeat

Do each of these steps every day for at least two weeks. Why? Because it takes time to form a habit, which is what you’re really trying to do here.

In the end, you’ll be amazed at how much freer you feel when you realize you don’t have to worry all day long. You’ll sleep better at night and be much more productive during the day. Not bad for an investment of only half an hour.

If you would like a bit of help to curb your worrying by meditating and don’t know where to start, clicking here might help.

Worrying sure affects our ability to experience happiness. Here are some ideas to up your happiness quotient.

WRITE A FRICKIN’ BOOK ALREADY

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I haven’t been around this neck of the woods in a long while. I had plans when I retired to spend much more time on my website with all sorts of interesting and vital information for the world. Yep, the best laid plans…

I have accomplished a couple of things though. Since last August, we have moved back to Calgary – that’s in Alberta not Panama, Costa Rica or Spain, Portugal, Italy or Croatia – maybe next time. Survived Covid, so far. Bought all new furniture and furnishings – please God, never again! Spent 2 weeks in Scottsdale, walking and swimming each day and made time to visit the Grand Canyon and Sedona.

I’ve also written and published 9 new books. This is what I want to preach to you about today. You should write a book, too. Everyone who reads this corner (and I know each of you) has an important reason to create your own book. No excuses. I am going to create a new post in the next few days about all the reasons to write a book of your own, and I will actually turn it into a book.

Many of you are excellent writers but are not clear on how to turn that WORD document into an actual book. It has never been easier and if you are reluctant to use Kindle/Amazon, I have recently been publishing e-books to a new site called SQRIBBLE. If you want to see how easy and fast, you can create your own book for fun and profit – take a look here. It costs a couple of bucks to get set up but there’s a nice discount available at the moment.

More about that later but I just wanted to say hi and give you some food for thought. I read somewhere recently that in order to have a successful following; you need to be confrontational or controversial and have an opinion, thus the title.