Making Positive Affirmations work for you

Have you ever tried using positive affirmations before? Did they work for you? Or did you give it a shot and finally conclude that they don’t work!

I know some people who swear by them and have seen some wonderful results using them. I unfortunately, belonged to the other set! I did them ever so obediently for 3 years and then came to the conclusion that they don’t work. And was therefore not ready to buy the explanation that many people give. They say you must not have done them enough number of times!

My colleague on the other hand, has had great success with them. Which intrigued my interest a few years back. I wanted to know why they work for some and not for others. And you know what, I found a number of reasons which I am going to share with you today! Ready…

Why Positive Affirmations Don’t Work

It’s actually got a lot to do with your Personality. I realised there was a stark difference in my and my colleague’s personality. He was a happy go lucky kind of guy and somehow his mind would believe what he told it. I, on the other hand, had a mind which loved to refute every positive affirmation I gave it. And instead of helping me, it actually aggravated the already raging war inside me!

Previously I had to manage a mind which kept repeating like a tape-recorder how I was ‘not good enough.’ But now I also had it tell me how I was even worse as I was trying to believe a silly statement like ‘I am fine the way I am’ which I knew was untrue. Also, I was a failure as I was unable to make use of positive affirmations when the rest of the world was doing it so well. Along with, I was wasting my time for continuing the positive affirmations that don’t work. All of which was too much to handle!

How to make Positive Affirmations work for you

I have been experimenting on how to create change in our lives since some time now and make it a point to share what I have learned in the soft skills training programs that I deliver. I have tried a number of different techniques on myself and have had some inferences:

1.      Positive Affirmations can work. How? By first dealing with the voice in your head that refutes them. This can be done by a number of tools that help you get aware of and accept your beliefs. My favourite techniques are Mindfulness and the Emotional Freedom Technique. I use them all the time. And I’ve seen that they work like a charm especially for emotional people like me!

2.   Instead of only using Positive Affirmations also use Affirmations. Confused? Let me explain. Positive Affirmations are, well, positive. They are positive sentences which are supposed to include only positive words. And this you affirm by repeating a number of times. I have realised that if you affirm a statement in the format ‘Its ok to feel (sad/angry, etc.)’or ‘Its ok to be (anxious, disappointed, etc.)’ it helps create acceptance. This helps process and settle the negative emotions that fuel the voice in our head that opposes the positive affirmations. It’s about clearing the negative to make way for the positive.

3.    Now use positive affirmations. Now once the awareness and acceptance bits are done, you can safely use positive affirmations. This is important as it means you now have the right energy to move into them. Its like removing the brakes that was retarding your forward motion. Which also accelerates the motion the positive affirmations can now create. And you’ll find that you move ahead with motivation and minimal effort towards your desired goal.

BENEFITS OF EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION SKILLS IN WORKPLACE

Communication skills training is a common training program that anyone can go through irrespective of their level, age, experience, department, etc. This is one skill that needs continual enhancement, though sometimes some people do get offended when asked to attend a communication skills training! They feel, being in the position that they are, they are by default exceptional at their communication skills. There are good at it, no doubt. But remember there’s no limit to learning. And certainly, no harm in enhancing a skill further.

It’s very important to have good communication and good team bonding in a workplace.  It makes things easier and a lot smoother. In fact, an organisation that encourages open communication has less unnecessary conflicts. People are ready to listen to each other’s opinions and a lot of sharing happens. They also give each other constructive feedback and are open to receiving it too. This helps in improving them, others and the organisation on the whole.

Talking about open communication, organisations where people can openly share ideas and thoughts have very high levels of creativity too. This in turn improves employee engagement and retention levels. When people have the liberty to share their ideas, they feel heard. This gives them a creative boost which helps them come up with more such ideas. And that’s when you have an organisation full of people who are running high on creativity, productivity and will stick around for a long time!

Another benefit of good communication skills is teams performing better. When communication is good, team members come together to create strong cohesive units. This is not just helpful within the team, but also greatly improves cross functional collaboration. Being able to communicate effectively opens more channels to ask for help and provide help more often.

Effective communication skills also help in being able to speak assertively to our seniors, colleagues and subordinates. This is challenging for some people. But can be helped by communication skills training.

In short, communication skills enable you for better asking, speaking, listening and understanding. And believe you and me, its these basics that matter a great deal while trying to get any job done! And how do you enhance these? By attending a good communication skills training. It will help you work on these aspects. And if you are already good at them, it will help you in brushing them up further.

So if you are ever given a chance to attend a communication skills training, go for it. Irrespective of what your communication level is, go for it. It will only make you better. And people rarely get a chance to better themselves.

5 steps to effective goal setting

A lot of people have goals, but not everybody spends time actually thinking deeply about their goals. And that’s the precise reason why we have goal setting workshops. They provide a dedicated time and space for you to reflect on where you want to go and how you can get there.

Unfortunately, most people don’t take goals very seriously. And that’s one major reason why these goals never get achieved and just remain as dreams. Therefore goal setting workshops are very important and one’s that shouldn’t be taken lightly. It’s a part of corporate training. Just thinking of what your goal is in your head is not enough.  One needs to stop and spend time with the goal. Check and see whether this is truly what you want in life and ask yourself what you’re ready to give for it.

Goal setting is therefore an extremely important exercise and not setting proper goals can compromise their achievement. Therefore one needs to follow certain steps to get their goals right and maximise their chance of fulfilling them:

Step 1: Believe and Visualize

The first and most important thing to do in order to set a goal is to believe in yourself. One needs to believe that he or she is capable of achieving the goal or else you’ll lose the motivation to work towards it on the way.

After that, visualize what you want. Picturize yourself in the situation when you have achieved what you want. How does it feel? Do you feel motivating enough to pull it through? If yes, then you’re on the right track. If no, you probably need to change or modify your goal. If you however still feel that you want to go ahead with that goal, reflect to understand the internal resistance you may be facing. Check what fears you have or what challenges you may face on the way that are affecting your motivation levels. 

Step 2: Create a SMART goal

Make your goal SMART; specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. If it isn’t SMART, work on it until it is. Making your goals SMART also provide you with insights on how to achieve the goal.

Step 3: Put it on paper

Only 3% people put down their goals on paper. And these 3% people have higher chances of achieving their goals as compared to those who don’t. Writing your goals down on paper indicates your seriousness towards your goals. It also helps your mind see things more clearly.

Step 4: Start Now and Stick to it!

To start working towards your goals, the best time is now. Start working on your plan as soon as possible and stay focused until you achieve it. Goals cannot be achieved over night and what you achieve over night may not a big enough goal. So stay patient, stay focused!

Step 5: Review

Make sure you are reviewing your goal on a timely basis. While in the process of working towards it, you might realise that your goal needs alterations. It may cease to motivate you anymore or you may even realise that you have the potential to achieve much more. And that’s when you will need to alter your goal and action plan.

As you can see, it’s important that you set your goals appropriately. And this is exactly what goal setting workshops help you do. A goal setting workshop provides you with a guide who takes you through the process of understanding the importance and implementation of these steps in depth. They can also give you good insights on the quality of the goal set by you and the challenges you may face on the road to achieving them.

Change Management Training and Tomorrowland?

Guess which movie I saw yesterday? Tomorrowland. Seen it? It’s one of those movies which has a deep meaning to it but the meaning can get lost in the Sci-fi action that is shown. Now you must be wondering what this movie has to do with change management training right? Well let me explain.

Movies are a great way of learning. They give you a visual experience and some of them have enough juice in them to allow you to mull over them for hours and sometimes even days together! I still remember when I first saw the Matrix. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for so many days!

Well this movie, Tomorrowland seems to have had a similar effect on me! I saw it last night and am somehow still under its influence! So what was so special about this movie? The foundation of it. For most of the movie, it was rockets flying around and people roaming around in flying machines in a visually appealing location filled with high risers and flyovers. In fact I spent a major portion of time actually wondering what the movie was trying to show and whether it was really going to go anywhere or not!

The Tomorrowland Movie

It was the end of the movie which had its soul, a dialogue given by the 'so-called' villain which explained exactly why he was doing what he was doing. This in turn was followed by some other good dialogues on human behaviour. The whole message was very beautiful and it really struck me as it was so true.

What the movie talked about was as I said human behaviour. It spoke about the feedback loop and how we tend to get stuck in it. So in the movie they had this large monitor which was sending out signals of doom to the people on earth. The villain had intended that these signals would actually scare people and they would wake up and do something about the doom that the earth was heading towards. However, instead of taking action on it, people latched on to the negative thought. Instead of fighting against the negative, they now fed into the negative, creating a negative feedback loop which created more negativity. In this manner the negativity just continued and nobody made the effort of breaking out of it! This was until there were some people who were aware of the negativity and still had hope rose up. They realized that feeding negativity would lead to more negativity as what you feed grows. They stood up and fought to save the world with all their positivity and hope. This in turn inspired others and earth was saved.

The Wolf Story from Tomorrowland

This story is actually the story of our minds. What we focus on grows. If we focus on the negative, the negative grows. Of we focus on the positive, positive grows. Its up to us what we want to focus on. The world is going to keep throwing negative on us as it is what is currently there in the collective consciousness. However if we can stay focused on our path and bring ourselves back to the positive even when we stray, then we will turn out to be the winners.

Another interesting aspect that I found here was the negative monitor which throws negativity. The monitor is definitely out there in the world. The politics, famine, murders, hate and resentment being proof of it. However there is a monitor in our minds too. It’s the tape that keep running in our minds and telling us how pathetic we are. Even if we do something good, this tape tells us that it’s not good enough and makes us feel like losers. It somehow always tells us that we are not good enough no matter what we do!

 It is actually this tape that is responsible for stopping our progress. If we can learn to question the tape and only listen to those things that are true, we can actually make the changes that we want to make in life.

Seeing the link now, the link between this movie and change management training?

So this brings me back to my most favourite model, the model of change.

The Change Model

This model has the following three steps:

1. Awareness
2. Acceptance
3. Action

So what do we have to do to  change? Go step by step. If you directly jump to the third step action then you could be setting yourself up for failure. Why? Haven’t you seen when you try to exercise to lose weight what happens. Most of us are motivated for about a fortnight and then it slowly wanes off! So why does this happen? It is because of the little tape in our minds. It says things to us which make us lode the motivation that we need to go on. It actually resists the forward movement, a sort of anti gravity I would say! So the more you try to move forward the more your mind will pull you back. This makes your chances of being successful at your endeavor very bleak.

So what should you do? Go step by step. First get aware of what your tape is saying. If it’s telling you that you are a lazy person and you will never be able to lose weight then be aware of it. After you have heard it out now accept that it is saying that. What happens with most of us is that we start an internal conflict as soon as we get aware of things. We start fighting with our minds and all our energy gets wasted in fighting rather than moving to the next step. So what we have to do here is to accept what our mind is saying. Tell it that yes we have been lazy in the past but let’s see what happens this time. This will create a certain kind of peace inside which will give you enough energy, clarity and direction to move to the next step of action. Then you can finally take the third step and create the change that you want in your life.

Getting aware of and accepting our minds can be quite a task and takes a lot of practice and motivation. If you want to create a change in your life and need some help with it, we’re always there to assist you. Join us in our change management training where we help in mastering our change management model. Do also visit our website http://www.theyellowspot.com/ to have a look at the areas where you would want to create a change in your life.