How to Get More Encouragement

I will start by stating the obvious; we live in a world that can inundate us with negativity so how can we be encouraged more?  Before I go any further let me confess I am not the most positive person naturally.  I am a recovering perfectionist and naturally tend to be extremely critical.  With that being said, know that anything I say about this topic from here forward is stuff I am working on as well.

Who do you surround yourself with?  Are they people that lift you up or people that pull you down?  There are two types of people when it comes to this area:

1. Those who make you FEEL better. Now that may sound like a good thing, but what if they make you feel better by encouraging bad habits such as self-pity or destructive habits and enable you to continue down your path of destruction?  Are they really helping you?
2. Those who make you BE better. These are the people in our lives that when life gets challenging they meet two needs in our lives.  They are encouragers because they tell us we can get through the challenge.  They are also “truth tellers” who will tell us what we need to hear, but may not want to hear in the way we can hear it.  These people help us live to our full potential.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have people around me every moment of my life encouraging me so that is where I need to apply what I am calling The Little Engine principle.  Do you remember the book The Little Engine That Could?  If you read it, why did we love that book?  Because he believed in himself.   Over and over he said “I think I can” until he reached the top of the mountain.

In his book The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth John Maxwell says:  “You need to learn to become your own encourager, your own cheerleader.  Every time you do a good job, don’t just let it pass; give yourself a compliment.” ¹  We need to be our own Little Engines, but this is hard so let me suggest a few ideas that help me:

• Listen to encouraging talks
• Quotes that inspire
• Spend more time with people who are natural encouragers
• The Bible helps me, but it may be some other spiritual book for you
• Positive music
• When the discouraging thoughts come reflect long enough to learn the source and see if there is something I need to learn and then replace it with the true thoughts i.e. After making a dumb mistake replace “I am an idiot” with “I made a mistake, what can I learn”
• Instead of beating myself up for the little thing I did wrong in a project, celebrate all I did right while learning from the little mistake

These are only a few ideas and I am sure there are people who are much better at The Little Engine principle than me.  If that is you and being a self-encourager comes a little easier for you, tell me what works for you.  I want to learn from you.  Maybe you are like me and you have other ideas that help you, put it in the comments.  No matter what, remember you can do unbelievably more than you imagine and don’t let your thoughts tell you differently.  I think you can. . . do you?

©2017 Wheeler Coaching Systems