This got me thinking about an email I received a few years back, one of those circular things that I normally hate but this one I loved and have never forgotten. It was about the power of positive affirmations and how knowing what positive things others think of you can boost your own self-esteem. It talked of an inspirational teacher who got all her children to write one positive word down to describe the other children in the class and then they had to hand them in. The teacher then collated all the positive words for each child into a special sheet for them and handed it to them to read and keep. They learnt that their peers saw them in ways they had never imagined and it had an immense effect on them. The story goes that one of them died and a number of them attended the funeral and it was found that they all still had their lists 20 or so years later as they had been really touched by this loving gesture. Did this really happen? Who knows, but I love the sentiment of this story and therefore it does not matter to me if it was real.
Well, what about if us bloggers and virtual friends did something similar? How marvellous would we all feel to learn these new facets of ourselves that we did not know existed. Someone may say I am inspirational (another one I have heard about myself a few times recently) and me being me I would say ‘no not me’ but what have I done there? Rubbished their opinion and that is not right, only they know if I have actually inspired them to do something. If people are kind enough to give us a compliment we should be gracious enough to accept it…. and why not go one step further and actually go out and ask for it?
Well that is what I want us all to do. I am creating a meme, called the 1 Word Meme and I would love for every one of us to be able to collate all the positive words left by our real life friends, virtual friends and fellow bloggers so that we each have a sheet of positive affirmations to treasure and boost our self-esteem.
We do spend our lives listening to our critical inner voices, which are sometimes so loud that it drowns out positive words from others. I'm not bad at accepting compliments, I think, but does it shut my critical inner voice up? Does it heck! The feelgood factor from having nice words from others lasts about as long as my cup of tea stays hot. Which is not very long, given that I drink a lot of cold tea.So, now it's your turn. How would you sum me up in one word? Bit of a tall order, that one, given that I can't do it. But still - come up with that word and leave a comment below. And I promise - I'll try to make the feelgood factor last beyond my next cuppa.
As this is a meme, it is only right and proper I wave my tagging wand over a few other lovely bloggers to take it forward to have people say nice things about them too. They are:
Sarah from Happy Mum, Happy Child, Happy Life!
Sharron from Chocolate Is Therapy
Jane from Never Plain Jane
Deb from One Rubber Band
Sally from Who's the Mummy?
and Garry from The Blog Up North
(The badge code can be grabbed from Michelle's original post)
Onwards and upwards, folks. Don't forget to get to it in the comments below. Do your worst, eh?