Encouragement is the greatest gift you can give yourself.  After all, you are the most significant influencer in and of your own life! What you believe about yourself has the propensity to enlarge your life exponentially and impact your destiny. Yes, that’s right! Your best cheers should come from within you. This is a personal discipline we can learn to do for ourselves. We all want to move forward and live our best life each day. We do not need to rely on someone else to tell us how we should feel when we know we are giving our best and doing our best. Challenge yourself to grow in mind, thought and deed. Encouraging yourself begins with a thought that is continuously manifested in your mind to help you overcome obstacles, get unstuck, reframe problems and experience greater successes.  

Try answering these questions about the messages you consciously give yourself every day. When is the last time you intentionally encouraged yourself? What specifically have you told yourself about you lately? Do you understand the power of your mind to take a hold to the seeds you consciously plant in it about yourself and how you see the world? What do you like about yourself? What would you like to improve? What are your greatest strengths? What are most grateful for? Do you smile when you look into the mirror and see yourself? What catches your eye about you? What specifically do you like as well as love about yourself?

When you plant seeds of optimism, focused activities, reflections on continuous improvement, success and other notable characteristics into your conscious mind, your unconscious minds picks up the message and repeats it every day and you come to accept and believe it. Hopefully you feed your mind positive messages. Know that your mind can only digest and reproduce what you feed it! The message sticks. It is a matter of intentional choice!

It is also a joy to be encouraged by others; however, you should always begin with yourself and understand your motives for your actions.  Of course, we all experience challenges and will have difficulties from time to time – this is life. But think about how you do life and what you hope to achieve as a result of living an authentic as well as intentional life. Resolve to not allow your challenges to consume your time, energy and emotions and thoughts.  When we allow challenges to interrupt our growth – we spend so much time trying to weed them out of our mind and become distracted from our purpose and our destiny. Learn to censor your thoughts about you. This results in you becoming the person you were created to be – MAGNIFICENT in every sense of the word throughout every dimension of your life.

~ Dr. Sandra Sessoms-Penny ~