Realising that I needed to make some changes to my life wasn't an easy decision, but once I made it I had no idea actually how to do it. So after my post went live, I took to twitter to try and find some advice and inspiration. Luckily I found just that.
Blogger chats are something I was aware of, but never even thought to participate in. Last week I just happened to stumble upon one whilst it was happening and made the decision to take part. I'm so glad I did as a I met some pretty amazing bloggers.
As part of the #HappySelves chat, I shared my blog post and asked for some advice. I got a lot of responses with advice (big thank you if you were one of those who sent me something) and a challenge from @Lace_and_Grace. She challenged me to tweet one thing I like about myself every day for a week.
I accepted Lucie's challenge and began my daily #ILoveMyselfBecause tweets. It's not easy to think of something I love about myself. I did my usual on day 2 and tried to hide behind a joke (saying I look cute as an owl), but decided if I was to do this I needed to take it seriously. So since then I've tried to step it up a bit.
The challenge was fun to do, and I'm going to continue to do it for the rest of the month. Lucie's challenge taught me that I could easily write a list of things I don't like about myself, but finding things I do like is hard. That needs to change.
A few months ago I went to a Personal Branding seminar at work. It was held the day after my Granddad died, so I wasn't in the best frame of mind to take things in. But one thing I remember was a comment the Professor made about strengths and weaknesses.
He told us that if we spent 5 minutes writing a list of our weaknesses, we'd be able to write at least ten. But if he asked us to spend 5 minutes writing a list of our strengths, we'd really struggle. We spend too much time focusing on the weaknesses and always say we want to turn our weaknesses into our strengths, but actually once you've past the age of 5 (I think he said) you can't make a weakness a strength. So why focus on them? Just accept them and move on.
I've set myself the exercise for this week to come up with a list of my strengths and weaknesses. From there, I have to try and build upon my strengths, and accept my weaknesses. If I can do that, then hopefully I can build up my confidence from there.
Sarah x