Positive Attitude Development Workshop Week 2: Goal Setting, Direction, & Self-Esteem

Thanks for everyone who came and made class so much fun! We appreciate your participation and the great thoughts you bring to class. Here are some notes and resources from Tuesday.

Goal Setting

In order to have direction in life, we need vision of where we want to go and set goals to get there. Goal setting is the difference between wishing for something to happen and making it happen. There are several benefits of setting goals:

• Keeps us on track
• Forces us to establish a direction
• Improves our self-esteem as we achieve small accomplishments along the way
• Makes us aware of our weaknesses
• Makes us aware of our strengths
• Brings to mind past victories, which energizes our present state of mind
• Defines reality and separates it from wishful thinking
• Sets a standard for our decision-making process

When setting goals, make sure they are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-oriented.  Following the SMART criteria gives focus to our goals and empowers us to succeed.

Stages of Change

Change is a process, and setbacks are part of the process. Remember, “you have not failed until you quit trying!” Don’t give up!

Tenacity While Achieving our Goals

Change takes time. Achieving goals will be a process. Because set-backs are expected, persistence is an essential ingredient to success. Lyle Wildes says,“(let) go of setbacks and (accept) them as temporary, rather than dwelling on them as if they are permanent. In fact, something that appears to be failure is often a step along the road to success.”

“If at First You Don’t Succeed, You’re in Excellent Company”. This article gives several inspiring examples of overcoming setbacks and disappointments. When you find yourself struggling, remember that success if often just around the corner.

Tenacity through Life’s Detours

“It is more useful to think of a meaningful life as a journey that unfolds before us. It is smart to have a map to guide our trip, but it is also smart to be prepared for detours, surprises and beautiful vistas that do not appear on the map. Setting a goal is like creating our own personal map.” --Lyle Wildes

While it is important to set goals, we also must be flexible for life’s surprises. Each of us will experience life’s “peaks and valleys” -- times of success, and times of adversity. In the workshop we discussed one Mother's inspiring story of raising handicap children. Though all of our life challenges will be different, we can learn from her inspiring example. She overcame her valleys with tenacity and optimism. We too can reach our life goals despite our personal life trials.  Welcometo Holland Story

Martin Seligman’s Learned optimism

The benefits of an optimistic outlook are many: Optimists are higher achievers and have better overall health. Pessimism, on the other hand, is much more common; pessimists are more likely to give up in the face of adversity or to suffer from depression. Seligman invites pessimists to learn to be optimists by thinking about their reactions to adversity in a new way.

Three P’s to thinking more positively during adversity

Permanence: Optimistic people believe bad events to be more temporary than permanent and bounce back quickly from failure, whereas others may take longer periods to recover or may never recover. They also believe good things happen for reasons that are permanent, rather than seeing the transient nature of positive events. Optimists point to specific temporary causes for negative events; pessimists point to permanent causes.

Pervasiveness: Optimistic people compartmentalize helplessness, whereas pessimistic people assume that failure in one area of life means failure in life as a whole. Optimistic people also allow good events to brighten every area of their lives rather than just the particular area in which the event occurred.

Personalization: Optimists blame bad events on causes outside of themselves, whereas pessimists blame themselves for events that occur. Optimists are therefore generally more confident. Optimists also quickly internalize positive events while pessimists externalize them. 
(taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism)

Goal Setting & Self-Esteem

What is self esteem? Self-esteem is having confidence in one's own worth or abilities; self-respect; positive regard for yourself; feelings of worthiness. Self-esteem is different than self-worth. Your personal worth is great and it never changes. What you think about your worth, however, does fluctuate. We must be careful not to tie our self-esteem to external factors, such as job position, relationship status, income level, and so on. These external factors are unstable, and thus builds your feelings of self-respect on a shaky foundation. Positive self-esteem is independent of those external factors. It is when you come to realize your great worth and love yourself. 

Self-esteem is closely tied with self-efficacy, which is our confidence in our ability to carry out actions. As we strive towards our goals, we will increase our feelings of self-efficacy and consequently improve our feelings of self-esteem.

Lyle Wildes says that self-esteem ties in with humility, service, and respect.

Self-esteem & Humility

“Strong self-esteem and meaningful living have their roots in humility...True humility is not the same as humiliation. While small, our place in the universe still has meaning. In other words, healthy self-esteem requires the humility of balance-- living without either grandiosity or self-abasement.” --Lyle Wildes

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is thinking of yourself less.” --C.S. Lewis

Self-esteem & Service

“Self-esteem grows through true, selfless service to people--including to ourselves. Such service is totally in our control, which means that our self-esteem is also in our control.”

-- Lyle Wildes

One study found that “those who gave social support to others had lower rates of mortality than those who did not, even when controlling for socioeconomic status, education, marital status, age, gender, and ethnicity” (Brown et al., 2005).

Self-esteem & Respect (for ourselves and others)

Wildes also talks about how self-esteem is related to respect, and how we need to respect other and ourselves. As we are striving to improve all dimensions of our health, that is self-respect! Consequently you will feel better about yourself.

Videos

Jessica’s Daily Affirmation  

A cute reminder that “you can do anything good!” There is something powerful about saying positive affirmations aloud. Though you may feel silly, say some daily affirmations aloud to yourself today.

Kid President Pep Talk 

You have great potential to do something amazing today! “So get to it!”

If you would like a WORKBOOK, please email us at ucwell4life@gmail.com and we will send you a copy. We will also have extras at our next workshop on February 11th. Hope to see you there!