About a month ago I delivered my two day workshop, “Leader as Coach” for a large organization. Everyone there was very smart and accomplished and wanted to learn how to coach their teams. On the second day, I was ready to have them do an exercise that demonstrates the power of positive feedback and how much people need it.
Naturally, I explained how the exercise would work:
“Get into groups of three. One person will stand in front of two people, with his or her back to the other two people. The two people in the back will stand slightly to the left or right of the person in the front and when I say “Begin” the two people in the back will alternate saying positive things to the person in the front for sixty seconds.”
When I explain what we’re going to do, I get very interesting responses. A few people are eager to do the exercise, but typically, most participants have some uneasy feelings about it. Often they feel self-conscious about being the focus of such positive attention or they feel that such an exercise is silly or superficial. I mean, come one, we’re all adults here, do we really need to do this?”
However, after each person experienced hearing sixty seconds of positive messages, the room is buzzing with energy. There are a lot of smiles and laughter and people saying some form of, “That was incredible.”
What kind of things are said during this exercise? All kinds of things. Such as, “You have a great personality.” “You make a difference on our team.” “You’re a good listener.” “You can do anything you set your mind to.” “Your comments in the workshop have been really helpful to me, thank you.” “You should be proud of yourself.”
Now remember these are all very smart people, very high achieving people, very confident people. Yet in all the times I’ve done this, I’ve never had one person who didn’t say they were amazed at how good they felt afterwards.
The thing is, we need to learn to do this for ourselves. It’s not likely you’re going to go to work today or go home and hear sixty seconds of how amazing you are. And it’s not likely you give yourself the positive feedback you need to on a daily basis. Doing that will change your life.
You can do this exercise by yourself without any help from someone else. Simply take sixty seconds every day and tell yourself how amazing you are. You will likely feel uncomfortable at first. That’s natural for most people. It’s also an indication of how much you would benefit from doing it.
If you want to learn more ways to create instant positive energy, do the coaching exercises in my book Seven Secrets to Enlightened Happiness: Your Guide to the Life You Were Meant to Live. You can do them by yourself or share them with a friend or colleague and do some of them together.
You can get a soft cover version of my book or a Kindle e-book version here: Seven Secrets to Enlightened Happiness
Categorized in: Articles, Life, Mastering Emotions, Mastering Stress & Overwhelm, Prosperity, Self-Esteem/Self-Worth, Self-Improvement
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