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Think about something you’re good at.
Maybe it’s something you are particularly proud of achieving, or something about yourself that you really love.
How easily do these things come to mind?
How easily would you be able to say these things out loud?
It seems to me that when it comes to actually voicing our strengths, whether to ourselves or to others, we tend to be very quick to jump on the ‘I suck’ bandwagon
and we actually don’t know how to go about talking about ourselves in a positive light. What’s more, we say and think negative things about ourselves so frequently that it almost becomes second nature
Perhaps worst of all is that it can sometimes feel like we are expected to put ourselves down in order to show humility.
This tends to lead to us relying on other people to validate the strengths that we know we already have.
This is a big problem.
If we get in the habit of only voicing the negatives, rather than the positives, it’s going to affect the way we start to think about ourselves.
I believe that people often feel reluctant to voice what it is that they are good at for fear of sounding ‘cocky’ or ‘self obsessed’.
So I decided to put this to the test...
I asked the Yes Futures team to write down something they were good at -- and after about 10 minutes of um-ing, ah-ing and a whole lot of ‘I don’t know!”, we all finally managed to find something to say.
This is where the #JustSayYes challenge comes in.
What we found was that despite knowing our strengths- we found it incredible hard to actually put them down on paper.
Even harder still was to use words like "great" or "excellent".
We want to change this.
We want everyone to feel comfortable and confident in their abilities to think positively of themselves--and be able to speak positively of themselves too!
This challenge isn’t about bragging or showing off.
It’s about feeling comfortable articulating our strengths with confidence and without hesitation.
You should never feel like you are expected to hide the things about yourself that you are proud of and love.
So grab a pen and #JustSayYes
Lets share these positive images.
Click on the icon to tweet us @WeAreYesFutures don't forget to use the hastag #JustSayYes