If you’re a fan of self-help books and personal development, you may be familiar with positive affirmation.
Positive affirmation is a statement that confirms something to be true. Repeating a positive word or phrase is a proven psychological self-help process especially for changing, adding or removing specific behaviors and habits¹. Jack Canfield, a success coach, even outlined nine (9) guidelines on how to create effective affirmations on his book, The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. Other experts, like motivational author ²Louise Hay, actually has an audio-book that features positive affirmations.
BENEFITS OF POSITIVE AFFIRMATION
Various experts and studies support the effectiveness of adapting this concept in our daily lives. One website ³cites the following benefits of positive affirmation:
Strengthens muscles.
Increase physical and emotional energy levels.
Brings to life a person’s capabilities, strengths, talents and skills.
Penetrates a person’s subconscious, thus affecting one’s actions, behaviors and attitude.
A simple search of this term on the internet would give you hundreds and hundreds of stories of people who show affirmations really work. Of course, take everything with a pinch of salt. Positive affirmation should not be the be-all-and-end-all of your self-improvement journey. This should just form part of your action plan to achieving your goal of personal growth and success.
PERSONAL AFFIRMATIONS
I really believe that words have power on their own. This is why we should be very careful on what we say to ourselves and to others. Words, when said often enough, inspires belief which then may turn into action and reality.
The following are some of my personal affirmations. You may also create affirmations that are specific to your job or relationships. Hope you may find these useful:
Toxic people are the unnecessary crazies at work. Spending even a minute with them zap your energy. Hearing them talk rile up feelings that are mostly negative. For them, everything is big deal. There’s not an office hour when you can skip their drama. In extreme cases when they tend to be hurtful, they make you feel like your existence is the smallest, most insignificant of all. You don’t want to do anything or be around with them but they’re part of your team.
Posts on how to deal with toxic people at work just abounds. You can at least find a dozen ways on how to handle these people. Most of them are all about protecting yourself. They go on about establishing a limit or making yourself less vulnerable. It’s like: Never reach out to toxic people at work, period.
Or is it? Taking it from a team leader or a concerned team member’s perspective, how’d you go about helping a toxic team member to change?
I tried a quick search on how you can help a team member change their toxic behavior. I’ve encountered some self-confessed toxic people and how they eventually changed. According to them, it’s all about self-awareness – recognizing the signs that you’re becoming a toxic person and initiating changes that mostly include therapy and restraint. (Whoa, therapy sounds so serious!) I’d like to think that they are what Randy Pausch would call recovering jerks in his book, “The Last Lecture”.
Workplace Interventions for Toxic People
This info-graphic from GetVOIP might be a good springboard on the interventions that the management can do to change toxic employee’s behavior. It may be applicable for both subordinates and managers:
Interventions for Toxic People Using Emotional Intelligence Approach
If you want a lengthy study on toxic managers, this article by Roy Lubit may be really insightful. The article aims to help senior management identify toxic managers so they can distinguish those who can still be coached and therefore, retain, and those who they need to let go. He argues that to effectively deal with toxic people, you need to understand where they’re coming from. Uncovering their objectives will help you design interventions accordingly. He emphasizes the importance of developing emotional intelligence so it can help you reign in your feelings and behaviors, rather than letting the feelings run away with you.
In his article, there are four types of toxic managers:
Narcissistic
Aggressive
Rigid
Impaired
Each type comes in several varieties. The author put each in a table so personal traits and objectives can easily be identified. He also put in recommendations on how to deal with each type, both for when you’re a subordinate or a superior.
I may not always agree on the recommendations, especially the ones for subordinates. Most of it seemed to lean on downplaying performance or avoiding provocation. But to senior management, it can be a good springboard on how to reach out to once well-performing managers who devolved into being a toxic boss.
If you can share any tips on how to reach out to a colleague or a boss who’s become toxic, put them in the comment below.
You gotta give it to alcohol. It’s one of world’s most glorious temptations. It levels up everything – joy, excitement, sorrow, pain. Even beer tastes sweet when you’re drinking with the right kind of people. I personally put this on the list of why I believe and worship God! But alcohol almost always comes with the most earnest of its friends – hangover. No matter whether you’re drinking with family, friends or workmates, this miserable friend never fails to make you regret the booze that you had that time. I’d like to think that every bad case of hangover makes it to the list of I-swear-never-to-do-again-but-did!
Indeed, waking up and going to work with the feeling that your head may split open every few steps is just freaking hell! I learned how to do walling along corridors because of hangover; have experienced faux case of bulimia because of hangover; and almost lost faith in myself one time when I woke up asking these remorseful questions, “What am I thinking? Or was I even thinking last night?” Oh the misery!
You may think that feeling miserable is getting quite a good deal out of your drinking bargain, but think again. Hangover may just be a short-term side effect, unlike developing liver disease, but it poses great hazard as well. It may actually cause your death.
Whoah, that almost had you thinking twice about drinking, right? You already miss seeing those golden sparkles inside that beer mug or feeling that warm sensation going down your throat.
So, on this joyous season I’d like to share this info-graphic that discusses the biology of hangovers, its prevention and usual remedies. It’s more like a reminder-to-self kind of thing every time you decide to get drunk. And as always kids, drink moderately!
This info-graphic tells us the causes, prevention and remedies of hangover.
#Stop the Beauty Madness campaign aims to create a new culture around beauty. A culture that’s based on holistic self-qualities instead of physical appearance or vital statistics. A culture that encourages women to raise their confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth. A culture that wants women to acknowledge that they’re enough, and for me, perfect as who they are.
They have various ads for the campaign, which features women of all ages. They also have a website and Facebook fan page, Twitter and Instagram.
Pretty. Ad Campaign for #StopTheBeautyMadness
But what, really, is beauty madness? Does the culture of beauty madness exist? What does it mean to be beautiful in the first place?
Let’s get real. Beauty is something that we all aspire for. We all have a yearning towards it. Beauty evokes feelings within us and moves us into action. It’s a self-satisfying experience to say the least. And that makes it very personal. The conflict comes in when we try to represent or embody our idea of beauty to others.
But as humans, we tend to overlook our own version of beauty so that we can belong to a group. We compromise our own beliefs to what the majority dictates so that we can be accepted. And only then, we’ll feel that we’re being recognized.
And there lies the problem.
The two or three similar opinions of others do not need to become your truth. And I am not saying this to promote disunity or rebellious attitude. Cases like, since you and I have different opinions on this, we can never agree, therefore, cannot be in harmony. No, what I’m saying is that, our society lacks respect for singular opinion and understanding of where that opinion is coming from.
And here’s another irony.
We put blame on the media, on the other people that we interact with everyday, their narrow views and their judgmental attitudes. But, when did we ever look within ourselves?
You got to take 100% responsibility of your life. This means, you’re in control of which opinions to believe, which influences you allow to enter your mind and affect your life.
So, if you think and feel that you got to conform to what majority thinks is beautiful, you decided on it. That was your choice. And by choice, it means that you have all the rights in the world not to take it in the first place.
So, let’s take a moment here to think back on the latest issue of the beauty magazine that you’ve seen, or that last ad for an amazing beauty product, or even that gorgeous ensemble of clothes, shoes and bag at the boutique.
It’s called marketing, the activity is called promotion, specifically, using a print ad. No brute force right here, only gives you options on achieving your wants. Photo Credit: classic_film via photopincc
The thing is, the owner of those products knows you enough to arrange certain elements that would certainly catch your attention. What you see in the media is the reflection of what you want. Why would they let you see something that you don’t like? That will definitely not pull in any revenues. That’s bad business.
I have nothing against women who wants to be like a supermodel, or who wants to get a nose-job or boob-job. It’s their preference. It can be the thing that makes them feel good about themselves. Or it can be their way of expressing self-love.
It’s all about choices. Choices that hopefully, they made in line with their values and not because other people think it’s cool or because they heard it from someone else.
I recommend moderation. Because whatever’s done in excess never ends up with something good. You want to lose weight? Please be reasonable and do it the right way. You want whiter, smoother skin? Please ask yourself if that would serve you well.
Always, always ask yourself if you’re doing these things for the right reasons.
And the idea that physically attractive people should just be on the cover of magazine and nothing else… Defies all reasons and common sense. Don’t you have any imagination? Those physically attractive people can go after any dreams that they like. They can be anything that they like to be.
Remember, you don’t have power over any other person, unless, UNLESS they let you. The reverse is also true. No one can have power over you without your permission.
So, personally, I don’t think that there’s beauty madness, that one perception of beauty is more acceptable than others, or wanting to be beautiful should be condemned.
I’m for diversity. The more ideas of beauty we have, the more representations we can make of it, the better. That way, we’ll have more options, more perspectives, more opportunities to learn about ourselves and our values. The more we can build something that’s definitely us. A personality we created out of our own choices. Our very own version of beautiful.
What about you? What’s your take on beauty? This campaign? Do you agree with this post? Let us know in the comments! Thanks for reading!
Photo Credit: 
jelsjournal.home.blog 
