Me? A Cheerleader?

Well, one way that I’ve discovered that makes things easier, when they seem hard, is to have a cheerleader. When I was a teenager I wanted to be a cheerleader. Probably like pretty much every other girl around, I thought it would be the funnest thing ever. But, you know, things didn’t line up for me. I was homeschooled, for one, so, no one to cheer for. No football team or anything, so that didn’t work out. 

Do you know why they have cheerleaders at football games? Football is a really hard activity, and the team really feeds off the energy of the crowd. The cheerleaders pump up their energy and they cheer for the team and they boost everybody up in the crowd. Then everybody gets excited and motivated and they have more energy. Pretty soon the football players are running faster and catching better, because they have cheerleaders cheering them on.

Write Yourself a Letter

Well, why can’t we take that idea from high school and carry it on through our lives? We do hard things all the time and we know that having someone cheer for us, having someone in our corner, is going to help. So, one way that I’ve used this idea is by being my own cheerleader. I will write a letter to myself saying “Yay! You got this! You can do it! You’re awesome!” I just write a letter of encouragement to myself and then when I’m going through something hard, I can read it. I put it up in my bathroom on the wall and I read it frequently. It gives me a boost. It gives me the encouragement that I need to get done what needs to get done–these hard things that come up in our lives. 

So, consider being your own cheerleader. Think about writing yourself a letter of encouragement to help you get through whatever hard thing that you’re either doing or want to do.

Being able to con someone into doing something is a pretty cool trick. What if we could take that, take the evil part out of it, and use it for good? What if we could con ourselves? That would be a great skill to have, I think that could be really useful. There are some things that I just need to be tricked into doing, especially when my motivation is down or my confidence is low. In times like that I have needed to be tricked or conned into turning things around.

Through these experiences, I have found ways that I can con myself, and others, into more confidence, and I’m excited to teach you how I do this. If we look at the first three letters of the word CONFIDENCE, we have CON. My tips for you today fit within these letters, forming an acronym. I like acronyms because they are fun and easy to remember. I need as many tricks as I can get to remind myself of things, so acronyms work well for me.

So, CON stands for Care, Obey and Nice. When you show someone you care, give them a task that they can obey, and a way to be nice to someone else, it’s going to boost their confidence. You can con others, or yourself, into more confidence, so let’s use this particular con in a happy, nice, friendly way. Let’s CON ourselves and others into confidence! 

Caring

You start this con by caring. You show you care as you say positive words. Words of affirmation. Words of encouragement and love. “I knew you could do it! You’ve got this! You’re so amazing! You’ve done it before, and I know you can do it again.” Words of affirmation show that you care for yourself or those that you work with. 

Obey

Isn’t it so hard to obey sometimes? It is so hard to obey even our own internal rules or desires. Sometimes it’s hard to get ourselves to do something that we’re obligated to do, or something that we even want to do. It can be hard, but when we simplify things and identify a task that’s completely within our capability to complete, then we find it easier to obey. Find something that’s easy to obey and do it! You’re gonna feel much better as you accomplish even a small task.

Nice 

When you do something nice for someone else your confidence goes up. You receive an automatic increase of confidence when you do something nice for someone else. 

So, con yourself or others through caring, obedience, and being nice. 

See It In Practice

I have a story, to help demonstrate how this works. When my kids were young, in elementary school, I used to go and volunteer in their classes doing math flashcards with the first and second graders. It was so fun. It was so fun! And I felt like what I was doing was making a difference. The kids would come in one at a time and they’d sit down and I would look them in the eye, say hello to them with a smile, and get out the flash cards. I’d show them that I had confidence that they could do it, and that they could learn it. If they couldn’t do it yet I expressed to them that I knew that they could learn it.

After showing them I cared through words, I then gave them the small task of obeying something that they could do. I would ask them to give the answers to the flashcards. If they couldn’t do it the first time, I would help them to do it the second time, or the third. And if they needed help, that was okay because they could do it even with some help sometimes.

And then, as they finished the task, I would have them go find their friend that would come and do flashcards with me next. I gave them a task, like a simple job, to do something nice for someone else. They would go get someone for me. I would ask them to serve, because service is a guaranteed confidence booster! 

The World Needs More Confidence

It can be fun, not hard, to con yourself or someone else into more confidence. This world needs more confidence. We need to have more confidence in ourselves, in others and in the goodness that is in this world.

The S.A.V.E.R.S.

Being unsure of which one he should incorporate into his life, he had the bright idea “Hey, if these six different things work for different people, what if I do all of these things? What could that do for me?” So, he implemented those into a morning routine called SAVERS. SAVERS is an acronym. S for silence, A for affirmations, V for visualization, E for exercise, R for read and S for scribe. That makes a nice acronym there, SAVERS. It’s easy to remember and it’s easy to do.

Silence

The first is Silence. It seems like in today’s world we don’t get a lot of silence, right? We get in the car and we turn the radio on, or we’re doing stuff around the house and we’ve got music playing, and we always have people around us. It’s hard to just take some time to ourselves, to sit and just focus on our thoughts. But it has so much value. Silence may just be some quiet meditation time, where you close your eyes and focus on your breathing, as you inhale and then exhale. Or maybe this is prayer time, where you are praying and listening quietly.

Affirmations

The next part is Affirmations. Affirmations are just positive statements that we repeat to ourselves to help increase our energy level. They’re positive and they’re helpful to us and they give us guidance and direction. They could be as simple as what we might call “I am” statements. “I am happy. I am free. I am helpful.” Things like that. Things that we want to improve in our lives that serve to remind us, “Hey, this is where I’m going.”

Another way you could do it is you could write out, or say something like “As I do blank, I become blank”. For example, “As I read my scriptures, I learn more about the Gospel or I learn more about Jesus Christ.” Or “As I am kind to others, they are more kind to me.” So, that might be something you could do for an affirmation.

Visualization

Visualization is the third part. It’s just like it sounds. You visualize things. This is about you telling your mind what you want, and where you want it to focus. If you know where you’re going then you’ll have a much easier time getting yourself there. This might be done by standing in front of your vision board. Maybe you’ve got some picture of things that represent things that you want to achieve in your life, or things you want to bring into your life, or successes that you want to have. You can stand there and study those and try to get those into your mind. Try to see them in your mind.

You could also just sit silently with your eyes closed and picture what you want your life to be like. See if you can get yourself to feel what it’s going to be like when you are there and that will really help you to internalize that, and to accept that as the reality that you want to achieve.

Exercise

The fourth part is Exercise. This can take on different forms. Maybe you go out for a run. Maybe you go out for a bike ride. Maybe you rearrange the cans in your food storage room, those big heavy cans, moving them, lifting them around. Or big buckets of cement. You can be creative. Maybe go outside and do some pull ups on the swing set, or just jump up and down. A lot of times we get up, go into the office and sit in a chair all day, and we don’t move a lot. We’re just sitting there–all day. If we can get ourselves moving, that’s going to help our bodies to function a lot better. And our minds as well.

Reading

The fifth part is Read. Pick up a book. Learn something. This could be your scriptures. Or a novel, where you could really get into the story and. Or, it could be something that you want to learn, through some educational book. The idea is that we want to always be exercising that part of our brain. We’re reading words, and we’re learning new things.

Scribe

The final piece of SAVERS is Scribe. This is writing. He calls it Scribe because that makes the acronym flow. What would it be if he used the word Writing instead? SAVERW??? Scribe sounds better. It makes the acronym work better–so we have SAVERS. Scribe then. We all have negative feelings and emotions inside of us, and if we let them sit there, eventually they’re going to bottle up and they’re going to come out and be spewed out all over other people. We don’t want that. We want to be proactive and get ahead of that.

So what we do is, maybe every other day, during your scribe time, your writing time, is you sit down and write all the things that are troubling you or bothering you. Write about your frustrations. Write about the sadness you’ve experienced in your life. Write about any disappointment and anger you’ve felt. Write that on paper, and then tear it up and throw it in the garbage.

If you do that every other day then maybe on the even days what you do is you write about gratitude, or things that you are grateful for. Maybe you have a gratitude journal where you write and record these things. You can write in there “I’m grateful for this, I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful for my family,” and on and on. This will help you to appreciate those things more.

The Quick Version

Those are the six pieces of the SAVERS morning routine. What’s really great about this is that you can do a super simple, abbreviated version. What I like to do is to set a timer for one minute and spend just a single minute on each part. This then becomes the six minute version.

I’ll set a timer for one minute on my phone and I’ll sit there and I’ll just be silent for one minute. When the alarm goes off I reset it and I switch over to my affirmations. I have a list of affirmations on my phone that I like to read and I’ll read through those until the timer goes off again. Then I’ll switch over to some visualization. When the timer goes off again I switch over to exercise. Maybe I’ll do some push ups or planks, or some stretching, or whatever, for one minute. Then next is reading. So I will pull out a book and I’ll read for one minute. And then the last thing is scribe. I’ll write down quickly, “These things are bothering me.” Or “I’m grateful for this.” And after six minutes, BOOM!, I’m done.

Now it’s Your Turn!

It’s amazing! Even just doing it for six minutes makes you feel so empowered, and so ready to go. It gives you that boost you need in the morning. Of course if you do it for longer and spend more time on these different things, you’ll get more benefit from it. But before investing more time into it, just try it out at an easy level. You’ll see that even just doing the quick version is going to make a big impact on your life.

When I Found Myself Stuck

Let me relate this to a story of a time when I got stuck. My story is about being physically stuck, but I think you will see that it applies to being stuck in life, in your thoughts. and in your brain. So, years ago when I was younger, I was travelling in a car on this dirt road with a friend. We were out kind of exploring this area we were unfamiliar with and it had just recently rained. Here we were cruising along, and as we passed by some interesting things we stopped to take some pictures. Like for example, we saw this old abandoned house, well, a shack I guess, and it was made of cinderblocks and there was some old metal corrugated roofing lying nearby.

Well, we continued on a little bit past this point and decided that the road wasn’t going anywhere, so we decided to turn around and head back. As we were coming back, we started heading up this hill that was probably 100 feet long, and we didn’t get but 20 feet up and our tires started spinning. They were filled with dirt and mud! It was wet, like I mentioned, and the car just slid back down the hill. It was very clear, very quickly, that we weren’t going to be getting up the hill this way. We tried again and again and we couldn’t get past this certain point. We were stuck!

So, there we were at the bottom of this hill and we were stuck. Does this sound familiar? This might be how you’re feeling in life, when you are, what you might call, stuck. You are trying to move forward and you want to move forward but for whatever reason the wheels just spin and you’re not able to get any momentum or any traction to move forward in your life. And this was the same situation that we were in.

How to Get Yourself Unstuck

I’ll come back to the story in a little bit, but first I want to share with you four suggestions that I have to help. Maybe these are things that you can try that will help you to get unstuck and to get yourself moving forward.

My first suggestion to you is to find some support. There’s probably people around you that are not stuck and who would be willing to offer you some help, to give you some advice, or to give you some direction. Maybe they would even hold your hand and help you get started and be supportive as you get going. Support may also come in the form of someone else who is stuck like you are, who also wants to get unstuck. This is someone you can bounce some ideas off of and that, together, you can work on finding some solutions and getting both of yourselves to move forward. 

My next suggestion for you is to change something. Find something new or different that you can do. If you’re continuing to do the same things that you’ve been doing in the past, then you’re going to get the same results you’ve been getting in the past. In order for things to change in your life, you’re going to have to make some changes. So you need to find something that you can do differently and then you can start to expect that you’ll have different results. 

My third suggestion to you is to find a way to gain some momentum, to get some small victories that will help to give you that momentum. I suggest that you have a morning routine. Something that you consistently do as you wake up each morning. Identify a few things that you can do that are pretty simple, that you can just knock out pretty easily, that will help you to get some small victories. It could be as simple as just making your bed. Start the day off with a victory and as you do that you’ll teach yourself “Hey, I’m the kind of person that wins. I’m the kind of person that gets things done.” That will lead to other, bigger things that you can get done. It will get you the momentum that you’re looking for that will help you to move along.

My fourth and final suggestion for you is to pray for guidance and inspiration and then go about your day and keep your eyes open. Be aware of things going on around you and expect to find that something is going to come your way. There’s going to be an opportunity or an idea that comes to you, or something like that. Or perhaps there will be someone that will cross your path, that will help to guide you and give you some better direction in your life, that will help you to get yourself unstuck, and that will lead you to getting whatever idea that you need to get yourself moving forward.  

A Quick Review

So those are my four suggestions for you. Let me do a quick recap of what those are. The first one is support. Find some support, someone who can help you, someone who can encourage you. The second thing is to change something. Do something different than what you’ve been doing. The third thing is to get some momentum. Start with some small victories. Implement a morning routine. And the final suggestion is to pray for guidance and inspiration. 

The Happy Ending — Stuck No Longer! 

Okay, so now back to my story, and hopefully you’ll see how some of these things, these suggestions that I mentioned, played out in my story and in us getting back to the top of the hill. So we sat there and we realized we were stuck. We knew that just sitting there wasn’t going to help get us out of the situation. So, we remembered the old building up at the top of the hill, and the roofing material. We went up there and we grabbed some of that old metal roofing. We thought if we could lay that on the track then maybe that would help us give the wheels something to grab onto and move up. Unfortunately, it didn’t work like we had hoped. 

The next thought was something similar. We thought “Oh, maybe we can gather some rocks and stick them there in the dirt and that would help us get moving.” So we packed down some rocks on the trail and again the car got a little bit of traction on those rocks, but it wasn’t enough to get going up the hill. 

So, finally, as the sun’s getting lower in the sky, we were getting more concerned about getting back before it got dark on us. We decided to pray again, and as we got up off our knees from saying the prayer, I remembered something from my high school days, in a physics class. It was something about friction being different depending on whether you’re pushing or pulling.

I had the thought “What if we turn the car around and drive it up backwards?” So my friend jumped in the car, spun the thing around and gave it gas. He started going up the hill and he was actually making progress, inching his way up the hill. So there I was running alongside him cheering for him saying, “Go, go, go, go!,” Trying to encourage him and the car to give it their all and to get up the hill. Well…we got up the hill! We survived, which is why I am here today. We survived! We celebrated at the top of the hill and we were excited to have overcome this challenge and to get unstuck, to be able to keep moving forward with our day and with our plans.

I want you to look at these suggestions that I’ve given you here. I want you to consider if you might find value in implementing one of them, or more of them in your life. Give it a try. See if it’s what you need to help yourself to get unstuck and get moving forward in your life again. You can do it!

I have been really puzzling this out. In the last video that I shared about the Four Tendencies and communicating with each type, my interest was really sparked because the author, Gretchen Rubin, also talks about motivation in relation to the Four Tendencies. To repeat from last time, the Four Tendencies are Upholder, Obliger, Rebel (I prefer the term Freedom Lover), and Questioner. Since each of them is motivated differently, what happens when you want people from all four tendencies to be motivated? You’re going to have to use different techniques to motivate different people. They think differently and they’re motivated differently. 

But, once you learn how each tendency is motivated, you can motivate people, including yourself! There’s power in being able to motivate, especially if you can motivate yourself! Let me share a story. My husband and I are opposites on the tendencies. You would think that that would make it harder for us to get along, but in some ways I really think we balance each other out. It seems to work out nicely. 

Mike is an Upholder-Questioner. As an Upholder, he wants structure and order, and as a Questioner, he wants answers. He wants to understand what’s going on and to have all his questions answered. 

Meanwhile, I’m on the opposite side of the scale, leaning towards Obliger and Rebel, which I actually like to call freedom lover (just sounds a little more positive to me). And that’s really how I’m motivated…by freedom. I’m totally a Rebel. I don’t want to do something just because. I want to do it if there’s freedom for me in doing it. If I see that I can have that, then I’m all in. l do it. So, I’m motivated by freedom. The Obliger side of me is motivated by people. If other people are doing it, I’m more likely to do it also. 

So, you would think that it would be hard to zero in on the same goal when we are each motivated so differently. But that’s not necessarily the case. When you have the same goal, you just need to be motivated differently, but you can still achieve the same goal. 

I’ve learned this in hindsight, which, seriously, it’s so much easier to learn in hindsight, isn’t it? I’ve been looking back on our marriage, at how we’re differently motivated and thinking “Wow, how did we get along? How did we survive all that we have when we are so very different?”

This experience I’m going to share is a perfect example of how to motivate two different people towards the same goal. So, our goal early on in our marriage was to stay out of debt. The way that Mike’s motivated is very different from the way that I’m motivated, but we made it work. He’s motivated to stay out of debt because it just makes sense. He has asked a lot of questions, and done a lot of research, and study things out because he’s a Questioner. And he concluded that being in debt really didn’t make sense to him. And as an Upholder he recognized that we have a standard of living, and he wanted to uphold that by staying out of debt.  

As an Obliger, I wanted to oblige him, so I went for it. And, as Rebel, with my freedom-loving tendency, I didn’t want to be in bondage to anyone else, or owe anyone anything. So, you can see that even with the same goal, and the two of us being differently motivated, we both could reach that same goal together and be on the same page by understanding how we’re motivated and using that to push us forward. 

Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that super, super interesting? Seriously guys, my mind was blown. Looking back on how we’ve managed our marriage and our relationship I can see the bumps in the road, where he was trying to motivate me with lots of information, and as a non-Questioner, that information really wasn’t important to me. Or, I would try to get him to just embrace the freedom of things and that was not motivating to him. Very interesting, right?

I encourage you to look back. Try to place yourself, and those around you, into those four tendencies. See if you can figure out how to motivate yourself after you recognize what your tendency is. What motivates you? What’s your tendency? Are you motivated by information, by structure, by people, or by freedom? Which one motivates you? See if you can apply this information in your life and get yourself motivated to do something that you’ve been wanting to do.