The Power of "I Am"

Positive affirmations is a long-standing concept. I just saw a social media post and Kyrie Irving and someone from Shark Tank were talking about the power of positive affirmations. Specifically, "I am..."

"I am going to make it to the NBA."

"I am going to lead a great class."

"I am going to be a great teammate."

When you tell yourself stuff like that for a couple of minutes a day, over and over again, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You basically trigger the brain to be attentive to that thought. I won't get into all the physiology or the neurology of the brain because I'm not smart enough, but when they were mentioning this in this article, it was talking about how the brain reacts to self-talk. "I am going to be successful." "I am going to be a great coach." "I am going to be less confrontational in this meeting." "I am going to listen to the next five people I talk to." What you're doing is you're coaching yourself. You're signaling to yourself to be in the moment, to be attentive. We don't do that enough.

Think about having your people do the following exercise each week, even if they do it silently to themselves:

Start with saying to themselves "I am..." Then just list out five things they want to accomplish during the week. Then repeat that several times a day the whole week.

We just had somebody do this and the leader called and said, "I didn't want to do it because I thought they were going to think it's dumb. But I noticed a difference." It wasn't anything specific or something measurable yet. It just seemed like it was a great week for their whole team. So they did it again the next week.

Choose three things, and you're going to start with "I am..." If you want to do it out loud, if you want to go to a conference room and do it out loud a couple minutes a day or take a break in the afternoon, repeat those positive affirmations. They work.

The client called me up last week and he said, "Again, we had a great week. As a matter of fact, somebody said boy, your team's in a good mood." He said he couldn't think of any conflict they had with each other. See when we talk to ourselves like this, we'll talk to other people more positively.

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