Resilience is a self-belief skill that means you keep moving forward and learning from life’s stumbling blocks. Rejection and failure can be hard, but they happen to everyone. They are not going to stop you from becoming your best self.
Can YOU keep going, even when you feel like giving up? Can you face the trials of life and still have the motivation and positive attitude to work towards a better situation and a stronger, happier you?
Setbacks can include:
- Not getting a job
- Dealing with a disagreement at work
- Managing yourself if you’re feeling less than your best.
Working on your resilience is a huge part of developing your confidence and self-belief skills. What doesn’t stop you makes you stronger.
Why it helps to stick a motivational quote on a mirror
We all love a bit of Pinterest therapy but it’s a quick fix. We see a motivational quote, we say, “yes those words speak to me, I feel better now” and then we forget the quote ten minutes later and move on.
Reading a quote in this way is passive. It may not help you fully absorb the message. Motivational quotes can be so encouraging and inspiring, but they work best when they are turned into an ACTIVE experience.
Here is how to turn your favourite motivational quote into an ACTIVE experience:
Pick a quote that speaks to you.
Choose a quote that offers active encouragement to view yourself and your challenges in an uplifting and productive way. If you can, pick a quote that offers you active tips on how to keep going whatever the odds, because it will help you build resilience.
As an example we have chosen this quote but you can use your own:
Own the quote. Do an ACTIVITY to keep it forever.
When it comes to boosting your self-belief and positive attitude to setbacks, remember these five magic words:
Doing Makes All The Difference.
You’re bound to forget your chosen quote if you just look at it briefly online then do something else. You need to do something active so that the quote’s inspiring message goes from your eyes through to your hands and into your body memory where the message will properly sink in.
Here are some ideas to save your quote through physical activity so you can get it deeper into your system:
Print out the quote you found online.
Printing it onto paper is a hassle, but that so-called hassle is actually productive activity that is already helping the inspiration of the quote to sink in.
Copy that quote out by hand and personalise it.
You can draw your own version of the quote with sharpies on a sticky post-it note, or lovingly design it on a paint programme in your computer. However you copy out the quote, end up with a piece of paper you can touch. Doesn’t the quote already feel more real, more linked to you and your life? That’s because you put the work in.
Now stick the quote on your mirror.
Read it out loud every day.
Break your comfort zone.
On the one hand, this challenge seems so simple. Read a quote out loud every day? Sure, no problem. It only takes ten seconds.
On the other hand, this is a pretty big ask. It’s a real challenge. It’s way out of your comfort zone.
Let’s look at it realistically:
- If you live in a shared house, you don’t want anyone to hear you.
- If you live in a shared house, you don’t want anyone to see your quote on the mirror because you have natural concerns they might ask you about it.
But this mirror work is important stuff. We’ve discussed the cons, now let’s look at the pros:
- This is an activity you are doing for yourself, no-one else. It can feel really good to make time to put yourself first.
- You are doing a real and productive activity to start putting positive encouragement deep into your body memory, using words that you have chosen, that matter most to you.
- Talking TO YOURSELF in the mirror is powerful stuff, no? It’s one major pep talk from the most important boss you’ll ever have – yourself! Talking out loud can help ideas seem more real or important. Saying the quote out loud to yourself in the mirror is so much better than reading it online then swiping onto the next thing.
- Mirror work can help with self-acceptance. We can all have issues with our appearance or feel shy in front of the mirror. A challenge that encourages us to do mirror work helps build confidence. You can just look at the motivational quote on the mirror to start with. Then, if you feel like it and you know the words well, you can start saying the words to yourself, looking yourself in the eyes. You don’t have to, but you can if you want to.
- Resilience is about finding the spirit and means to keep going even when it’s easiest to give up. This mirror work is an achievable challenge – but it’s still a challenge. You are building resilience just by doing this activity each day for a week. Your subconscious remembers these good things you are making the effort to tell yourself. It remembers you know how to keep going in a challenge, and that skill is so incredibly useful to build.
We hope you agree that the pros outweigh the cons with this exercise. Give it a go and see what happens!
Confidence mirror exercise – top tips
- Pick a quote that makes you feel good but ALSO contains a positive activity. “You are amazing” is true, and it never hurts to hear it as a confidence booster! But it doesn’t contain a positive activity. Our example quote contains four activities: attract, reflect, become, and mirror. Look for quotes with “doing” words or verbs.
- Keep your quote stored somewhere safe when you’re not using it, like your desk or under your pillow. Then you can stick it on the mirror just when you say it. The quote doesn’t need to be stuck on the mirror all the time.
- Mirror work is great but you don’t have to do this in front of the mirror. Choose a time and place where you feel safe to say the quote out loud to yourself; that’s the important thing. You might want to say it on the way to school or work, or in the bathroom, or in a quiet spot in the park, or when you know everyone’s out.
- Many quotes (like our example) use the word ‘you’. When you copy out the quote by hand, do you want to change ‘you’ to ‘I’? Think about it. When you read the quote out loud in the mirror, “attract what I expect” could feel more personal and real when you say it to yourself than “attract what you expect”. It’s your choice.
- Do this exercise once a day, every day for a week. You’ll feel good at knowing you found a way to stick to the challenge and complete it even if some bits of it weren’t always easy.
- You don’t have to pick a motivational quote online. You can create your own message to tell yourself if you want! Make the quote whatever you feel you need to hear, especially if you don’t hear those words of encouragement often enough from other people in your life.
- Yes, this challenge is harder than seeing a cool quote and sharing it on Tumblr. But you’ll gain so much more from it. Good luck – and if you’re on Twitter, you can share your quote with the world using the #MondayMotivation hashtag to inspire them too.
Never forget that self-belief is a life skill. You can grow it over time. Onwards and upwards!
This article was published on 29th January 2018.
This article was updated on 22nd December 2021.
