I spent an enjoyable weekend with a lovely group of people from Citi Bank Sri Lanka last weekend conducting a self and leadership development program.

The objective of the program was to enable participants to reflect on their own development, strengths and areas for improvement in the way they manage their work, career and personal life, and in how they communicate effectively.

As is usual when I am conducting a program, I check in with the participants every half day and ask them to tell me what more they want from the program, and a lovely and challenging question was posed.

We know we must believe in ourselves, in order to achieve anything, but how do I learn to believe in myself”

Hmmm … How? Easier said than done. I asked them to let me sleep on this question and come back to them the next day.

The next day morning we started the day with a small exercise of being grateful where participants spent sometime identifying the things they were grateful for. Some were grateful for the rainy weather because it made the day seemed cozy, some for their parents for their love, some for the friends they had and so on.

This seemed an ideal place to share with them on my reflections of how we can learn to believe in ourselves.

Here is my list

• Be grateful – identify on a daily basis the abundance and gifts we have received
• You are worth it – Believe that you are worth every bit of everything you receive from the universe
• Act “as if” – act as if you already have everything you want, everything you want to be
• Trust your intuition – learn to listen to the inner voice.
• Validate your intuition for evidence – the only way to trust your intuition is to keep reflecting on the evidence of when your intuition was right, so that you can distinguish it from just whim or a fancy
• Be clear about what you want – you just may get what you ask for
• Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want
• Know what you can and cant control
• Don’t be too attached to the outcomes, what ever happens is also the right thing
• Be accepting
• Laugh – at yourself – at life –Laugh a lot

So all you lovely people out there … believe in yourself. You are worth it.

Wishing you grace in your life

Mihirini