Classmates

Recently I stopped in at the website classmates.com and took a look at those listed from my high school. It was fun looking at some current pictures of people I knew back in the early 1980's. Good old Generation X.

Today I received an e-mail from one of those classmates. It was fun to hear from her and I just finished sending her an e-mail giving her the extremely condensed version of my life since graduation.

The e-mail was longer than I expected, but it was actually a good exercise to review the successes I have had in my life.

In his book, The Success Principles, Jack Canfield recommends that you "acknowledge your positive past." He points out that we tend to remember our failures more than the successes because the failures in our past usually carry more emotions at the time. That is what programs our subconscious mind, emotions. So, the subconscious tends to keep track of the failures.

Jack Canfield suggests keeping a journal, or a list, of our successes. When things don't go quite right, we can read our list and remember the things we accomplished. Positive reinforcement works very well with our employees, it can work just as well on yourself.

Try an exercise from The Success Principles. Divide your life into three parts. List three major successes for each part of your life. From learning to ride a bike to the big promotion at work. See how good you start to feel about yourself. If you take it to the next level, expand the list to 100 successes.

I am going for the list of 100.