"I Can Do This"

There are other simple exercises I found helpful in gaining back the person I had lost through in last several years and had brought about this change in my life. One of my favorites and one I have shared with several friends is each time I came to a barrier preventing me from moving forward or was feeling frustration in what I was trying to accomplish, I repeated the phrase "I can do this." In those first several months in my temporary apartment as well as purchasing my own home and decorating it I would repeat the phrase as many as 10 times a day.

About a year after the divorce, now living in my own home, one day I became frustrated with a simple problem. Suddenly I said to myself "I can do this." I realized I hadn’t said my little phrase in months. I stopped cold and started crying because I knew I had gone beyond the worst and most difficult months in this major life change. I knew I had accomplished a great deal and what a wonderful feeling to look at all those goal lists and 99% were completed. I didn’t have to reward myself because I looked around at my very own home and said this is my reward. It was decorated the way I had envisioned and it gives me pleasure, comfort and a feeling of triumph and fulfillment each day of my life.

The other acknowledgment I made was that I felt good about myself. Each goal, each month, each achievement gave me a little of myself back and eventually made me the happy, confident, "smiling for no reason" person I was almost 20 years ago. In Koman’s Step 5 of Part III called "Mending the Broken Heart" she discusses several ways of becoming aware of your recovery. Just a few of these signs are:

I think that all of these signs can be applied to most stressful situations. When losing a job we can see diminished confidence in our abilities to accomplish our daily chores in the workplace. In almost any type of change that reflects on who we are and highlights an area of our life where we feel we have failed, we will probably lose some of our self-esteem. Accepting that reality, making goals to move forward again, giving our self encouragement when we need it and praising our self when we see what we have accomplished will bring us back to where we were and usually give us impetus to move beyond that level to a new, higher plateau.

My goal in this article is to help you realize that most times change results in growth and growth is what makes us stronger, more capable, confident individuals. My own philosophy is that I never want to stop growing because I believe stagnation is a destructive, negative force in our life. As we get older we may want to slow down and relax but that doesn’t mean that we can’t continue to make goals for ourselves. They maybe not be as ambitious as they once were but they will give us that continued feeling of "I can do this."