Sunday Soundbite

Alison Whitney gave the presidency message for the month of June.  She based her talk on the youth theme for the month How do women and priesthood work together to build the kingdom of God?  She was also led to a conference talk by Elder Cook entitled, LDS Women are Incredible!

Alison asked the room full of women to show, by raise of hands, "who has had negative thoughts about yourself?"  Almost immediately, about every hand in the room went up.  A few minutes later she asked, "who has positive thoughts about themselves?"  The observation was that the women quickly and without hesitation identified that they had negative thoughts about themselves.  However, it took longer, and hands were slower and fewer to rise, when the women were asked to identify if they had positive thoughts about themselves.

Why don't we recognize our value?

• We focus on being better instead of celebrating where we are.
• We compare ourselves to the great accomplishments of others.
• We are too busy to give ourselves time to focus on ourselves.
• We may confuse humility with identifying talents/worth.

There is a website created by Hilary Weeks called billionclicks.org.  Alison summarized the message of this site which speaks to the power of positive thoughts.  In order to recognize how incredible you are, you need to take LEAPS of faith:

• L - look for the positive
• E - expect reasonable results
• A - approval from within
• P - prioritize the things that matter most (we can have limits and say NO)
• S - service to and from others; be able to give and receive

(From Ensign March 1982 "Learning to Love Myself")