The Mighty are running monthly self-confidence challenges all year. I religiously did the daily writing in January. Was too exhausted to do whatever the February challenge was! But I’m going to drop in late and start the March Challenge. The week two task is:

Now that you have your top strengths and examples, make a list of at least one activity you can do to bolster each strength. For the rest of the month, try to accomplish these activities.

[I don’t even know what kind of things they’re referring to?! Bolster my strengths? How do I bolster personality traits? I’ll have a think and make something up…]
1. Kindness and generosity: Oh – I just remembered I forgot to visit grandma today! So I have reneged on some kindness and generosity. I will make sure I visit her on the weekend. I will also make some time to organise activities for my niece and nephew when they come to visit in a few weeks. And I’m going to do lots of planning and preparation for this weekend’s family dinner, which will feature a birthday cake for my 84 year old dad 🙂
2. Honesty, authenticity, and genuineness: I want to focus on doing some recovery work – and this definitely requires these three traits. I want to think about (and write down) all the tools that I have discovered over the past few years and work out how I can use them, and why I haven’t done so as yet.
3. Judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness: I tend to be very black and white in my thinking – which is a huge impedence to recovery. A massive stumbling block! I need to have a big red flag wave around in front of me the moment I feel that rebellious tendency to dismiss a recovery suggestion as being unnecessary, irrelevant, or too hard.
4. Leadership: Not so much leadership… But I have let my friends take charge of our friendships in recent times. They do all the contacting and organsing to catch up etc. I can become more proactive in nurturing these relationships that are so important, and have been an amazing lifeline for me in recent times.
5. Modesty and humility: Again, a recovery stance for this one. I can take more time to listen to other’s stories of recovery, grief, trauma, mental illness etc, and worry less about how it relates to me, and focus more on how extraordinary every single human being is. We’re all fighting a battle…