Humility; Letting others have the spotlight

For the next seven days I’m focusing on humility and looking at how I can use humility more in my life, and and using that as a strength.

We’re going to start off with a definition; It’s about letting your accomplishments speak for themselves. Not regarding oneself as being special in any way.

The essence is, achievements don’t elevate your worth. It’s about thinking I’m okay, but I’d rather actually focus on you, that’s really being humble, and really trying to shine the light on someone else.

The dimensions is modestly.

Some questions that you can ask yourself to help you use humility more often:

1. How can you balance humility with your ego driven desires, for recognition? For praise
2. What obstacles to expressing greater humility are there in your life?
3. Think of a time you regret being humble, and how can you make a slight change, yet retain humility if that situation were to happen again?

Interventions: Think about a time and write about when you felt humility, how did you feel?
What did you think at that time? Ensure that it’s genuine and not self-deprecating.
Look for examplars as heroes and write about their characteristics to help you feel your feed your humble nature, and starve your arrogant nature. This is a really good exercise.

The golden mean: It’s right in between arrogance at one end of the spectrum and the other end you’ve got self-deprecation, and humility is right in the middle between those.

Correlations: These are areas, strengths that correlate well with humility, and often needed to use humility properly. Prudence, Fairness, Honesty/integrity, Teamwork, and Kindness.

1. Actions you can take; 
   Resisting showing off your accomplishments, maybe for one week, and notice the change in interpersonal relationships. Do people act surprised you waited to reveal your news for one week?
2. If you notice you’re better than someone at a task, allow others to notice your skills on their own.
3. When others show off, observe the reactions that show-offs get from other observers.
4. Notice if you speak more than others in a group situation, concentrate on listening to the words of others rather than waiting for your opportunity to speak. Which really goes back to Stephen Covey’s Seven habits of highly successful people; he talks about listening with the intent to understand, rather than the intent to reply.
5. Compliment people sincerely who are authentically better than you in some ways,.
6. Accept compliments from others, about being humble.

It’s one of the least endorsed strengths across the globe. Requires accurate self-assessment, and a recognition of limitations and a forgetting of the ‘self’.
It strengthens social bonds and humble people are more helpful than less humble people.

That’s this week, all about humility. Next week is humour, so it’s going to be quite a different approach.I hope you enjoyed this one and tomorrow we’re back to movement and there’ll be another blog on that.

I help my clients to think about creating health.
To look at the body as a whole system.
To look at sleep, breathing, nutrition, movement and mindset.
To optimise the essential functions of our body to create health.
By helping the people I work with improve their sleep quality and quantity, they get more deep sleep and REM sleep.
They have better functional breathing so they don’t get out of breath so quickly, and can play with their kids and grandkids.
We explore foods that aid their autoimmune system rather than create inflammation and fight against it.
We discuss the most appropriate form of regular movement for their lives, so they’re not so prone to breaking bones if they fall down.
And above all, to have the mindset of knowing they can take responsibility for their own health, be proactive about it, rather than what so many people do, which is to be reactive and wait until the pain, or the tumour shows, or receive that diagnosis.
When you create health often disease goes away as a side effect.