Giving and receiving encouragement: For school, sports and other situations

We can all use some encouragement in our lives. As a child, you often get quite a bit of encouragement. When your parents don't give it, there are often friends or grandparents who encourage you to do something right, but in your adult life you suddenly have to encourage yourself. How do you go about that and how can you encourage people around you? In this blog, I explore this in more detail.

Importance of encouragement

Getting encouragement is incredibly nice. It makes you feel better and you feel a better connection with the people from whom you receive encouragement. Especially in times of difficulty, encouragement is nice.

As a child you are constantly encouraged, but even as an adult you can continue to use encouragement to feel good[1].

It can improve your sense of well-being and your sense of quality of life[2].

What does encouragement need to meet?

There are all kinds of ways you can encourage people. A few things are helpful to keep in mind, namely:

1. Focus on what's going well.
2. Communicate respect.
3. Showing appreciation .
4. Avoid a superior way of doing things while encouraging.
5. Share personal experiences.
6. Provide motivation.
7. Cheerleading (cheering).

Also, encourage someone about certain specific behaviors and not in general. In addition, it is also helpful if the encouragement matches the goals, desires and feelings of the person receiving the encouragement from you (source 2).

It is also helpful if you give and receive encouragement from people with whom you collaborate, for whom you have respect, with whom you share responsibilities, with whom you feel equal and with whom you have a sense of "belonging" or perhaps where you want to belong[3].

Giving encouragement goes best when:

1. When you accept that others and yourself are ok the way they are.
2. If you trust the other person and if the other person trusts you.
3. If the other person has a choice in what you give encouragement for.
4. When you express hope and confidence rather than expectations (source 3).

You find that you have (had) plenty of encouragement when you:

1. Have a positive and accurate self-image .
2. Have a positive and accurate view of others and feel connected to humanity.
3. If you are brave enough to be open to experiences and (almost) unafraid to fail.
4. If you have many social connections you can build on and they will build on you.

Encouraging Children

When encouraging children, it is also true that you can be specific about what you are encouraging them about. For example, you can name a beautiful drawing differently.

For example, you can say something like "What beautiful colors you used."

In this example, you can also see that it does not say "I think...".This is because as an adult you always have some kind of "position of power" over your child (or the child in the classroom if you are a teacher ). And if you name yourself, a child may worry about continuing to conform to the "pretty colors." By not naming yourself, the child will continue to focus on what he/she has done well without worry.

A compliment or encouragement to a child also sees a child as an extension of himself. That drawing also belongs to him/her. Saying that something can be "prettier" is actually saying that the child can be "prettier"[4].

So pay attention to that when encouraging children. "Keep going" if you want to encourage a child while coloring with pretty colors, for example, is more helpful.

Encouragement exams/school

Encouraging a child with homework or preparing for exams is something you can tackle in multiple ways. The temptation may be to suggest how a child should do certain things, such as how to do math.

But don't. Instead, express confidence in the child to do what it takes to prepare properly.

If your child has done something good for school acknowledge it and reward your child.

Focus on what your child is good at, the tools they have and your child's interests.

When you review your child's homework, you can also instantly tell how well your child did. Even while you are working on it. The sooner your child gets positive feedback, the better it is for your child's performance and concentration. Again, do not lecture your child on how to do something, but compliment your child on the good answers and encourage them to keep going that way[5].

Encouraging sports/rehabilitation

Improving your body can be done with sports or is sometimes necessary if you are rehabbing from surgery. Even then you can sometimes use some encouragement, but how do you properly approach encouraging someone with exercise?

What is useful to know is that verbal encouragement actually helps improve performance during rehabilitation[6].

Encouraging people while running a marathon, or something similar, also helps runners improve their performance. Research on runners shows that encouragement by the public makes them feel like "giving back" by doing their best. Personal and authentic support was especially appreciated.

But some support also made them feel like they had to "perform." In that case, a kind of judgment came into the encouragement and that, in turn, does not help[7].

Encouragement work

Getting and giving encouragement at work can also be helpful. In fact, encouragement at work helps improve productivity and quality of work[8].

Making encouragement easier

Now that you know how to give encouragement in different situations and what it is good for, it may be time to actually give it, but you may be reading this because you are not used to getting and giving encouragement at all.

Many people who find it difficult to utter words of appreciation find this difficult because they have not been taught this from home. Maybe you are very good at giving criticism, but compliments and encouragement just wasn't in there and so that's not in your "vocabulary."[9]

In this case, it may be helpful to practice giving encouragement first. For example, you can write down a few phrases in a notebook and say them several times before doing the same in real life with your partner, children or at work.

A hypnotherapist can help you determine what encouragement you want to give and how to practice it. You can also practice this in hypnosis. For example, you can use a guided visualization to practice how it feels and goes when you give encouragement to colleagues at work.

That visualization can also be used as an audio recording so you can practice it again at home to make it easier to give (and receive) encouragement.

Some phrases for your work may include:

"How nice how you are shaping that project."

"I appreciate the coffee you bring every time."

"Super text again on the website/mail/social media."

These are just examples, depending on what you want to give encouragement about, you may get other phrases to practice with.

Receive encouragement

Giving encouragement can be the first step to receiving encouragement. But what do you do next when you actually receive encouragement back?

Of course, it can happen that while you receive encouragement and compliments, you just don't believe that someone has your best interests at heart. That you think someone is just saying that "because they should," when really that person means it.

This is incredibly unfortunate because then you can't really enjoy it either.

In that case, it is helpful to find out where that feeling came from. With hypnosis, you can do this through regression. With regression, for example, you can go back to the moment when you first felt that the encouragement was not sincere.

You then go on to do something with that moment in your mind. This allows you to revisit and reinterpret the moment from a distance. That way, you can notice, for example, why you thought that at the time and why that thought has lingered even though it does not apply to the situation now.

Sometimes that alone is enough.

But sometimes more is needed. Then you can also start the conversation in your mind with the person you were then and grow with them into who you are now. You then leave that feeling behind, so to speak.

Now that you know how useful encouragement is and what you can do to give and receive encouragement, you can move forward with your goals again.

Want to learn more about hypnosis and how to use it for yourself and others? Then come to the free online master class on hypnosis.

Or enroll in one of our training courses .

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