I Heart Me by David Hamilton Page A

‘A’ in large red writing at the top, he whispered, ‘You’ve given me the wrong paper.’
    He’d simply made the assumption that he couldn’t possibly get an A. He believed he was not good enough .
    I assured him it was his paper and that he should be proud of himself. He’d earned his ‘A’. His eyes immediately welled up with tears. He quickly looked away, embarrassed.
    I walked on, tapped his shoulder and said, ‘Well done, son!’ I hope that helped him feel that he was good enough.
    I learned just last year that one of those boys had gone on to university and graduated with a first-class honours degree in engineering.
    Magic can sometimes happen when we face our difficulties instead of trying to avoid them. Visualizing and power posing helped me to face this challenge. They rewired my brain sufficiently in the week leading up to the second lesson. I kept the practice up for a few more weeks after that too. It showed me clearly that by changing our brain, and therefore how we respond to life’s events, we find new possibilities opening up that quite simply didn’t exist for us before.
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SELF-LOVE GYM: How to Be a Self-Love Olympian
Think of a situation where your self-worth is low. It might be at work, at home, in a social situation, on the telephone. You might be getting bullied or taken advantage of. You might be giving your power away. You might be able to think of many different scenarios…
Now imagine yourself in the same situation but now in a state of ‘I am enough.’ Imagine how you’d be standing. How would you move? Would your spine be erect? What about your shoulders? How would you be breathing? What would you be saying? How would you be saying it? What kind of tone would your words have? Would you speak quickly or slowly?
Play the scene out in your mind five to 10 times as you wire ‘I am enough’ into your brain. Start the first few times by reminding yourself of how you were in the not enough stage, but by the third or fourth time, just go straight into imagining your behaviour from an ‘I am enough’ space.
Repeat this process consistently – either daily or a few times a week – until you actually do show you are enough in that situation.
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Insight to Wired
    When I talk about wiring brain networks, sometimes someone comments that surely a person can just have a moment of insight and know they are enough , just as a person can have a moment of insight that leaves them enlightened.
    That’s absolutely true! And with that insight come changes in brain chemistry that support the new mindset. Over time, with consistent thinking and feeling in this new way, brain networks build up and wire in that knowledge, and once the brainnetworks are there, there’s very little chance you’ll ever go back to the not enough stage of self-love. Ultimately, it only does take one thought.
    If that insight hasn’t struck you yet, though, don’t despair – keep wiring in ‘I am enough’ and you’ll make it stick! Repetition! Repetition! Repetition!
    In summary… The brain doesn’t distinguish between real and imaginary. Plenty of research shows that it changes as we do something and changes by about the same amount if we imagine doing the thing instead.
    All élite athletes use this phenomenon of neuroplasticity to enhance their performance through visualization. Rehabilitation specialists also teach visualization to patients recovering from a stroke, because imagining movement actually helps the brain to recover.
    What all this means is that we can imagine ourselves acting with a healthy level of self-worth and our brain will wire in this healthy level.
    We can also forget how to have low self-worth, just as we can forget how to do long division. If we don’t give our attention to thinking of ourselves as small or less-than and instead focus on thinking and acting in a way