Our guest speaker today was Benjamin Sampson, Outreach Specialist with Wounded Warrior Project. Mr. Sampson spoke about personal growth and development using Accomplishment Boards.
Accomplishment boards allow the person to revisit the memory by allowing you to see, think and feel the emotions attached to the achievement.
What Accomplishment Boards do is to reinforce positive beliefs, overcome negative beliefs and identify the skill set you have to achieve a desired outcome. They help you feel good about yourself.
He spoke about the Biology of Belief and how your brain finds change to be difficult. The brain tries to get us back on the path of least resistance. Our belief system resides in our subconscious mind. Consistent actions and repetitions over time becomes habit-it hardwires that belief into our default subconscious level.
Each participant at the collaborative was asked to start their own accomplishment board. Here is how to start:
1. Pen and Paper
2. Draw line down the middle of the paper
3. On left side write accomplishments-chronologically, brainstorm areas of your life (family, work, hobbies, travel, etc)
4. Find pictures, words, articles or draw a picture. How to emotionalize an accomplishment.
Pick 1 accomplishment and answer the following questions
a. How did you get there?
b. What challenges and obstacles did you overcome?
c. What hardship did you go through to get there?
d. What did you learn in the process?
e. What new skills did you acquire-physical skill, technical skill or emotional skill?
f. How did you feel when you accomplished that?
Take yourself back to that moment. What did you feel? Joy, Relief? Let yourself rest there for a minute. Let yourself experience the emotions attached to that accomplishment. Value that experience, relive those emotions.
5. On right side of each accomplishment put name of the person(s) who helped you get there in achieving that goal
6. Pick one of those names and tell them Thank You. No One Succeeds Alone Believe that people care enough about us to help us get through-helped you believe in yourself.
7. Put up where you can see it
Thank you to Ben for providing this exercise and we hope each of you took some time to develop your personal accomplishment board.
