Seeing Friends Achieve Personal Growth

Are you an encourager? Today I want to start out by telling a story about a friend I have who has lost 100lb.

He shared his journey on Facebook, but he was a little embarrassed to share, because he did not want to seem like he was bragging. Although, it is wonderful to see how well he did, and it was encouraging.

Learning a Lesson to Encourage

One thing I learned is that he should have felt completely comfortable talking about it. We tend not to want to share our success because we do not want to come across boastful. In some cases that is what people are doing, but in this case, he was sharing the progress he made. He was encouraging others who were watching his journey.

We can learn from reading and thinking about his story. Sometimes we can get so caught up in worrying about, “What if I am bragging?” because we know we should not be bragging about things. However, there is a difference between talking about an achievement and talking about how great we are because of that achievement. We should be able to share our successes at some times! We tend to be more willing to share our failures than our achievements because we are afraid of what people might think.

Sharing Your Journey

There is nothing wrong with sharing what we have gone through. (Here is a great article to give you the basics on how to do that.) Share what you have learned from the experience. It is a very valuable thing to share your story. Because there are a lot of people out there who are trying to do the very thing you have done. Sharing your story can help them and encourage them along the way. It is a huge encouragement, and it shows people that they can achieve the same goals.

Sharing your journey with the mindset of wanting to help other people is a whole lot different than sharing to show off to other people. When you see someone sharing that they are working at a goal, encourage them to keep going. Tell them how well they are doing.

Encouraging Others

I want to encourage you today to be an encourager. Not only does it help them, but it can help us too. (This link shows what the MOST IMPORTANT encouragement is from us.)

There are people who do not get enough or any encouragement at all and we all need encouragement. There are people who refuse to tell other people they are doing a good job. They will say they do not want the other person who is being encouraged to get a big head. Some of these people would not bring themselves to ever give a compliment. Or the ones that do, turn right back around an insult them also. Shame on you if that is what you do. That is ungodly.

Be happy for the success of other people. Their success does not in any way take away from your success.

Now I understand it can be hard to be happy and encourage someone else if you yourself have never been encouraged. But, it is a good sign of strength and maturity if you can give people encouragement.

Now you should not give praise to someone with the mindset that you should receive praise back, that is not the right motive. The right motive is to see how well the other person is doing and genially wanting to praise them for it. There are benefits in praising other people though, it is really hard to praise someone for doing a great thing and not feel good about it.