Morning readers,
How often do you go out of your way to offer encouragement to your friends and family?
How often do you seek out information in the form of books, articles or videos that encourage you?
A wonderful quote that I recently read stated that encouragement is oxygen for the soul.
It is fascinating that when teaching a child a new skill such as walking or talking, us human beings have unlimited patience and offer huge encouragement even with the smallest of progress. However, when the child gets older and older the encouragement dissipates and all that remains are scowling orders and unreasonable expectations on how well it should be achieving compared to their peers.
Experiments conducted have shown that people learn quicker and retain more when encouraged yet as a species we still don't take heed and are all too quick to criticise.
From a religious perspective, it is interesting for me to see that God almighty praises a nation in the Quran as being the best nation and gives 2 reasons for the praising the nation.
None of the reasons include education, affluence or health.
In chapter 3:110 of the Quran, God praises a nation for its people encouraging each other towards righteousness and discouraging each other from evil.
In today's world, there seems to be a huge focus on ourselves and doing the best that we can. There is nothing wrong with wanting the best for ourselves. It is in our nature.
What I am really trying to convey is that each of us possess the power to provide oxygen to the soul of each other with words of praise, recognition and encouragement and we should be mindful to not neglect this beautiful gift that we are able to offer that doesn't even cost us anything. We should also be mindful to find people and sources of encouragement to ensure that we grow and develop into our full potential.
As often, I will end this post post with a quote:
9/10ths of education is encouragement.
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