Valentine’s Day is typically associated with chocolate and flowers, but it’s also an excellent opportunity to express gratitude at work! Employees feel rewarded and motivated when someone or the company takes the extra effort to show them how much they are appreciated.
At GudangAda, we shared hampers to all GADA Troops to show how much we appreciate and care about them. GudangAda also hosted a webinar as we believe that celebrating Valentine’s Day together and participating in joint activities (including the virtual ones) can boost team morale, spark a sense of togetherness, and make everyone feel more engaged.
The webinar titled “Feel Empowered with Self-Love” with Tsamara Fahrana Putrityas is a small #LoveProof to remind all GADA Troops to love themselves first.
In this webinar, we discussed self-love and practiced self-love meditation. The following are some key takeaways from the webinar.
What is self-love?
Self-love is a feeling of appreciation for oneself that stems from actions that promote our physical, psychological, and spiritual development. It is about valuing yourself as a human being deserving of love and respect. It is a combination of self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-compassion.
Self-awareness is conscious knowledge of your own character, feelings, motives, and desires. Self-acceptance is the act or state of understanding and recognizing your own. However, this does not imply that you accept your flaws but refuse to improve. Self-acceptance means that you recognize your abilities and do not try to force your will. This will lead to self-compassion, which is being kind and understanding to yourself when you suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring your pain.
When you love yourself authentically, you also love others authentically, making others love you back for your acceptance of what they perceive as their flawed selves. In the process, you empower yourself along with others for them to give you their personal best. Now, that’s power!
Why self-empowerment?
Feeling empowered means having the knowledge, confidence, means, or ability to do things or make decisions for yourself. Feeling empowered can help you in a variety of areas of your life. It has the potential to improve your relationships, not only with yourself, but also with others. The more self-assured you are, the more people will gravitate toward and trust you.
It can also help you advance in your career because when you feel empowered, you tend to be more in control and manage things better because you don’t have self-doubt weighing you down.
Self-empowerment also means LOVE:
L = Learn from your experience. What can you learn and be grateful for that challenging experience?
O = Ownership of your life. Is there any area where you still blame the circumstances and have a victim mindset?
V = View compassionately. How can you practice compassion for yourself?
E = Empower yourself. What daily practice can I do to empower and love myself? What loving words or affirmations do you need to hear?
Low energy level
A person experiencing low energy may feel tired all the time and may be unable to complete basic tasks without feeling worn out or exhausted. Now, imagine your cellphone’s remaining battery is only 10%. What would your reaction be? Leave it or go find a charger so that the phone can still be used?
Assume the cellphone is your own body. Do you just let it go when you’re experiencing low energy, or do you try to recharge it as soon as possible so you can continue your normal activities?
Without recharging or re-energizing yourself, you will struggle to feel empowered, making it difficult to love yourself.
Re-energizing yourself
There is little to no scientific evidence that energy boosters such as ginseng, guarana, and chromium picolinate work. Luckily, there are things you can do to boost your natural energy levels.
Practicing self-love meditation
You inject far-reaching and long-lasting benefits into your life when you meditate. You lower your level of stress, you become more aware of your pain, you connect better, you enhance your focus, and you are kinder to yourself.
All it takes to practice self-love meditation is one cycle of conscious breath. Take a couple of conscious breaths. With each conscious breath, you can start over and decide to start fresh. You can empower yourself in each new breath.
Journaling
Journaling allows us to express ourselves in a healthy way. This method has been scientifically proven to improve both physical and mental health, also can be done with a variety of tools, including digital gadgets that are more accessible or on paper, where you can write more expressively.
A consistent journaling practice can help you:
Improve self-awareness
Manage stress
Set your intentions
Practice gratitude
Record the life you are experiencing right now
If you journal for 20 minutes about stressful events for three days in a row, you will notice significant improvements in your health, including better sleep, increased immune system, blood pressure regulation, pain reduction in chronic disease, and improved mental health.
Now, have you ever received a love letter from someone? Well, everyone loves love letters! So, at the end of this webinar session, Tsamara invited all GADA Troops to write love letters to themselves to show how much everyone loves themselves.
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