PROVE It: P = Pick a Time When You Weren’t Humble
Hopefully, you now feel that you’ve made a sincere decision to be more humble. But making a decision to be more humble is far different than actually experiencing humility in your life. Otherwise, all we would have to do is make a New Year’s resolution that we won’t be prideful, arrogant, or self-righteous, but we wouldn’t have to act on it. But, indeed, although making a decision is necessary, it is not sufficient to really change.
You need to PROVE it to change. The remainder of this growth path is about moving through five steps so you can PROVE your humility. We will work through these five steps to PROVE humility.
Take some deep breaths. We are about to really start working toward humility. Quiet yourself, relax. Picture the situation. Picture the experiences you had during and before and after the situation. Remember conversations and other experiences of events. Going through this exercise will help you understand where you stand and how you can gain some fresh perspective.
- Write about your story. Try to recreate it with detail.
- Now look at what you wrote, but pretend like this is a story about someone else instead of you.
- Get more distance on the story. Do the imagery. Try to make it as elaborate as you can.
- Now, write the story again, but without emphasizing the emotions or consequences of the example.
- What are the differences between the first and second versions of this story?
- If you witnessed someone else doing or saying the same thing, what advice would you give? What could have happened differently?