Sentence Completion Exercises for Personal Awareness

[Nethic]

Have you guys ever heard about this thing called sentence completion?

It is an incredibly powerful method for increasing self awareness and self esteem (if you actually act on the things that you do).

Anyway, its a technique developed by Dr Nathaniel Branden (often credited to be the father of the self esteem movement).

Its very simple to do. You're given a sentence stem, and your job is to finish the sentence, 6-10 times. The trick is that you should do this as quickly as possible, without thinking about consequences, rehearsing your answers, or playing out the scenarios in your head. The goal of the exercise is to work as rapidly as possible. You literally read the sentence stem, and then write the very first thing that comes to your mind.

From esteemedself.com

Sentence-completion work is a deceptively simple yet uniquely powerful tool for raising self-understanding, self-esteem and personal effectiveness. It rests on the premise that all of us have more knowledge than we normally are aware of – more wisdom than we use, more potential than typically shows up in our behavior. Sentence completion is a tool for accessing and activating these dormant or “hidden” resources.

Sentence completion can be used in many ways. Here I will describe a way I find particularly effective. The essence of this procedure is to write an incomplete sentence (or sentence stem) and then write a number of different endings, with the sole requirement that each ending is a grammatical completion of the sentence. Aim for a minimum of six endings.

To truly benefit from the exercises, you should work as rapidly as possible. Don’t pause to “think”, invent responses if you get stuck and don’t worry if any particular ending is true, reasonable or significant. The object is simply to let your thoughts flow forward without impediment.

I thought it would be fun to share our responses to some of these.

Happiness to me means -

feeling warmth
feeling acceptance
being independant
being immortal
having someone to hug
having a shoulder to cry on
having someone who understands me
having someone who accepts me for who i am
having a job
having my own money
having a girlfriend
having friends who accept me for who i am

If I bring more awareness to my life today -

i would realize that im being lazy
i would realize that i need to get to work
i would realize that i need to get off this forum and start doing work
i would send out messages for the statistics study group
i would set up the meetup location for my statistics study group
i would work on my website
i would finish up the work on my website
i would dedicate today to finishing the work on my website

If I make happiness a conscious goal ...

i would do the things i wrote above
i would do all the things i wrote above
i would get off my ass and get things going
i would get started
i would get off this forum
i would get to work
i would start playing my part
i would realize that i need to work in order to succeed
i would realize that i need to put in effort if i want to be happy
i would work on my website
i would get to it
i would send out emails for the statistics study group


I've been doing these for about a year now. Its been life changing, to say the least. Anyway, I'm gonna go now...

Try these exercises out for the stems:
Edit: To make replies to this shorter / easier, pick one of these 3 stems and reply. It can be daunting to write replies to all 3.
PICK ONE OF THESES and reply


Happiness to me means -
If I bring more awareness to my life today -
If I make happiness a conscious goal -


Have fun.

 

[Peachykeen]

Happiness to me means -
accepting myself
being accepted by others
not feeling negative
being loved
being patient

If I bring more awareness to my life today -
these feelings will go away eventually (sorry didn't have a better response for this one)

If I make happiness a conscious goal -
I would stop being so negative
I would put in more effort with those around me
I would try to love myself more

 

[Nethic]

If I make happiness a conscious goal -

i would work on my project today
i would write better comments in my code today
i would go to the kareoke meetup
i would write my final report
i would work on my statistics exam
i would study statistics a bit
i would stop being so lazy
i would spend less time browsing websites
i would spend less time on this forum

 

[Peaches]

Happiness to me means:
being in a warm, social environment
be loved and love
have good central heating and my mattress
to give
to make music, to be in music
spend time with nature and animals
spend time in creative activities (also with others)



If I bring more awareness in my life: I will drop dead, because I really do my best already