And So It Begins - An Introduction

Have you ever been travelling through life fairly smoothly, everything going according to plan, when all all of a sudden you come smack bang against a brick wall, an insurmountable obstacle that you cannot pass? I certainly have from time to time, and I think the vast majority of us will have experienced this feeling of being at a dead end. Somehow, hopefully more often than not, we do make it past those dead ends we are faced with, and sometimes, dare I say often (with no reliable data to back me up) this is due in part to the encouragement of a friend.

The 'Oomph' behind Encouragement

We all know words have power, right? Sometimes a word contains so much power just in its meaning. I was quite blown away when I took a look at the component parts of the word encourage. I have shared this before but I would like to touch on it again. Encourage is made up of two parts, en- and courage. Let's take a look at the meaning of each of these (from the wonderfully convenient dictionary.com).

En           - to cause (a person or thing) to be in

Courage - the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain,     
                  etc., without fear; bravery.

So, putting these together, to encourage means "to cause a person (let's forget the 'thing' for now) to be in the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain,
etc., without fear; bravery". Pretty powerful if you ask me. 

The A to Z Project

Encouragement has always been important to me and I am afraid that it is something that I do not do anywhere near enough. I was wondering how the concept of encouragement could be reinforced in my life and hopefully others. That is where the 'A to Z of Encouragement' idea sprouted. Simply put, I will go through each letter and look at aspects of encouragement or things that can encourage that start with that letter. Fairly straightforward, but I don't want to do this on my own (I will certainly need some help with 'x'). What I would ask from you, the readers, is to add additional items that I haven't mentioned in the comments, or of course comment on what I have written. I think in this case we can certainly learn from each other and hopefully the principles of encouragement will be reinforced in each of our lives. I hope at the end to create some sort of graphic or booklet or something of the sort to capture what has been shared.

Ready, Set, Go.......

OK. That's all for now. I am looking forward to journeying with you along the way. Just to kick it all off, I would really love to hear of examples of times where someone has encouraged you to make it past some obstacle in your life journey.

Until next time, be encouraged. In my journeys, I came across the following clip. I hope you enjoy.

Bye for now.