One of my favorite journaling tools is something I call the Sentence Stem. Basically, when I am using journaling in a workshop or classroom, I provide the first half of the sentence and participants finish it. If you polled my students, they would tell you that their least favorite thing that we do in class are reading quizzes. They loathe them. And, yeah, I know they are hard. So this semester, I gave my students a totally different type of quiz on their last day of class. It was a sentence stem quiz that really just asked them to gather their own understanding of self-acceptance. For this week’s spark, I am sharing those sentence stem starters with you. I hope you will take just a few minutes to answer them– either in the comments section or in your own journal. And because I was so touched by my students’ reflections, I shared a few of their sentences here, too (with their permission).
If I were more self-accepting, I would…
Self-acceptance is an opportunity to…
When I think about being more self-accepting, I am most worried about…
When I think about being more self-accepting, I am most excited about…
I want to be more self-accepting because…
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Self-acceptance is an opportunity to enjoy life and enjoy being who you were made to be. ~Breayonna
Self-acceptance is an opportunity to learn to love myself and experience a greater degree of happiness. ~Laura
Self-acceptance is an opportunity to grow freely. ~Jordan
Self-acceptance is an opportunity to embrace who I am even though I am not exactly where I want to be. ~Lily
Self-acceptance is an opportunity to live a life without judgment from the one person that really matters. ~Quinesha
When I think about being self-accepting, I am most excited about seeing the outcome of my growth. ~Quenesha
When I think about being self-accepting, I am most excited about the natural ease that comes with it. ~Crystal
I want to be more self-accepting because I have so much to offer to people and I shouldn’t be ashamed about it. ~Adrienne
I want to be more self-accepting because I want to grow and learn more about who I am and be in tune with my star power. ~Jane’t
I want to be more self-accepting because it is exhausting being paranoid and critical of myself. ~Alexis
I want to be more self-accepting because I don’t want to be at war with myself. ~Christina
