Build self awareness & self esteem with a simple exercise that can be done anywhere
Sentence completion exercises are where you take an incomplete sentence then think up a bunch of endings for it to reveal any answers/insights/wisdom that you didn’t realise you knew. I first read about this technique in ‘The 6 Pillars of Self Esteem’ by Nathaniel Branden where he calls these sentences ‘stems’, but I prefer to call them ‘seeds’. Here’s an example of a seed:
If I were to live a more responsible life…
Once you have your seed you then list down whatever endings to the sentence appear in your head. There’s just one rule to follow: your ending should be a grammatical completion of the sentence. Here are some example endings for the above seed:
According to Branden, practicing the sentence completion technique can help you live more consciously as it strengthens your ability to select and move useful information from your subconscious into your conscious.
Sentence-completion work is a deceptively simple yet uniquely powerful tool for raising self-understanding, self-esteem, and personal effectiveness. The 6 Pillars of Self Esteem by Nathaniel Branden
For me there is also an added benefit in that we get to choose the seed which I think can just as revealing as the endings you come with. Asking yourself “If I could have done that task even better…” feels very constructive and way more approachable than “why did I do a poor job?” so there’s less chance you’ll criticise yourself or suppress any uncomfortable truths.
Another thing I like about this technique is that creating whole sentences is a great way of inspiring instant positive changes to your beliefs. For example: say you want to increase your level of fitness so you add “exercise” onto your schedule for each day. Nothing wrong with this but it’s just an activity, another task for you to complete, there’s not much logical or emotional connection to it. But what if instead you told yourself “if I exercise every day then I’ll be in better shape at the end of the year”? Now you got a reason to do your exercise and because the statement is clearly true you’re more likely to just accept it and make it part of your core beliefs.
I haven’t figured out the best way to write seeds yet but after looking at a list of seeds on Branden’s website
I don’t think there are any strict rules for writing your seeds but I have noticed that most of the examples on Branden’s website start with ‘if’. I’m assuming this is just a convenient way to start a seed sentence instead of some special requirement.
Most of the seed questions I’ve read are structured like so:
I plan to write some lists of my own seed questions but until that happens check out sentence completion list number 1 and sentence completion list number 2 on Branden’s website for dozens of examples.