I’d like to highly recommend Mary Pipher’s The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding our Families.

Mary Pipher is the author of Reviving Ophelia, which you may remember from the 1990s as the hottest book about the lives of teenage girls.

The Shelter of Each Other analyzes and recommends practices to modify our work-life balance, that is the amount of time that we spend with our families and the amount of time that we spend with our work.

Pipher also critiques some of the ways that we currently deal with challenges in the workplace:

Often insecure adults try to boltster their self-esteem with compliments. Many listen to self-affirmation tapes as they drive to work, or they ply themselves with programmed messages that they are good people. These self-affirmations have a place, but they have been oversold as a panacea for a difficult life. If a person’s work is meaningless and his/her relationships are fragmented, self-validation will go only so far. Then the person needs to make real changes.

This advice resonates with me. I love the Love Yourself affirmation cards that Cheryl Rainfield makes, but they aren’t the solution for every type of problem.

Prayer, meditation, guided journeys–it’s good stuff, but after contemplation you may find that that actual solution to your problem may be in changing your position, your job, or your field. That may be the ultimate way to affirmation yourself.