Many self development gurus have promoted the use of affirmations to change your thinking and change your results for many, many years. So what are affirmations? How do they work? And how can you create your own affirmations to achieve your own goals?
An affirmation is a positive statement that you want to be true about yourself. Affirmations work by being repeated again and again. The repetition forces the meaning into the subconscious mind. The subconscious then does everything it can to make that affirmation the truth. This is because the subconscious mind does not judge whether anything it is given is right or wrong, true or false. It just accepts what gets through to it from the conscious mind and then sets about making that true.
In order to create your own affirmations you need to write out a statement that is positive, present tense and personal.
A positive affirmation is one that states what you do want rather than what you don’t want. Your subconscious mind is unable to comprehend negatives. It’s a little like me asking you to not think of a pink elephant under a red umbrella. You have to create a picture of a pink elephant under a red umbrella to consider not thinking about it. By which time it’s too late — you’ve already thought about it!
An affirmation must be in the present tense, as if it is already true for you. If you create an affirmation about what you want to happen some time in the future, the subconscious mind will always accept it as being in the future. And that will mean it doesn’t bring it into the present, now.
Your affirmations must be personal. They are what you want, phrased in the first person. You are talking to yourself and want to take ownership of the desired outcome.
As an example you might create an affirmation: ‘I weigh 140 pounds’. This follows all three criteria. It is positive, present tense and personal. If you had phrased it as ‘I will lose 40 pounds’ then it will not be effective. That statement is negative (lose) and future tense (I will). You are effectively telling your subconscious that some time in the future you will focus on losing 40 pounds. That example is particularly poor as the subconscious mind is programmed to look for anything it thinks is lost! So if you say you will lose 40 pounds, your subconscious will work very hard to make sure you don’t! Quite the opposite of what you intended.
Having created your positive, present tense and personal affirmations, you then need to install them into your subconscious. You can do this by repetition. Say them out loud every morning and every evening. Write them out at least ten times each, every single day. Make up silly songs to sing them to yourself. Singing helps to bypass the critical conscious mind that might be whispering negative remarks as you repeat the affirmations.
In order to make your new affirmations stick you need to repeat them twice daily over a period of at least 21 days in order to establish a habit and a change of thinking pattern. And use them whenever you need a boost as well as morning and evening. The more often you repeat the affirmations the quicker they will take root within your subconscious and the quicker they will start to become truth in your life.
So create your own affirmations. Remember to make them positive, present tense and personal. Practice them frequently and often and you will see your life transform as you start to feel so much better about yourself.
You must log in to post a comment.