The Power of Affirmations

TAGS Affirmations Personal Development Self Improvement Self-help

Positive Affirmations

Have you tried affirmations? Do you think they’re all just New Age nonsense? Have you been doing them for years and feel that you’re getting nowhere? Are you afraid you’ll just end up muttering away to yourself in the small hours of the morning?

Let me ask you this? Do you have a little self-critic living inside your head? A little voice that, as soon as you have a great new idea, it goes “Who do you think you are, with your great big ideas?” or maybe “It’ll never work, just like that time you …” or even “There’s no point, you’re just no good at that” ? What do you suppose that is? Yep. It’s a little voice doing affirmations. BUT it’s doing negative affirmations!

We all have them, a little inner voice that criticises us when we try anything new, or want a promotion, or want to write a book, or stand up and make ourselves heard. So - if you don’t believe affirmations work - have you noticed how well the negative affirmations DO work? Do you ignore the voice? (Rarely) Laugh at it? (I wish I could) Do you not have an inner voice? (What???) If you don’t, then please write a book about it, because you are one in a million!

For me, affirmations (the positive ones we read about and try out sometimes) are just an attempt to level the playing field. If I’ve been programming myself with negative affirmations for years, it’s only right to start bombarding myself with positive ones to even up the balance. I have years of negativity to combat and conquer. This is not a moan, or an accusation or an “Ain’t it awful” . This is just a fact. I have been accumulating a huge recording of negative messages for years. I have also gathered positive ones, but the negative ones (for most of us) win out.

Now the worm has turned. The little guy (me) is fighting back. The meek are inheriting the earth. And positive affirmations are a fantastic tool in the arsenal of any self-improvement fan. I don’t always find it easy to formulate a “good” affirmation. The best format (according to various experts in the field) is that:

They must be framed in the positive e.g. don’t say you don’t want to be overweight, say that you want to be trim and a healthy weight for you. This is because your mind doesn’t recognise negatives. For example, if I say “Don’t think of a bright blue car” you’ve already gone and done just what I told you not to. Because - in order to know what it is NOT to do - your mind has to reference what a bright blue car is before it can tell itself not to think about it! You’ll think it’s crazy, but you have no idea how convoluted our minds are (and yet, completely logical when you think about it).
Affirmations need to be in the present tense e.g. “I enjoy eating healthily and maintaining my ideal weight”. Your mind can only deal with right now, this minute. Everything in the past has been filed, and what is yet to come is not able to be processed until it comes. If we affirm “I am going to eat healthily” it’s never going to be NOW, so we’ll always be “going” to do it, but never DO it.
The more clear we can make the mental picture, the better the affirmation. e.g. “I am enjoying maintaining my healthy weight of xx lbs”. It gives us a positive, measurable statement to ourselves, backed up by an image of our slender selves, or of our ideal weight appearing on the window of our bathroom scales. Whatever works for you.

I only use the weight issue as an example, it’s quite a common source of affirmations. You can use the same format for any personal development affirmations you want to devise for yourself.

I love hearing from readers when they try any of the self-improvement suggestions from this blog. Comment here or contact me at daria@lifepotential.ie .

This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Beliefs & Values, Confidence, Human Behaviour, Self Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.