How To Create Effective Affirmations

To put it quite simply, an affirmation is a thought, silent or spoken, either positive or negative, which is repeated throughout the day. Most of us tend to think of affirmations as always positive, as in “I am confident and successful!” But the thought “I am useless!” is also an affirmation. It is said that we have around 50,000 thoughts a day and that most of them are always the same, repeated over and over. If you watch your thoughts, you will begin to recognise recurring themes. And you may well find that your thoughts are mostly negative: “I can’t…”, “I’m no good at…”, “I don’t want…”, and so on. I’m sure you can find quite a few more that are particularly relevant to you. These thoughts have become a habit, and as with any habit, these thoughts can be changed. And what we are aiming to do is to change the negative thoughts or affirmations into positive ones. nnWhat prevents successful affirmations? We could just spend all day repeating “I am confident and successful” and come to the conclusion that affirmations don’t work. And in a way, that’s right, because there is much more to it than just repeating the words. To start with, if you think again about the thought “I am useless”, it may well conjure up pictures from our past of being criticised or ridiculed by a parent or teacher. Maybe we remember not being able to do a task perfectly and feeling foolish. And these pictures reinforce the words, making them much more powerful by recreating the feelings of being useless, and so we come to believe these words. So it seems that the important part of an affirmation is the feeling we associate with the words. And therefore it is key to realise that it is the feeling the words conjure up that can affect the power of an affirmation. If we can change our feelings, we can change our thoughts and therefore our beliefs.nnHow can we get affirmations to work for us? Let’s look at our example affirmation, “I am confident and successful”. As we have discovered just saying these words over and over is not going to help us to feel confident. But, just for a moment, close your eyes, quieten your thoughts, breathe slowly, and see yourself in a situation where you would normally lack confidence. Now change the picture: see yourself standing tall, people looking to you for advice, smiling at you in admiration; you are in charge of the situation, you know what you have to do, you feel confident and it feels good. Enjoy and delight in feeling good. Now each time you repeat this affirmation, “I am confident and successful”, conjure up those feelings again, lift your head and feel that confidence. For many of us, there is another barrier to successful affirmations in that we hear a naggy little voice that is constantly contradicting any positive statements we make. If we affirm “I am wealthy”, this little voice will instantly reply “But your bank balance is at zero!” This contradiction sets up a conflict inside, not allowing any positive feelings and effectively cancelling out the affirmation. But there is a good way to outwit this inner critic by not giving it the opportunity to contradict. So instead of saying “I am wealthy”, we alter the wording of the affirmation to “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I was wealthy?” Now this allows us not only to visualise just how wonderful it would be but also makes it so much easier to have those positive feelings we need for effective affirmations. Our inner critic just doesn’t have a chance to argue against that! Changing our negative beliefs into positive beliefs through affirmations may not happen ove ight. But if we can choose to conjure up those joyful feelings, either with visualisation or through altering the words we use, then we give ourselves the power to change our lives through effective affirmations!