WHY USE AFFIRMATIONS?

The short answer is Because they work!

As we saw in the Beliefs and Money section, Positive affirmations can be used to create positive and permanent change to your life. If you have needs and desires that are not being met then positive affirmations can help manifest them in your life. This helps you create a more empowering way of life for yourself.

We use positive affirmations to simply help programme our brain into the new belief model that we have chosen. Each thought we have and sentence we speak is an affirmation. It affirms our existing belief system and this then creates how we experience life.

But here’s the scary thing...the vast, vast majority of our thoughts are limiting or negative, some say as high as 90% ! AND what’s even more worrying is that the human ego finds it easier to believe the negative thoughts than the positive ones.

For instance, imagine that you’re having a great day, everything is flowing well and then something negative happens that really upsets you. How many of us will focus on that one bad thing that happened rather than the majority of the day that was good? The answer is most of us! It’s this situation that works so effectively at keeping our negative and limiting beliefs so strongly in place. 

Using Positive affirmations will enable you to question and challenge your limiting beliefs and consequently you’ll start to notice the huge number of negative thoughts and words that you use in order to validate them and thus keep them in place. We saw that our beliefs are simply thought patterns that we have learned from someone else, usually in childhood. Some of those are helpful to us as adults and some of them are limiting beliefs and so prevent us from being as competent, successful, skilled or confident as we are capable of being.

Every affirmation we think or say is a clear indication of our inner truth or beliefs. This is why it can be so revealing to slow our minds down and start to witness the chatter that goes on in our heads. It is SO VERY REVEALING about what we really think about ourselves, others and the world !!

So once we have listened and we know we want to change something we can use a positive affirmation to change a specific subconscious belief.

GET RID OF YOUR LIMITING BELIEFS

The intention is to replace your limiting belief with a positive one that serves you better and helps nurture you. You’re re-programming your brain by deciding which limiting beliefs you are going to let go and what new more positive beliefs you are going to replace them with. This is a very empowering act

By using positive affirmations we therefore are able to keep a strong focus on our goals and desires. Additionally we become much more aware and more conscious of our every thought and every word that we utter. When these thoughts and words reinforce an old belief that we wish to change because it no longer serves us we can notice it and immediately change the energy by replacing the thought or sentence with an empowering statement instead – a positive affirmation!


How and why affirmations work.

Affirmations will work best for you when you have made the decision that you really wish to change something that is not working for you in your life. By making this decision you have implicitly decided to let go of the old and welcome in something new in its place.

The re-programming of the brain works in the following way:

You state your positive affirmation as if it were already true (we’ll come back to how to create a powerful affirmation) and this causes your brain to be confronted with something new, with a new belief. Your brain will then either choose to consider this new information and adopt it or it will feel threatened by the new belief and so it will fight back by resisting the new belief and holding on strongly to the old one.

The easy way to check out which route your brain is following is to simply “listen to your body”. It’s an easy thing to say but most of us have forgotten how to listen to our bodies. It’s that place of allowing your body rather than your brain to tell you how you really feel about something. So if you feel a tension in your body or an overall negative feeling as you say the new positive affirmation you’ll know your mind is feeling threatened and it’s therefore defending its old belief. On the other hand if your body relaxes and you feel a sense of happiness and well-being your body is telling you that it believes the statement to be true. In other words it has already made the transition to the new belief and it’s very happy to be there. Sometimes an affirmation will go to this place very quickly and other times you will have to keep working on it until your mind finally gives up the old and stops resisting the new and finally believes your new statement to be true.

If your mind is resisting taking on the new belief don’t worry- it’s completely normal. In fact the bigger the limiting belief you’re trying to change the more your mind is likely to resist it. you may even feel that the affirmation is a total joke and a big lie and it’ll never happen!! Don’t get disheartened if you think it’s not working, on the contrary remember that the bigger the limiting belief and the more deeply ingrained it is in your psyche the more energy and work it will take to shift it – but trust me that it will be well worth it !  Simply continue repeating your affirmations with total conviction and passion. This will have the effect of dismantling your old limiting belief bit by bit until it finally breaks down.

Probably the two biggest factors that will influence how long it will take to change and how much effort you’ll need to put in will be:

1. How deeply ingrained is the belief in your system and how big a belief is it for you to alter? 2. How committed are you to create the change?

The only one of these two that you can affect is the second. The first is a given but if you’re ready to make an improvement in your life it WILL change

CHOOSING & CREATING POWERFUL AFFIRMATIONS

To give you as much help as possible in succeeding with your affirmations here are some top tips! :

1. The first point is to remember that it’s not just about repeating a short sentence. It’s a whole process of becoming aware of your thoughts and words at any time. When you notice that your thinking or expressing a limiting belief then make a different choice and decide to think and speak positive, empowering statements. The more you can incorporate this into your daily thought and speech patterns the quicker you will see great results.

2. If you’ve already found some limiting beliefs that you want to work with then start with them. If not then consider reading that section (link to beliefs section) or otherwise start focusing on some areas of your life that you would like to be different. Think about how you’d like them to look and write it down. See if you can write 2 or 3 positive statements about the area that you’d like to change. ( Note you’ll often notice that I say write something down or say it out loud and the reason for this is because the energy is much stronger when you do and so it helps with whatever exercise you’re doing)

3. Each affirmation needs to be written in the PRESENT TENSE – otherwise your energy focuses on something in the future rather than bringing into your energetic field NOW.

4. It needs to be POSITIVE! Ie focus on what you do want not what you don’t want.

For example if you have a limiting or negative belief that you are unsuccessful in relationships you may decide this is an area where you would like things to be different. So you might write down something like this:

I want a successful relationship.

Notice that this is actually not written in the present tense so we need to change it to be something like:

I am able to have a successful relationship

It is already positive but there’s no reason why you can’t make it even more positive so you might develop it further to say:

I am able to have a successful relationship that fulfils so many parts of my life.

Play with this process and have a bit of fun with it because what’s really important in creating an affirmation is that it feels right for YOU. Write something down and then add to it, change it, sit with it for a few hours and come back to it and see if it still feels right. Trust your own intuition and wisdom to know that you’ll know it when you get there.
Sometimes we don’t know where we want to get to but we know that we want to change something. If that’s the case you can use something as simple as

"I am ready and willing to let go of the past, now"

5.  SPEAK YOUR AFFIRMATIONS OUT LOUD

I’ve already stated why saying things out load and writing them down is more powerful. This is absolutely the case with affirmations too. Once you have created your affirmation you need to say it out loud as often as you can and an even stronger result will be achieved if you speak it aloud whilst looking at yourself in the mirror. This can be a very challenging thing for some people. If it is for you don’t be surprised and please don’t be put off either. Just acknowledge that you find it challenging and be gentle with yourself and in your own time start the process. Looking at yourself as you say your affirmation intensifies the energy you are creating around it and gets you used to the idea that YOU are truly saying this. 

6. WRITE THEM DOWN SOMEWHERE WHERE YOU CAN SEE THEM EASILY AND REGULARLY.

There’s many different ways of doing this. The objective is to keep reminding your mind of the affirmation, the new belief that you are re-programming your mind to believe. So write it down and put it on a note where you will see it several times a day. On the fridge, in your car, next to the mirror!

You could also have it as a screen saver on your computer, phone or tablet.

It can also be beneficial writing it down a number of times...just like you did at school if you ever had to stay behind and write 100 lines saying “ I promise not to misbehave in class again !!! The principle is the same in that the more you write it down the more it will imprint upon your brain. Hopefully this time it will be a bit more empowering for you than it was in school!

7. SAY IT WITH CONVICTION AND HEART.

Bring your entire being and all your enthusiasm into saying your affirmations. You need to aim to speak them from your heart and not your head. Say your affirmations with passion and if you need to do something to psyche yourself up to achieve this then do. If listening to one of your favourite songs or dancing round your living room raises your energy so that you can state your affirmations with heart and conviction and energy and belief then go for it!

8. SING THEM .

This can be one of the best ways to express your affirmation. For those of you who saw the movie “The King’s Speech” you’ll be well aware how singing uses a different part of the mind from speaking and this can help us with the re-programming that we aiming for. Don’t worry about sounding daft just combine it with the point above about saying with all your being and from the heart and enjoy your sing song.

Below are some examples of affirmations that are positive, present tense. If any of them resonate for you then please use them. Otherwise use them for inspiration and together with the above guidelines have a go at creating your own and see if it resonates for you even more.

I believe in myself and therefore so do others

I sign my cheques with love and gratitude because I know abundance flows through me

My cells are alive with energy and health

I find prosperity in every area of me and I know that I deserve it.

I am able to have a successful relationship that fulfils so many parts of my life.

I offer kindness and it is returned to me threefold

I rejoice in the love that I receive every day

I know that I am lovable and that I am loved

I choose to open my heart and allow wonderful things to flow into my life.