To be totally honest with you, I’ve never been a huge fan of repeating affirmations in the mirror like some self-help gurus would suggest. The truth is, I felt like affirmations don't work for me, and it felt like a really hollow activity.
That being said, I don’t think the act of affirming something to yourself is completely useless. In fact, I’ve found a way to use affirmations in a much more effective and efficient way.
Why Affirmations Don't Work
Affirmations are essentially a statement you repeat to yourself that affirms something that you’d like to believe. This could be anything from “I am happy and healthy” to “I am worthy of love and respect”. There are a lot of variations with affirmations and that’s one good thing about them – you are meant to completely customize your affirmations to fit you.
However, most self-help gurus will suggest writing these affirmations over and over in your journal, or putting a sticky not on your fridge, or the dreaded mirror affirmations where you stand in front of a mirror and affirm things to yourself.
Now look, I’m not here to tear these methods down, if they work for you – great! But I’ve found these methods to be less than effective and truthfully, even destructive.
The thing is, if you really don’t believe something, saying it out loud might trigger your critical mind to analyze all the ways that it’s not true. For example, if you stand in the mirror and affirm “I am confident” but you feel deeply insecure and unworthy, that affirmation might cause you to think of all this evidence that you really aren’t confident.
You might start thinking about times when you were socially awkward, or moments when you just wanted to hide, or all the times you didn’t speak up because you were afraid. And when this happens, it has the opposite effect that we want. We start to feel bad about ourselves and we start to mentally rehearse what it looks and feels like to be insecure.
If this has ever happened to you, or if you simply find yourself going through the motions with affirmations, feeling no effects at all, listen up.
How Beliefs Are Created
The key is belief. Yes, I know, we are using affirmations because we want to believe them. But, be honest with me, if someone told you “You are confident” when you felt awkward and insecure, would you magically believe them? Probably not. That’s because beliefs are not created in this way. They are created through experiences that hold a lot of emotion.
Just think about it, why are you not confident? After conducting hundreds of Hypnotherapy sessions, I can say with confidence (no pun intended) that you are not confident because you’ve been through experiences that made you feel unworthy, awkward, less than, or simply humiliated.
Maybe it was a common experience, like being bullied at home or school. Maybe it was unconscious programming you picked up based on how your parents treated you. You never felt good enough in their eyes, so you assumed the belief that you simply are not good enough. Maybe it was one time in particular that you felt humiliated or unworthy based on how someone treated you.
Whatever the case may be, you surely didn’t become ‘un-confident’ without an experience jam-packed with emotion.
This leads us to the massive missing piece when it comes to affirmations. EMOTION.
If you are simply rambling off affirmations in the mirror, or jotting them down in your journal, you are not feeling anything. The key to make affirmations work for you is to infuse them with emotion.
How to 10x the Power of your Affirmations
So, how do we infuse our affirmations with emotion? It’s simple. You engage your imagination! 10x your Affirmations in three steps:
Step 1: Affirm
What positive thought or belief do you want to affirm. Some ideas are:
· I am worthy of unconditional love
· I am confident and powerful
· I love who I am becoming
· Everyday I get better and better
· I attract abundance into my life everyday
· I easily attract what I desire
The key here is to make it personal; it should really feel like a really powerful statement.
Step 2: Visualize
What would it look like if that were true right now? Engage your imagination as you visualize your affirmation actualized. As an example, if your affirmation is “I am confident and powerful”, start to imagine what you would look like or act like if you were to be confident and powerful. This can be as simple as standing a little taller and speaking with conviction, or it could be something really big, like you achieving a big goal and feeling really confident as you do it. Whatever comes natural to you in the moment is perfect.
There are two important pieces of this step: Believability and Desire. Your visualization needs to be something that you actually desire (don’t imagine speaking on stage to hundreds if that’s not even something you want), and it needs to be something you believe could happen. This might mean starting small, but that’s perfectly okay! Imagine speaking in a meeting with confidence, or going for a solo lunch date and feeling at ease – anything you believe is possible for you and that you actually desire to happen.
Step 3: FEEL
This step usually comes naturally if you’ve done a good job in step two. When you imagine something that you desire, and can do so in great detail, you naturally start to feel how it would feel if that were happening now. Elicit the emotion you would feel if that affirmation and visualization were happening now, and repeat the affirmation while you visualize.
Sticking with the same example, imagine what it would feel like to be more confident and powerful. Maybe you feel more open, more secure in yourself. Maybe you feel more relaxed in your body, or maybe you feel more authoritative and in-charge. If you’re struggling with experiencing emotion, go back to step two and imagine something that feels realistic to you.
You may notice that by adding these extra steps, we are not just affirming something verbally, but we are having an inner experience of that which we desire. In doing so, we can actually create a new belief in ourselves and start to see real change.
FYI… by adding in the visualization and emotion, what you’re really doing is self-hypnosis. Yup, that’s right, this is what self-hypnosis is! It’s giving yourself positive suggestion (a.k.a. affirmation), while engaging your subconscious mind though visualization and emotion, hence, creating new neuropathways that will strengthen over time to create new beliefs.
The Verdict
Although affirmations aren’t all bad, they are really lacking in the oomph department. Repeating the same old thing over and over does not create a belief. Engaging the subconscious mind through your imagination and emotion while giving yourself positive suggestion can actually stimulate new neuropathways in the mind, resulting in new beliefs and new behaviors.
These are some of the reasons Hypnotherapy is so effective. We are going a little deeper to create new beliefs on a subconscious level. Hypnotherapy sessions are even more effective than self-hypnosis because we can quickly get to the root of why you aren’t confident (using that same example), releasing and reframing that old belief into something more helpful – resulting in more confidence.
The main thing to remember is that your mind is your greatest asset. Learning to harness your mind through simple things like affirmations or self-hypnosis can have lasting effects on your self image and ultimately, your life.
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