Affirmations are one of the most powerful ways to create a vibrational match for what you want to attract into your life.
Every thought you think and every word you say is an affirmation. Your thoughts and words are declarations of who you think you are and how you perceive the world to be. Every time you think a negative thought or make a self-deprecating comment you are actually affirming it as your personal truth. Fortunately, the same holds true for positive thoughts and statements.
Strong, positive affirmations are powerful means of self-transformation and they are a key element in the creation of the life you desire. They work by purposely replacing the limiting ideas, negative beliefs, and self-talk that you have taken on and internalized over the years with positive statements that assert who you want to be and how you want to experience life.
The goal here is to create positive, self-affirming, self-empowering statements that uplift and inspire you—that raise your emotional set point. There are two types of affirmations that we will be addressing: positive affirmations and goal specific affirmations.
First say to yourself what you would be
and then do what you have to do.
Epictetus
Positive affirmations
Positive affirmations simply affirm your positive beliefs about yourself and about life.
These simple declarations of who you want to be and how you want to feel are extremely powerful, and they help to replace the negative, limiting beliefs that you may have taken on in the past. Those old negative subconscious thoughts are actually reprogrammed through the use of these positive affirmations into strong positive feelings and images.
You will want to create your own positive affirmations and use them on a daily basis. We have created a place for you to write them down on the pages to follow. All of your affirmations will work best when they are read and repeated several times a day. Be consistent—it usually takes about thirty days to reprogram your thought patterns. Say your positive affirmations out loud with feeling, and experience the emotions they evoke for you.
Constant repetition
carries conviction.
Robert Collier
For even more powerful results, you can repeat them while making eye contact with yourself in the mirror. Affirm just how wonderful you are and how great your life is. Feel it, believe it, and fully receive it in all of your being. You are recreating your self-image, building positive attitudes, and internalizing a more positive belief system.
Goal specific affirmations
Goal specific affirmations affirm your specific dreams, desires, and goals as having already been completed.
These affirmations are statements that describe a goal in its already completed state, such as “I am celebrating feeling light and alive in my perfect body weight of 135.” These affirmations will help you to create the emotional experience of having already attracted what it is that you want. The feelings of joy, happiness, exhilaration, excitement, confidence, relief, inner peace, and so on, are the vibrational match for the physical manifestation that you want to attract.
Every thought we think
is creating our future.
Louise L. Hay
These affirmations create a positive expectation that you will achieve these goals, and they increase your desire and motivation to act on these goals and dreams.
In addition to that, they actually do something pretty amazing. They begin to literally reprogram the reticular activating system in your brain, so that you will start to become more aware of people, money, resources, and ideas that will help you achieve your goals. These resources were always present, but your brain was actually filtering them out. Through the regular use of your affirmations you will reprogram the filter and expand your perception and awareness.
It’s not what is available
or unavailable that determines
your level of success and happiness;
it’s what you convince
yourself is true.
Dr. Wayne Dyer
Now, go ahead and take a few minutes to develop your own positive and goal specific affirmations. Create strong personal affirmations that reinforce your positive beliefs and that will replace any of your negative self-talk with a strong positive statement. Use the charts on the following pages and write them down. You might want to refer to your dream list, too, and keep those desires and goals in mind as you write your goal specific affirmations.
Repeat this entire process with each of your affirmations. You may also want to try writing your affirmations down on a piece of paper ten to twenty times each day. This is another powerful way to internalize them and imprint them in your subconscious mind.
We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence then, is not an
action, but a habit.
Aristotle
By repeating and visualizing your affirmations in this way, you are maximizing the effect of each one and what it means to you personally. The Law of Attraction will respond to the energy of the thoughts, images, and feelings created by each affirmation, and your subconscious mind will respond by storing the new beliefs and treating them as reality. Remember, your subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between what is real and what is vividly imagined.
If you find that negative or limiting responses, such as doubt or skepticism, keep emerging in your mind as you are saying your affirmations, then you may want to use one of the releasing techniques we referred to in chapter three. You can also create new affirmations that are the opposite of each of the negative thoughts and add these to your daily routine.
Make a commitment to use your affirmations every single day. Let them become a personal ritual, something you look forward to. This is how we reprogram ourselves: through repetition, association, and emotion. The level of emotional intensity that you feel while using your affirmations will determine the intensity of the attraction they create.
You are literally reprogramming your beliefs about yourself and the world you live in with each affirmation.
The thing you set your
mind on is the thing you
ultimately become.
Nathaniel Hawthorne