Create Powerful Affirmations For Lifestyle Design.

What are affirmations?

Affirmations differ from your written goal statements in that they’re shorter, only one sentence in length, and more in number. As with written goal statements, they should always be written in the present tense. The great thing about affirmations is that you can have dozens.

Rules for writing powerful affirmations.

1. They must be in the present tense.
2. They must be positive.
3. They must be short.
4. They must be clear and bold.

Remember, what we learned in Powerful Written Goal Statements For Lifestyle Design? We learned that the nonconscious mind only operates in the present tense.

Now you may ask, “Why must affirmations be positive?” Once again it comes back to your nonconscious mind. Just as your nonconscious mind can only think in the present tense, so it can also only think in the positive.

When you express what you want in negative terms, your nonconscious brain unfortunately focuses on what you don’t want. When you state something you want in a negative way, your conscious mind can process the sequence of words and understands what you don’t want. However, because your nonconscious mind is much more powerful than your conscious mind, it absorbs the whole statement as one chunk instantly. As you can see in the table below, when you phrase what you want negatively, your nonconscious mind actually interprets negative statements as the opposite to what you want. It will focus on the words I’ve bolded in the table below such as “stupid”, “nervous”, “slow ”, “hard”, etc, even though you want the opposite to be true of yourself.

To prevent this problem all you need to do is to state your affirmations in the positive.

How do affirmations work?

Affirmations work through repetition. Repeating your affirmations to yourself often will help to strengthen the neural pathways in your nonconscious mind leading to more positive thinking, while weakening and supplanting the older neural pathways, which led to your negative thinking. It will take time to form the new habit of positve thinking. Persist and after a month, you should be thinking significantly more positively.

How to use affirmations

At first you can read your affirmations out loud. Carry them around with you on a piece of paper. Once you’ve memorized them, you can start varying your voice pitch ranging from whispering them to shouting them out loud or even singing them. You can also record them onto an Mp3 player and have them playing while you’re out shopping or commuting. If you want to take it to the next level, why not using some recording software and record your affirmations over some accelerated learning music such as some of Bach’s baroque music.

A few examples of affirmations.

• I am clever.
• I learn fast.
• I am confident when public speaking.
• I am calm and confident in interviews and meetings.
• I am humorous and charming with the opposite sex.
• I attract people who help me improve.
• I am very self-disciplined.
• I am great at meeting deadlines.

Feel free to use these as well as come up with your own. Please share with us some affirmations below that you think will be useful for others.

You may also be interested in:
Lifestyle Design: Take action, but don’t be attached to the outcome (up to a point).

Powerful Written Goal Statements For Lifestyle Design.

Writing Personal Action Plans For Lifestyle Design.

Related posts:

1. Powerful Written Goal Statements For Lifestyle Design.
2. How Self-confidence Can Strengthen Your Lifestyle Design And Personal Development.
3. How To Develop Persistence.
4. Six Things You Should Do Daily To Succeed.
5. Lifestyle Designers Should Set Financial Goals.