From Louise Hay’s affirmations for healing your life to Abraham Hicks’ affirmations for use in Law of Attraction, affirmations are widely used in the self-help community and with good reason, as they can be an incredibly powerful tool to help you overcome your blocks and re-programme your subconscious to make positive changes in your life, whether it’s for your health, personal life or career. But what are affirmations, how do they work and what steps can you take to write an affirmation that’s going to give you the outcome you want and help you make the changes you want to see in your life? Here we take a more in-depth look at affirmations and give you 5 steps to writing a kick-ass affirmation that’s going to help you become the creator of your own reality.
What is an affirmation?
An affirmation is simply a written statement or mantra designed to help you focus on what you want. The idea with all affirmations is to repeat them a number of times as you progress through the day, allowing them to slowly be accepted by your subconscious until you start believing them to be true. Affirmations are used for many purposes, from personal development to manifestation and as long as you follow some basic rules, they can be about anything you want. Your affirmation can be a general one that you use everyday or you can change it, depending on the outcome you want.
There are lots of ready-made affirmations you can use, but if you want to write your own, this is a quick guide on how to get started.
5 tips for writing an affirmation:
- Only write about what you want, not something you want to get rid of. E.g. writing about getting out of debt will have you focus on the debt not abundance.
- Use the present tense. Try to write the statement as if it has already happened, e.g. ‘I am abundant’ rather than the future ‘I will be abundant’ this makes the affirmation more effective as you start to believe it to be true.
- Avoid words like ‘but’ ‘try’ ‘must’ and ‘should’, that makes it seem like you feel obligated to do something. E.g. ‘I must try to work harder to become successful.’ Instead, try a more positive statement such as ‘I am successful and enjoy my work’.
- Stay in touch with your emotions, if the affirmation doesn’t resonate with you, it may not be the right one. Also, if you make it too unbelievable you won’t resonate with it. Keep it positive but realistic.
- Try and start with gratitude. Gratitude always helps to lift our emotions as it shows that we have something to be grateful for. So try adding ‘I am thankful for…..’ or ‘Thank you for…’ at the beginning of your affirmation and see how it makes you feel.
The most important thing to remember with any personal development work is to have fun with it, if it seems too much like hard work, then the chances are you won’t persevere, if you experiment and have fun then you can really start enjoying the process of becoming the conscious creator of your own reality. So, it’s important that you enjoy the process of writing and repeating your affirmations, otherwise you won’t be sending out the right energy and you won’t get the outcome you want to see.
Originally posted as a blog post on Get Mindful, here.