Affirmations: An Introduction

 Introduction

Is there something you want more (or less) of in your life? If you are like me and many others, your answer is definitely YES!

Have you wanted this something for a long time? Have you tried your best, doing everything you can think of to achieve or receive it to no avail? Don’t be discouraged. This is a common aspect of the human condition.

Affirmations can help you with this issue and this is the first in a series of posts that will teach you how to write your own affirmations. The issue that has been frustrating you for some time can be handled if you diligently apply these principles.

Definition

An affirmation is a statement that you repeat to yourself to change your thinking about a particular issue. According to Dictionary.com it is “a statement that is declared to be true”.

As we are using it here, an affirmation is not actually a true statement at the present moment. It is a statement of intention, a statement of what you intend to be true for you.

Have you read the post the basketball players who improved their foul shooting percentage by visualizing themselves being successful? [If not, read about it HERE] They imagined themselves being 100% successful at making foul shots. And even though they knew this was not the case, the visualization practice improved their performance as much as players who spent the same amount of time physically practicing making foul shots.

A good affirmation is like the basketball visualization. It is a mental practice that will improve some aspect of your life. Affirmations can help you to achieve whatever you desire for yourself.

Characteristics of a good affirmation

Years ago when I first learned about affirmations, I was told they are constructed using three P’s: Personal, Positive, and Present tense. After practicing using affirmations all these years, I realized that there are actually 15 P’s (with some editorial license) which characterize a good affirmation.

How they work

When written and used properly (more on that in future posts), an affirmation directs your mind to:

• find supporting evidence in your memories or in your daily life experience,
• find things that you need to do to make it so in physical reality,
• encourages you to take action,
• replaces the negative self-talk about this issue, and
• builds your self-confidence in general and specifically regarding this issue.

A good affirmation repeated several times a day with strong positive feelings, will take hold in your subconscious mind and:

• open your eyes to the present possibilities,
• encourage you to do whatever you can to create more mini-successes every day until the affirmation is true,
• the affirmation becomes a subconscious belief which then serves as one of the mental operating principles in your life.

One reason that you are dissatisfied with certain aspects of your life now is that you have been unconsciously using the principles of affirmations in a negative way to create situations that you don’t like.

Examples of affirmations

The classic example of an affirmation was developed by Émile Coué (1857 – 1926) a French psychologist and pharmacist who called the method optimistic autosuggestion.

His standard affirmation was:

“Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”.

He claimed that with the proper use of this affirmation he was able to heal most of his patients of all sorts of maladies including kidney problems, diabetes, memory loss, stammering, weakness, atrophy, and all sorts of physical and mental illnesses.

DO NOT read this as a suggestion to substitute affirmations for your physician’s medical advice. Working together the two are much more powerful.

Coming up

In the coming posts, I will introduce you to nine of the 15 P’s of writing a good affirmation and give you some guidelines for how to use them. The first three Principles are presented in this post. Check it out.

In a previous post [An Ernest Quote] I invited you to identify an area of your life that you would like to improve. We will use these principles and guidelines for affirmations to help you achieve what you desire for this issue.

Learning to use this tool properly will take some time. Be patient. It took years of improper use of these tools to get to the point where you are now. If you stick with this, I promise you will begin to see results for yourself soon.