Positive Thinking
for Smart People Who Cringe at Hype.

How to Make Affirmations Work

Dear Friend,

There's not much getting around it... Positive thinking involves affirmations.

And if you think it's bit corny repeating these affirmations, writing them down and drilling a positive thought into your mind like you did years ago with multiplication tables, you might want to give this some more thought.

Here's why.

You're right.   Mindless affirmations are useless.   Nobody who repeats a thoughtless phrase a hundred times a day or writes it down twenty times a day will live to see that mindless phrase come to life.

The key is to come up with something that is not a mindless phrase... the key is to know what an affirmation is, and how to think positively using affirmations.

Perhaps a good place to start is with the belief that your life can indeed be changed, and that you have the power to change it.   Now you can learn how to make affirmations work with these five concepts.

1.
Create Your Your Affirmation with Specific Action

Do not build an affirmation just to state what you want. The affirmation is more effective when you both state your goals and an overview of what you intend to do to achieve it.

“I am learning six new verbs every day to work toward my fluency in French.”

2.
Make Sure Your Affirmation is Focusing on Right Now

It’s not what you will do or plan to do, it’s what you are doing right now. So state your affirmation in the present tense.

“I am writing 500 words every day and this is the task that will lead toward completing my novel.”

3.
Focus Your Affirmations on the Journey

The destination is critical. Reaching your goal is key.

But there must be a journey toward this destination, so describe it, commit to it and use this to help craft your affirmation for the here and now.

“I am making sure that every time I sit to dinner with my family I am carefully listening to everything everyone has to say, and valuing these moments.”

4.
Aim Your Affirmations at Deep Change

Author Robert Fritz suggests that our lives “follow the path of least resistance” and feels that we can “change the fundamental underlying structures” of our lives.

Fritz suggests that we recognize these structures and change them ”to create what you really want to create.”

Powerful affirmations don’t just focus on behavior. They focus on the structures and patterns that our behaviors are built on.

“I know that I am impatient, and this impatience keeps me bouncing from Project A to Project B. My impatience keeps me from finishing a lot of things I start. So I am going to start finishing things, which will help me deal with this structure of impatience.”

5.
Affirmations Should be Home Runs, Not Singles

Many of you live outside the United States and this baseball analogy might not make much sense.

The point is, go for big, bold goals and big, bold changes. When we set goals, we have three choices.

We can latch onto a goal which we are virtually certain is attainable.

We can set a goal which is so outlandish and unreasonable that it is all but impossible to achieve. Or we can fall somewhere in the middle.

A goal with a “stretch” can easily be turned into an affirmation that excites us, stimulates us, and, through the power of autosuggestion, starts to make us realize that what we first thought of as a bit of a stretch is actually doable.

This kind of an affirmation also validates the power of our imagination.

As Napoleon Hill wrote in his landmark book “Think and Grow Rich”...

"One must realize that all who have accumulated great fortunes first did a certain amount of dreaming, hoping, wishing, desiring, and planning, before they acquired money.”

One way to stay on course with your affirmations is with some positive reinforcement: positive thoughts to keep you moving toward success, and to help you enjoy each day to its fullest...

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Thanks for spending some time with us and learning more about why positive thinking and doing the hard work it takes to work on your affirmations helps lead toward whatever you define as success.