Introduction

In his famous book, The Strangest Secret, Earl Nightingale stated, you are what you think. You become what you think about most of the time. He believed that if a person only feeds his mind with negative thoughts, he will experience life through a dark lens.  

Small things that shouldn’t affect him will ultimately become bigger than they really are because their mind is focused on the worst possible outcome rather than the best. He talked about how a person who lives with mostly negative thoughts will focus his mind on all his problems rather than the opportunities before him.  

Unfortunately, many people today, live with this kind of mindset. With the 24/7 access to media outlets around the world, it’s no wonder more, and more people are unable to achieve a blissful and positive state of mind. Today’s media knows that “negative news sells,” which provides them with the justification to engage in fear-mongering. Sadly, it works. This is because we are designed to survive, rather than thrive. While this is beneficial for us as a species, focusing our brains on survival, does nothing to guarantee our personal success. If it did, there would be more people flourishing both financially and personally.  

Fortunately, our minds are incredibly powerful and are capable of incredibly awesome things. Our job is to stand guard at the doors of our thoughts and feed them empowering words. This is where positive affirmations come into play.

Understanding Affirmations and How They Work

Affirmations are suggestions and thoughts that you give to yourself and can be either positive or negative. As you give yourself these suggestions, you are feeding them into your subconscious mind, which is what ultimately helps to determine your mental attitude.  

If you feed positive thoughts and suggestions into your subconscious mind, this will ultimately build a positive or optimistic mental attitude, and when you constantly feed your subconscious with good, and happy ideas, your mind begins to accept these suggestions as reality because your subconscious is unable to differentiate between your imagination and your reality. When you consistently inject positive ideas into your subconscious, it will start to trust them as being the reality, and it starts to work producing similar thought patterns. 

When your thoughts become positive, you start to become more optimistic about your life and the world around you. Your thoughts, after all, construct you. By thinking positively, you can empower yourself and build a healthy mindset and a healthy frame of mind that is always thinking of growth, development, and new ideas. 

A positive mindset will give you the strength and courage to believe in yourself and follow your dreams. Additionally, positive attracts positive opportunities. When you create a positive thought in your mind, it moves out and starts drawing towards you helpful and constructive opportunities that can help you fulfill your goals.

This is how positive affirmations work, and why using them daily will gradually turn you into a vibrantly positive individual. 

On the other hand, if you are constantly feeding negativity into your mind, you should only expect to have a negative mental attitude. 

Why You Should Use Affirmations

Emile Cole was a renowned psychologist you popularized the practice of positive affirmations by providing the world with a powerful, effective tool to help people from all occupations actualize prosperity and success. Subsequently, various scientific and medical studies have been conducted to prove the effectiveness of affirmations and the benefits gained with daily practice. These studies have successfully shown that affirmations are indeed incredibly beneficial and can help dramatically change your life for the better.

One such study showed that students who used affirmations daily at the start of their school term were able to perform better compared to their counterparts who didn’t use affirmations daily. Another study showed that daily positive affirmations help many people battle stress and the severe side effects associated with the condition.  

Lisa Legault, a psychologist at Clarkson University, is an unwavering supporter of using positive affirmations. She believes that affirmations can help to significantly boost your self-esteem, resulting in improved performance in different aspects of life. Affirmations help to build a positive and feel-good frame of mind. When you have an optimistic mindset, you tend to think positively a majority of the time, and your positive mindset can easily be used to battle negative thoughts that might try to infiltrate your mind. This helps to build self-belief, which in turn shapes your self-confidence instilling the ‘I Can’ mindset. When you start taking action, you eventually take charge of your goals and become successful in life. 

The effective use of affirmations to achieve success in every pillar of your life largely depends on some principles.

How to Make Affirmations Work for You

Chemicals are how the brain communicates with your body. The chemical connections are created for each of the experiences in your life. When you repeat actions frequently, it helps to strengthen these neural connections. It is a constant reorganization process in your brain every time you take action. Your actions don’t just have to be physical, but can also be mental and include your thoughts as well as your words. The more that you think, do or speak something the stronger these neural pathways become. 

The challenge we face is that the majority of your more than 60,000 thoughts that cross your mind daily are negative, because of our biological and survival instincts to hold on to beliefs, habits, and experiences that were bad. However, when you choose to think positively, you can alter your subconscious mind to break this tendency to fill your head with negative thoughts and start focusing more on the positive things in your life.  

Most of the power of thought and emotion already exists within you. This means that you already know how to feel happy, grateful, loved, etc. However, the issue often lies in the thoughts you continue to strengthen as you follow a negative narrative. You tell yourself that you are bad, unloved, sad, but want to be happy, loved, and good. To make affirmations work for you, it is important that you make a concerted effort to change your self-talk so that you can reinforce the feelings and emotions that you have inside that you want to bring to the forefront of your life. This means that saying the affirmations in the present tense, “I am,” instead of “I want to be,” or “I wish I were.” When you change your thoughts to the present tense, it creates control over the pathways in your mind. It also opens doors for you to accomplish amazing things.

Scientific studies have proven time and again that adopting positive affirmations in your life can create powerful changes to your psyche. The daily practice of positive affirmations has been linked to better academic performance, better athletic performance, lower stress levels, better performance when tackling challenging tasks, and making healthier life choices. No matter how or why you are looking to practice positive affirmations, there is evidence out there that it works well. But, how can you make the practice of daily affirmations work for you? 

The practice of incorporating positive affirmation into your daily life is a personal process and is something that you need to develop if you want it to work for your life. This means that you can choose a positive affirmation that fits in your life, but you also can tweak it and change it so that it works better for your situation. If you are still struggling with the process, you can try the following steps. 

1. Keep a journal with you at all times, and write down your thoughts. The action of writing helps you to integrate the thoughts more fully into your subconscious, much faster than if you were to type them out. Writing them down also makes them more intentional. 

2. Every time you notice that you are thinking of something negative about yourself or your life, write it down in your journal. 

3. Below or next to the negative thought, rewrite it into something positive that negates the negative message. Make sure that you write it in the present tense and include the statement, “I am.” 

4. Repeat this new thought several times for as long as you want to repeat it. 

This process is meant to help you identify the negative commentary in your mind and also shed light on the times when these negative thoughts appear. If you have the time to record the day and time and a little bit about the situation that is leading to negative thoughts, you can begin to identify patterns in your thoughts and actions. These “triggers” can end up leading to negative outcomes, or you can rewrite the connection to something that leads to a positive result. 

When you rewrite your thoughts into positive affirmations, you want to be sure to make it something that you will actually remember. It should directly address the problem but be short and simple.  

It can also be extremely beneficial to incorporate creative visualization into the process. If you don’t know what creative visualization is, it is a meditative thought process that enables you to manifest your most heartfelt desires, just by thinking about them. Using creative visualization along with your positive affirmations plays an essential role in attracting what you desire. With creative visualization, you can create a more loving and positive image of yourself. 

When you incorporate creative visualization into your affirmation practice, you need to take steps to relax and get into a peaceful, meditative state of mind. What works for one person may not work for the next, so you want to contemplate what works best for you. When you can enter into a state of total relaxation, you can begin to sketch out the mental details about what you are trying to manifest in your life. Like with your positive affirmations, you have to be detailed and specific in what you want. For example, you don’t just want to think about getting a new car, but you need to think about your driving in the actual vehicle that you desire. You need to imagine what that car looks like, what it smells like, and how you feel driving it. For the creative visualization process to work, you have to believe it will happen, just like when you are reciting your positive affirmations.

Practice will make your affirmations better. You don’t need to strive for perfection, but rather you want to aim for a positive experience. If you wish to change your mindset and your current situation in life and start to live the life that you desire, positive affirmations can be an incredibly powerful tool to help you get there.

Conclusion

It isn’t easy to change how you see certain areas of your life or to dig into complex and sometimes dark places. As you explore different affirmations to improve various areas in your life with growth and positive change, you can use them to impact them with patience and grace. Positive affirmations are a tool that you can use daily to help you relax or energize, focus or forgo, connect, or release. It all depends on what you need and where you believe you need to go. You have to trust your instincts, stay true to your path, and stay positive. 

You can teach your mind to re-write the narrative of your story. You can start at any place and move forward in the direction of your goals. And, if at any point, you find yourself off the path you were meant to head in, fix up a new affirmation and get going where you need to go. You have control over your thoughts, which means you have control over your actions. Your actions will then lead you to your reality, and this is how you can make amazing things happen in your life. It all starts with your thoughts.

The more you repeat affirmations, the more it ingrains as the truth in your mind. When your mind believes it, your actions will live it. And when your actions live it, your reality, in turn, reflects it. Every day you have to choose to keep moving forward and being positive. You have to truly believe that you are making a difference in your life and the lives around you and that you are powerful beyond your wildest dreams. You have to believe in yourself and your amazing purpose if you want to manifest all your heart’s desires with the help of positive affirmations

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