How Positive Affirmations Create A Better Life

Of all the ways to create a better life for yourself, saying positive affirmations is the winner.

“In order to carry a positive action we must develop here a positive vision.”

Dalai Lama

The main reason you may not be living the life you dream about, is because you hold yourself back with beliefs that insist, “I can’t” or “that won’t work.”

It’s too easy to become a hostage of your beliefs and shy away from making decisions that support your dreams. But this only results in feelings of resentfulness and dissatisfaction.

Upgrading your beliefs so that they support every one of your dreams doesn’t take a lot of effort. And you’ll be pleased to know it doesn’t require any extra time.

The truly powerful thing about positive affirmations is they can be said anytime: when you’re feeling “less than,” when you’re scared, when you’ve got some down time, when you’re commuting, when you’re exercising, and even when you’re meditating (as a mantra).

Beliefs are nothing more than opinions that have become habitual.

Most of your beliefs are picked up during childhood and while many beliefs work for you, many don’t.

To upgrade your beliefs you must first know what you do believe, before you can decide whether it supports you or holds you back.

Here’s How:

Listen to your self-talk as you approach a challenge. For example:

Are you talking yourself down or up? Are you encouraging or discouraging yourself?

Listen to what you say to others.

Are you pointing out the problems or focusing on solutions? Are your comments negative, or positive?

Do you blame, criticize or judge? Or do you take full responsibility and actively seek out the best in people and situations?

Here’s the thing: every complaint is an affirmation – it just happens to be an affirmation of something you don’t want.

The more attention and emotion you give to what you don’t want, the more it will become part of your reality. How? Well, every thought generates an emotion; together, that creates expectations.

Your choices and behaviors then align with your expectations. If you’ve ever gone into a social situation expecting it to be awkward and uncomfortable, your behaviors would be vastly different than if you expected it to be fun and pleasant.

And that’s how you create your life experience.

When you recognize your negative thought patterns, you can begin the process of changing them using positve affirmations.

Many people insist that affirmations don’t work and you may be one of them.

The reason however that positive affirmations don’t work is because they are not being practiced correctly. Just like strength training, you can’t go to the gym once a week and expect great results. Just as you can’t say affirmations once a day and expect your deeply ingrained thought patterns to change overnight. Especially if what you’re saying the rest of the day contradicts what you are affirming!

The secret to having positive affirmations work quickly is to consciously choose thoughts that make you feel good, ‘every time’ you find yourself thinking negatively. If you’re persistent and consistent in this practice, you will succeed.

You always have a choice in the thoughts you give your attention to.

You can acknowledge, “I’m thinking something really mean about that lady” and instead of giving your attention to that thought, you can deliberately choose to think something kind about her.

Or, you can realize that you’ve been telling the same “poor me” story and instead of that, choose to ‘spin’ the situation positively so that you’re focused on growth and positive change.

For best results:

1. Meditate, in order to become more aware of your inner self-talk
2. Choose one area of life you’d like to improve, and figure out which of your beliefs are holding you back from success and satisfaction in that area
3. Create affirmations that support success, and repeat them as often as you can throughout the day
4. Mind your self-talk and the way you speak to others, and as quickly as you can, replace self-defeating statements with empowering and encouraging statements.
5. Repeat this for a minimum of 30-90 days, depending on how “sticky” a belief is. When it feels natural and easy to say the positive affirmation (and not feel like you’re lying to yourself) then you know you have successfully created a new neural pathway that can lead to:

Better automatic thoughts, better-feeling emotions, better expectations and better behaviors: and of course, better results.

All of this can be seamlessly woven into your regular routine, with minimal effort.

You can dramatically change the way you perceive the world, and respond to it, by using positive affirmations!