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If you have been around the world of personal growth, or working on self worth, for even 10 minutes, then I’m sure you’ve heard of affirmations. You’ve probably done them. And then stopped doing them. And then maybe quietly beat yourself up for ages because you haven’t been doing them… While I certainly hope not, even if that last part is true, this blog post will clear up some of the reasons they haven’t worked as well as you’d like, some of the reasons why they can be so hard to keep doing, and of course, some alternate methods that help address some of the pitfalls of affirmations. We’ll learn a bit about how to work WITH your unconscious mind more congruently, instead of just pushing back against it.

To start off, just in case someone is only 3 minutes into the personal growth journey and doesn’t already know what I’m talking about, saying affirmations is basically a way of changing something in your mind, or your life, by repeating the same statement over and over. Some methods call for writing it out, some just speak it out loud. The statement is something you want to be or feel or have or be, but that is not actually true for you yet. Some common ones connected to habit and perspective change, like “I am fit, strong, and weigh 135 pounds” or “I am a capable and motivated entrepreneur” to the more externally focused outcome statements I’ve heard out there, something like “I make a million dollars a year”. 

Creating an Effective Affirmation

There is a lot of helpful common wisdom around forming affirmations out there in regards to forming your statement, so I’ll start there and then we’ll talk about techniques.

1. It should be positive. You might use “I am confident meeting people at parties” instead of “I am NOT anxious at parties”. Notice the first is focused on where you want to go, and not where you DON’T want to go. This is very helpful for our unconscious minds actually get you what you want. If I send you to the store for me, and ask you to buy me something… “let’s see, I don’t want pickles, I HATE celery, and I am allergic to peanut butter..” Later, when you’re at the store, do you have any actual idea what to get for me? You might even think, “Wait, I think Lara said something about pickles? Let’s get those!” So, rule number one, focus on what you actually want. If you’re not sure, and you keep naming things like “Not anxious, not broke, not lonely, then stop and ask yourself, what do I want INSTEAD of anxious, broke, lonely, or whatever else you don’t want. 
2. Phrase your statement as a fact rather than as a desire. “I am in great shape and feel strong and healthy” is something that is actually happening, where the statement “I want to be in great shape, and feel strong and healthy” is about the desire for that rather than being about any actual real strength or health. 
3. You can use progressive suggestions to avoid or reduce resistance, which we will definitely talk more about shortly. Just to briefly explain progressive statements, you might take the last example, and shift it to “I am becoming stronger and healthier, and getting into great shape” in order to create some movement in that direction without stating the outcome that feels so far out of reach in that moment. Some other examples: “I am feeling healthier and more comfortable in my body every day”, and “I increase my income steadily and easily”. 
4. Pick statements that are within your control, for best results. Affirmations like “My boss is going to promote me” or “Jennifer and I are going to be best friends”  obviously rely on someone else, not you, to do something specific, and that is not within your direct control. You could instead look at the capacity you want to bring to each situation, the skills you want to develop to be more promotable, or the skills you bring to making and keeping friends more generally, without being specifically tied to Jennifer. This is going to be a more empowering and effective approach. I know those of you who are into law of attraction might disagree with this, but even through the LOA lens, where your affirmations are shifting the probability of getting what you want, you still have SO much more leverage over your own actions and behaviors, so spend a little time identifying the parts of the issue that you have most leverage over for the highest impact.
5. Have a specific plan. You don’t have to know exactly how it all works out, in fact that’s not really a good idea, but having an avenue for your affirmation to actually succeed is helpful. Back to the one about making a million dollars, it is unlikely to just fall out of the sky, so what business or income streams can you build that have a likelihood of creating that kind of income for you? And if you can’t even start there, with an affirmation about building a specific business or project, then maybe start with an affirmation about being able to be creative and inventive in finding new business ideas, or something like that. Think of the affirmations as steps towards the goal. The whole reason we have stairs is because it’s way easier to climb twenty sequential small steps than it is to pull ourselves up a whole floor at once. Even if you CAN do a pull up, getting your whole body to move that entire distance without steps is certainly not the most effective strategy right?  
6. Include emotion. How you want to FEEL can be a key part of a successful affirmation. If you were trying to ace a difficult class and find yourself easily distracted, then you might say “I focus and concentrate on my studies every day” or you can make it much more appealing by saying “I enjoy my studies and focus and concentrate on them easily every day.” Notice how much more appealing the second one feels? This helps reduce the resistance and connect with your motivation more easily.  

What about resistance?

While all the tips above are helpful, you may follow all this advice, and have your well crafted affirmation statement, and start saying it, AND…. still feel some conscious or unconsious resistance. Maybe you say “I love eating healthy foods that I enjoy preparing for myself” and the moment you say that, you have a competing internal voice that says “No way, I hate cooking and eating fast food is basically my happy place. Healthy food tastes gross and is WAY too much work.” 

Maybe you push through that first experience, but every time you try to say the positive statement, this other unconscious pattern is flooding your body with the opposite feelings and thoughts, and the old pattern for wanting fast food is way deeper and more ingrained than the new thought of eating healthy, so it’s much stronger. You might even end up eating MORE fast food, because this other voice keeps popping up when you do affirmations and sending you cravings for french fries. Since the new healthy eating idea doesn’t feel true yet, it doesn’t automatically overpower that old habit or craving. 

Even if your affirmations aren’t unconsciously sabotaging your efforts, you may just notice that you feel bad when we think about our new statement not being true yet, like you’re reminding yourself over and over about what you don’t have yet. Even in those moments when we can muster some emotional energy towards the new statement, having conflicting feelings can actually be more draining than just feeling bad. All of these emotional responses help explain why it can be so hard to KEEP doing affirmations, even though theoretically, it’s such a quick and simple action.    

What can I actually DO that works?

How do we get around all this resistance to get the results we want?

The first thing I have to say on this point should be no surprise to anyone who has worked with me before: we don’t have to just get around it, we can actually work with what comes up. So, if you feel a craving for fries, then you hear yourself thinking that cooking is way too much work, and then maybe you feel a sad or deprived feeling that comes up around the idea of avoiding your childhood favorite treat, these are each pieces of information. They are just telling you something about your current internal landscape, rather than just trying to ruin your day. Allow yourself to just notice each thought, image, feeling, or whatever comes up for you when you state the affirmation. Then, take each piece separately and work with those thoughts or feelings. The more you diffuse this resistance in whatever form it pops up, you will naturally have less and less resistance come up over time.

So, how do we do actually this? There are lots of ways, and most of my favorites are not so easy to teach in a blog post, so maybe I’ll make some videos one of these days, but for starters, something like EFT (acupressure tapping) works really well and there are definitely tons of videos of it out there already.

Even breathing can help, just notice where a thought or feeling lives physically in your body, and imagine that you can breathe deeply into that place in your body, softening it with each breath.

If it’s a negative emotion like fear or anxiety, you can diffuse it with some bilateral stimulation. An easy way to do this is to hold an object in your left hand, off to the left side, then pass it across the midline of your body to the right hand, take it out to the right, pass back across the midline to the left hand, and repeat back and forth for a minute, or maybe 90 seconds or so, until the feeling dissipates.

You can also experiment with shifting into a confident body posture, with your shoulders back and sitting or standing up tall, breathing deeply, maybe arms raised in superman pose that kind of thing, Hold this pose while thinking about the triggering thought, without allowing your posture to close in or your breathing to get more shallow. This can begin to connect more positive feelings and associations to something that was a difficult area for you.

This article is not meant to be totally focused on ways to shift an un-resourceful state or thought, but for those with some tools in this area, or the willingness to experiment with the ones I’ve shared here, it’s certainly worth mentioning that you can actually work with the resistance itself until the positive statement feels better. Hypnosis is obviously helpful for these kinds of unconscious shifts as well, and I’m happy to talk about your issue if you think you need help with this.

Three specific approaches you can start using right now

Moving on, here are some specific methods that will help install that positive affirmation with less unconscious resistance. These are all things you can start doing today, with no additional info or skills needed.  

First off, let’s start with using the power of empowering questions. I talked about this in my podcast, way back in episode 7 if you want more info on this one. The basic idea here is that your unconscious mind LOVES to give you answers to questions, and it does so basically whether the premise of the question is factually true or not. So, you could ask yourself a question like “Why am I so stupid?” and get answers from your unconscious mind, and then you can also ask yourself the opposite question “Why am I so intelligent?” and get plenty of answers to that as well. Knowing this, we can prime the belief pump for our affirmation in advance by asking some questions about the experience or change we are seeking to create. If we take the example of cooking and eating healthy foods, we can ask ourselves something like “Why do I enjoy healthy foods so much?”. Your mind might start off reminding you how great you feel when you eat this way, or might pop in an image of something really delicious you ate at that health food restaurant, or you might remember the time you first discovered your favorite fruit. Just let your mind go wild giving you all the answers you have to this question and take note of what these are. Then, you might take the second part and build that up, something like “Why is cooking becoming SO enjoyable for me?” and then notice how your mind answers this question. After a couple minutes of getting answers to all the positive questions you can pull out of your affirmation, you can now say “I love eating healthy foods that I enjoy preparing for myself” and have some more congruent connections with the idea that came from your own mind. To put it more simply, it will just feel more true because you’ve found some evidence. For a bonus exercise, you can also turn this around on any resistant thoughts as well, and ask something like “Why am I just no longer interested in fast food anymore?”  

The next technique is something I got from one of my hypnosis teachers, Mike Mandel. He uses this process in every single class or lecture he gives. You use a statement of how you want to feel, which can be your affirmation statement, but it’s generally focused on the state you want to be in, something like “I am feeling confident, excited, and I know I am about to rock this presentation today”. You say the statement out loud, with feeling, all while tapping on triple warmer point on the back of your hand. The triple warmer is an acupressure spot just below the knuckles between your pinky and ring finger, right where you feel a notch or space between those two bones. So when we were in class, we’d stand up, get into a confident posture, and say things like “I am learning easily and having a great time, all my resources are online, I am becoming an amazing hypnotist…”, making sure to say it like we meant it, all while tapping that point.

This one obviously works best for shifting states, and it’s not necessarily obvious how to use it with other types of goals, but if you ask yourself how you need to feel in order to achieve the goal, then this can be part of the picture. Say you want to earn more from your side business, but you struggle to focus while writing your marketing materials. You could use this technique as you’re about to begin doing that work, tapping and saying things like “I am feeling focused and connected to my work, I love finding new ways to share value with my clients. I feels so good sharing my products and my insights about how it will help folks, so I feel so focused and connected to my work, and to my audience, as I really enjoy writing this copy today.” When you find the moments where feeling a different way will change your outcome, just let the stream of consciousness flow about that feeling, saying it like you really mean it, while tapping that point. It may feel fake at first, but your true emotions will catch up. Pretty simple right?

You can also add an anchor to this as well, which is basically like a reminder to your nervous system that let’s you step right into this state more easily next time. One way you can do this is by setting up a unique gesture and word for that state, so your focus state could be called “Focus”, or “Jerry”, or “watermelon”, really whatever you want. The gestures that work best are ones you don’t do all the time, which would dilute the signal. Something like touching your thumb to the tip of your ring finger on your left hand is great. If you let the state build with your words and your tapping, then you set the anchor at the peak of that state, when you’re really feeling it, by saying the word and making the gesture at the same time. You can add in the visual aspect as well by watching yourself make the gesture. Every time you build up this state and associate it with your anchor, it gets stronger. Then, you can use it to move straight into feeling focused or whatever other state you create an anchor for. 

The last affirmations upgrade I want to share today is a process I learned from Igor Ledochovski. This one really overlaps with self hypnosis nicely, so if you know how to take yourself into a trance, definitely do that at the start. If not, that’s ok, just give yourself a moment to relax, close your eyes and focus on you imagination. Back to our example of enjoying cooking and eating healthy food, imagine you have another version of you, sitting or standing in front of you. Notice that this version of you is already feeling the affirmation as their full reality. So, in this case, if it were my affirmation, I could see this other me and I would say the affirmation about her. I would say “ SHE loves eating healthy foods, and enjoys preparing them at home.” And maybe I imagine her in my kitchen, smiling, singing while she works, sampling a bit of tasty food along the way, really getting into how enjoyable the cooking for yourself can be. Because it’s her over there, I can accept that there are ways that she knows how to really enjoy this, to do this, and even if I don’t know what they are yet, I can see that it’s possible to get there. You can keep doing your affirmation this way, focused on the other you that already has this figured out. After a little while, one day, you might find yourself slipping up and saying “I love eating healthy foods and preparing them at home”. That’s ok when that happens, notice how it actually starts to feel more and more true for you as the understanding that the other you has begins to transfer over. You can really stick with this one so much more easily because there is no pressure for YOU to feel it on day one, the other you there already feels it, and they already know how to do this thing, so there is need to resist it. 

There is a lot here to play with, I know. Even just implementing one or a few ideas from this list can be enough to really boost your affirmations practice, and get you better results. I’d love to hear about your experience with these, let me know which ones are your favorite, or maybe you have some great techniques I’ve never heard of, let me know. And, if you ever need some additional help making that change, let’s talk.