You may have heard about the Law of Attraction, and how it responds to your thoughts and beliefs. This means that you get what you think about, whether you want it or not. That is why positive affirmations can be a powerful tool to help you get what you want out of life. When you focus on positive thoughts, you can turn around negative beliefs, feelings, and attitudes that have been holding you back from living your best life.
Affirmations can be so powerful when you get them right. Everyone has different beliefs and habits of thought, so for the best results, choose affirmations that work best for your own current mindset. Shaping the right affirmations for you and your situation is not always easy. Here are four steps you can follow to make sure that your affirmations fit you like a glove.
1. Examine your Beliefs
Try to think about the various beliefs that you have about your life and about yourself. This might be tricky at first, since these beliefs may be so deep in your mindset that you have been accepting them as fact, rather than viewing them as a belief that you hold. You may have been taught these beliefs at a young age by your parents, or picked them up through the experiences you had during your childhood.
Take some time to think this through and jot down all the beliefs that you hold about the big issues in your life: Health, Relationships & Family, Finances & Career, Self-Worth, etc. You can even keep a journal with you for a few days and write down any beliefs that come to mind throughout your day. Take an honest look at your thoughts, and write down everything, whether they seem to be positive or negative.
2. Write Down Your Negative Beliefs
Think about the areas of your life where you may feel that you are unsatisfied or want to change. Think about what beliefs might be holding you back in those areas? Some of the most common ones are that you’re not smart enough, or you’ve never been good at math/writing/public speaking/standing up for yourself. Or the sucker-punch of ‘I always mess things up.’ These beliefs make you feel bad, and it’s time to look them in the eye and tell them to take a hike.
For example, as a mother, think about the societal beliefs and expectations about motherhood that make you feel bad about yourself. Are there things that make you feel unnecessarily guilty or inadequate? When I became a mother, I felt constantly guilty about not being able to live up to the impossible ideals about being a good mother. There are countless ways a woman might think negative thoughts and beliefs about herself as a mother, from pregnancy, to breastfeeding, maintaining a home, parenting, feeding, being a working mother, and on and on….
Once you have worked out your negative mindset script, be brave, and write them all down, even the ones that make you squirm. Writing them down gets them out of your head and into the cold light of day. Take a piece of paper, and divide it into two sections. On the left side, write down all the negative beliefs.
This may not feel good, but it will feel so much better when those words are out of your head. Keep going even if it hurts! Now you’re ready for the fun part.
3. Make Your List of Opposites & Aspirations
This step will feel a whole lot better. To turn your negative, restrictive beliefs into positive beliefs, take each negative belief and write down the opposite of that belief in the right side of your paper.
Write it down as a positive statement, in present tense. Make your positive statement strong and simple. Statements starting with “I am” are super powerful. For example: “I am an organized person”, “I am healthy and strong”.
Once you have come up with positive affirmations that can counteract your negative beliefs, take it a step further and think about what are your aspirations for life. Make the Law of Attraction work for you, by crafting personalized, powerful affirmations that will help you to manifest exactly what you want.
Think about your big dreams. What are the things that you want to have and experience in life, that you may not have previously thought possible for you? Use your imagination, and picture that you already are everything that you wish to be. What attributes and beliefs do you hold? Remember that anything you can dream of, you can be or do, or have!
Affirmations can also be a useful tool for manifesting a desired outcome from a future event. For example, I used positive affirmations to prepare myself for a positive, unmedicated birth experience. I repeated the affirmations before and during labour, and successfully had a beautiful birthing experience without pain medication.
Write down all your positive, powerful affirmations on a new sheet of paper. Tell yourself to release and surrender the negative beliefs that are not serving you. You could even go a step further and burn the list of negative beliefs in a symbolic gesture.
4. Rinse and Repeat
The most powerful way to use affirmations is embed them deep in your mind. You should accept them and replace the negative, restrictive beliefs with these new positive ones. The best way to do that is to repeat them over every day until your affirmations become part of your mindset. Remember that this may take time, since you may have held those negative beliefs for a long time up until now.
Find ways to make them part of your daily routine. Say them out loud in front of a mirror every day. Build them into your daily habits by piggy-backing onto a habit you already have, like brushing your teeth. You can write them on post-it notes and keep them somewhere visible, or incorporate them into a daily journaling practice, you can also set a reminder in your phone to say your affirmations daily.
Soon those affirmations will be beliefs that build you up, and help you easily manifest what you want in life.