“I figured that if I said it enough, I would convince the world that I really was the greatest.” Muhammad Ali
One of the most powerful things you can do in your life to ensure a consistently positive emotional state is to use affirmations.
Affirmations are statements that you make to yourself that you wish to be true. This is different to a belief, which is a statement that you hold to be true. Affirmations don’t necessarily have to be believed to be effective, however a belief in the possibility of the affirmation certainly helps it be more effective.
Affirmations are underpinned by the belief that what we language, we create in our life. Affirmations can be positive or negative. A famous positive affirmation penned by the early 20th century pharmacist Émile Coué is “Every day in every way , I am getting better and better.” This is also known as the Coué Method. He also discovered what came to be known as the “placebo effect” where the positive expectation by a patient of a drug’s efficacy would be enough to effect a cure, even when there was no trace of the drug in the prescription.
Affirmations are what we focus on, consistently and persistently.
A negative affirmation is something that we are all guilty of to some degree – negative self-talk. It is estimated that we have something like 60,000 thoughts a day running through our heads, and that most of these are negative. If we use the premise that 90% of these thoughts are repetitive, and that of the 90% we can estimate that 70% of these thoughts are negative, that would mean that approximately 38,000 thoughts are repetitively negative, why there we have some powerful negative affirmations going on every day! Imagine if we could train our brains to turn those negatives into positives. Regardless of the nature of your affirmations, whether positive or negative, look around you and see the power of your creative mind – you are surrounded by what you have created first by your thoughts.
Closely related to affirmations are visualisations. A visualisation is simply an affirmation from which we make a picture in our mind. Visualisations have a very powerful effect on the unconscious mind, since the unconscious mind loves a story and a picture story is even more powerful. Since it is said that ‘a picture paints a thousand words’ you can see how much more potent a tool visualisation becomes when trying to effect a positive outcome.
And using the imagination is the only sure way to bypass the conscious critical faculty of the analytical mind, which will pick to pieces every affirmation and visualisation you enlist. It will analyse to death and tell you why you can't have the things you dream about, giving you 1000 reasons why they are nonsense, unrealistic and just plain stupid. (And by the way, ‘unrealistic' is a favourite word of the conscious mind.) So by using the power of the imagination – pictures, words, feelings, smells and tastes – your unconscious mind is engaged fully in the experience of the senses, and will move you towards your desires. The unconscious mind does not know the difference between real and imagined. To demonstrate this, close your eyes and picture yourself in your kitchen. Don't think about being in your kitchen – use all your powers of imagination to see yourself there. Still in your imagination, take a lemon out of the fruit bowl and feel it's texture, its coolness, smell the scent of it's skin. Now cut the lemon in half and put it into your mouth – can you feel in reality your mouth watering? Your unconscious mind has prepared your mouth for the onslaught of the sour taste of the lemon and has produced saliva in reaction to the expectation of that event, even though it was only imagined!
Think about what you most desire, and start constructing the most detailed scene of it actually happening using all of your senses – immerse yourself in the experience as deeply as you can, and do this every day for 30 days. You are a formidable creator!
© Copyright Estelle Williams 2011
