“I can’t do it”, “Why would they listen to me?”, “I am not important”.
Do statements such as these make you feel empowered to take on the world or empowered to crawl into a hole? For some reason our minds seem wired to bring us down. So many people exhibit the poor little old me syndrome that it must be true. Or maybe it isn’t. Perhaps they’ve not learned to do anything differently.
It has taken me many years to accept the power of affirmations. In this, the third in a series of articles on stress management explaining the simple and practical ways in which you can reduce stress in your life to a level that you can then do something positive about it, I hope to help you accept them as well. Yesterday we covered a couple of Little known ways to eliminate stressful thinking. How did you go?
Affirming affirmations
Affirmations are powerful and simple. Perhaps too simple for us to take seriously. I used to think it wasn’t possible for mere positive words to have such an effect on my life. Now I know differently. It took some time and practice—affirming yourself is a skill like any other—and eventually I felt my self confidence begin to rise. Sure, I still have bad days but the base level, or the water table so to speak, is now much higher and I can recover quicker.
An affirmation is a positive statement about oneself designed to encourage. If you’ve ever travelled on London’s Underground in the afternoon rush hour you can often find yourself held upright by the passengers around you. Affirmations are like that in the sense that they surround and support you.
For an affirmation to work my experience has shown me:
- It must be personal—Although you should start with a list of affirmations to see what is possible, those which work best are those which come from within you. I may suggest “I am of good character” but if character is not important to you the affirmation will be of little benefit.
- It must be in current tense—Not “I will be of good character” but “I am of good character”. If you were to affirm another’s beauty you say, “You are beautiful today” and not “You will be beautiful today”. My affirmations are riddled with “am”, “is”, “have” type words.
- It must be regular—Read your affirmations at least twice a day, preferably in a quite space. If you find yourself not believing what you are saying then stop, choose to believe, and start again. This may often require you to shift your posture to something more upright and balanced. Put them in your phone, on your iPod, taped to your bathroom mirror; whatever ensures you will read them.
Building a list of affirmations
Where to start? I suggest you take a look at my daily affirmations1 and take whatever sounds right to you. This list is updated with my most current set of affirmations designed to take me where I currently need to go.
Another excellent resource for affirmations and related meditations is Stin Hansen’s My Thought Coach website. Not only does she have a great article on the importance of thoughts, Stin provides a large number of recordings which you can access via subscription (pricing is extremely reasonable and there are free samples for you to try first). My favourites are:
- Full Potential Self Meditation
- Gratitude Affirmations
- Affirmations for Social Confidence
- Affirmations for Attracting an Abundant Life
- Affirmations for Dealing with Difficult People at Work
- Think Like A …Loving and Happily Married Person
Music that moves you
While you’ve got your iPod out listening to Stin’s affirmations you may also want to load it with some music to help you shift your mood. Often we can find ourselves in a mood which doesn’t suit what we are trying to achieve and we would like to shift it to a more beneficial mood. One powerful way of doing this is reconnecting with music that takes us to where we want to be. For more information see my previous article, Music that moves you.
Footnotes
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Post Lost in the mists of time. ↩