The Power of Affirmations: How to Talk to Yourself

Here is a great article on the principles of building your daily affirmations. The author presents some important tips on how to create them correctly. If you already have some affirmations you are using, it's a good idea to review them after you read this, and make any adjustments that will improve them.

 

Six Principles of Positive Affirmation

 

Now that you have a basic idea of how to monitor your self-talk,  let’s look at six principles for building your daily affirmation exercises:

   1. Action Based

The best affirmations are those which suggests specific actions instead of just wishes like “I want to be more confident.” Instead, ask yourself what you would actually be doing if you were more confident, and use those verbs to build your affirmation. For example:

   “I approach strangers with grace and enthusiasm.”

   2. Identity Based

Whenever possible, focus your affirmations more on changing your identity than on achieving goals. Yes, you want to achieve your goals as well, but always ask yourself what kind of a person you need to become in order to achieve your goal and build your affirmations around that.

   3. Affirmative

Instead of making your affirmations about what you want to stop doing, what you want to lose or what you don’t want, make them about what you do want. Whenever possible, use words like: can, will, want, gain and am instead of words like: can’t, won’t, don’t, lose, stop and quit.

This will encourage you to focus on the result that you want instead of the results you want to avoid.

   4. Specific

Your subconscious mind does not respond to vague requests and commands, so it’s important for you to be specific in your affirmations. This is another reason why action based affirmations are more effective. They give you something specific to focus on instead of stating their wishes like

“I am confident and assertive” or “I am wealthy and financially secure.”

TIP: Ask yourself exactly what you want to accomplish, determine what you have to do to accomplish it and build your affirmations around those specific answers.

   5. Practice

The most common reason why people fail in using positive affirmation is that they don’t practice them on a consistent daily basis.

You can read the whole article here.

Once you've written your affirmations you can learn how to use them in the article below.

How To Use Your Affirmations