Do Positive Affirmations Really work?

Maybe you've heard people talking about the power of positive affirmations, but it all seems a bit 'hippy-dippy' & gives you visions of wannabe entrepreneurs standing in front of their mirrors confidently stating 'I am a millionaire' despite having approximately £14.72 in the bank.

Believe it or not that was my take on it up until five or six years ago! I was a big fan of yoga, & not just the poses - I absolutely 'got' the cornerstones of yoga philosophy the first time I heard about the Yamas & Niyamas (that's a different blog for another day). Breathing exercises, meditations, even visualisations & full on yoga nidra made perfect sense to me.

But affirmations? What a load of old rubbish! I didn't get how what I saw as basically telling yourself total lies about your circumstances (with confidence) result in those things actually happening?

Now though, I'm a huge advocate of an affirmation - I use them standalone, in breathing exercises, as part of meditations - you might well have heard me say they're one of my favourite calming tools because they're just so versatile. So what changed you might be asking?

Well, what changed was that somebody - & I wish I could remember who, explained affirmations to me properly & I realised that I'd been sold them all wrong!

Whoever first told me about affirmations really did give the impression that you should stand in front of a mirror with a confident 'power stance' & repeat, in the present tense, positive things that you wanted to be true. The theory being that you could fool your subconscious mind into believing your stories, & would somehow then make your dreams come true simply because you believed that they already were! Hence the 'I am a successful businesswoman. I easily attract clients who want to work with me. I earn more than I could ever need' etc etc.

And initially starting my own business at the beginning of a recession there were an awful lot of business coaches / mentors advocating this kind of routine (for a very reasonable fee...) to an awful lot of micro business owners desperate to succeed ( as easily as possible.)

Now if that works for you then great, each to their own in my book. But I guess if you're reading this it's because you're new to the whole concept, or else slightly sceptical, & want to get more of an understanding, so here's the phrase that was the gamechanger for me:

"Your subconscious is impressionable - not totally stupid"

And just like that it made sense to me! I had struggled with the whole idea because how on earth could just telling yourself a big fat lie make you feel like it was true, to the extent that it actually became so? All of a sudden it clicked. Affirmations aren't about where you want to be in 10 years' time (visions & visualisations & goals are great - but they're not the same thing. If that seems obvious to you then forgive me for pointing it out, but I had been trying to tie them all in together.)

Affirmations are smaller & more frequent & are about the here & now. When you choose an affirmation it's really personal, because it needs to be believable - something that you could be, right now. They're about feelings & emotions, behaviours & responses to situations.

One that I used frequently for a period (when I was going through a really stressful time, I realise with the clarity of hindsight) & still come back to now when times feel a bit like that, is 'I choose my reactions so that I stay calm & happy'.

It's plausible (I absolutely can do that), & personal (I have a tendency to be less than calm in my reactions when I'm stressed). Two of the 'Ps' that make for really strong, helpful affirmations. The others are present (tense) - as in they're in the here & now - there's no will, should, or could in the world of affirmations; positive (not only in tone, but grammatically too - I am calm, rather than I am not stressed - because that subconscious mind of ours will fix on the major word so I am not stressed is more likely to result in a focus on stress!

So I suppose what I'm saying is that, yes, positive affirmations really can be helpful in lots of ways - but the catch is that you need to choose them well!