Aligning Your Mind With Affirmations – The Key To Success
March 26, 2019
How can we change our way of thinking in order to change our world? Many people practise an affirmation - a statement or a declaration asserting that something is true. They use it as a way of trying to change their circumstances in life because it offers emotional support and encouragement, but for many, it doesn’t work. At least not by itself.
The reason it doesn't work comes down to the way the brain operates with conscious and unconscious perspective - the neurological patterns and networks that are formed within our physiology, our brain, and our nervous system.
You could tell yourself over and over that “money comes easily to me”, but since that is a conscious mind statement, your unconscious mind wouldn’t be in agreement if it has a different set of beliefs.
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Don’t let negative connotations take charge
An affirmation is just a set of words. Many people think that by writing out a statement they want to believe is true daily, or saying it regularly, it will eventually become true for them. But, if you're repeating a set of words that really have no meaning to you, your feelings, emotions and physiology won’t be aligned with the statement. Put simply, there needs to be alignment in order for it to be able to make any difference to your beliefs.
If the affirmation is the opposite to our past experience, it will also stop it from becoming true for us. For example, if your experiences with money have been negative, where you’ve experienced poverty or difficulty in making money, that will be ingrained in your memory. Your habituated thinking and nervous system will trigger those negative connotations whatever the context.
An affirmation can be poetic and beautiful to listen to, but it needs to change at the unconscious level to have an effect. So, it is imperative to practise affirming language with conviction, the correlating physiology, tone of voice, emotion and gestures so the deeper story can begin to change to become a part of us.
Leave the past in the past
If you want affirmations to be able to change your beliefs and therefore your life, you need to understand the way you think.
What do you say or think when you have bills to pay? Or something breaks within your business and needs to be fixed or replaced? Do you feel frustrated, exasperated, fearful or dubious, or are you accepting of it and feel okay? Whatever your predominant thoughts and feelings are will dictate whether the statement you are declaring to be true or want to be true will actually make a difference over time,
It’s important to remember, though, that your personal history and culture don’t need to be a part of your current world. More often than not, those negative circumstances don’t exist in our lives anymore; it’s part of a past story. If they do still exist, you need to take a look at your environment and the way you live and decide what strategies you need to put in place to be able to change it, both externally and internally.
The way to do this is to tidy up your history so you can write a new one; you need to physically change the world around you to have the tools to build a new experience. You also need to change your inner thinking patterns and beliefs to align with your new world to avoid an internal clash.
It is quite easy to identify and clear up limiting beliefs and patterns that you may have been carrying for some time and to start to create new perspectives but it needs precise skills to do this.
Face the world with an adult mind
As Alice in Wonderland says, "I sometimes believe six impossible things before breakfast." You don't rise to the level of your ability, you actually fall to the level of your belief structure. While affirmations may be useful, by themselves, they are just meaningless words.
Being more mature and facing the world with an adult mind means you’ll be able to recognise if you’re facing an obstacle or difficulty in life. You’ll be well equipped to adapt and move around the obstacle to get to where you want to be.
You don't need to keep or hold onto the pain or the doubts of that obstacle as you work your way through it; you can just learn from it and move on.
As children, we didn’t have the skills to be able to do that but by learning the skills, like we teach at Mind Matters, you can be resilient and skillful in your thinking so you can let go of ideas and thoughts that don’t serve you.
Forming new habits is possible. When we move into internal agreement with our affirmations, a whole world of possibilities opens up.
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