Wishful Thinking, or Selective Attention?
How I learned to make positive affirmations work.
A good friend bought me a month of health coaching with a woman, also a friend, who does this as a business (thereby benefitting both of us!).
One of my health coach’s main strategies for me was to write positive affirmations and speak them aloud every day. I have tried this in the past, and never stuck with it long. It always feels contrived to me, like I’m just trying to delude myself. I’m with Terry Pratchett, who said,
“If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”
I believe I will get what I want by putting the effort in and earning it, not by saying wish-I-might statements to the stars.
But since my health coach is also a friend, and I wanted to give her advice a fair shake and to be able to be honestly say yes when she asked me if I’d been keeping them, I did it.
In the process, I began to see the power of this.
Making positive affirmations is perfect psychological sense.
Positive affirmations utilize the phenomena of selective attention. Selective attention is what happens when, for example, you start thinking of buying a certain kind of car, and suddenly you see them everywhere.
When you focus on your affirmations, you begin to see the opportunities to manifest them.
It has to go along with behavior though. You can repeat affirmations, or prayers, or spells all day, but unless you act accordingly, it will show you don’t believe it. You will not be able to get it or become it. So, when you see the opportunities, you must follow through with them.
You must say, “I am____ (insert dream here).” Then behave as if you already ARE what you affirmed.
- What does a person who is what you want to be do every day?
- What would their routine look like?
Do those things.
This is not magic, or pretending. It is the simple truth that even more than what you think, what you do makes you who you are.
Start doing then, and now you are what you wanted to be, even if not completely yet. And I think that’s what stops us. We think we’ll go from “I’m not that” to “I am that”, with nothing in between.
But every person out there who is _____ (insert dream here) is still in process.
Just like you.
So say your affirmation, believe it, but then go be it.
