How to use REAL affirmations
Often, affirmations refer to mantra-like phrases that supposed to install positive mindset into your mind. The way affirmations supposed to work is like this:
You simply say to yourself positive statements like:” I am good”, “I am brave”, “I love my work”, “I deserve to be happy”, “I am successful”, “I am loveable” etc. You say this to yourself over and over as much as you can even if you don’t believe it. With time these statements will became your reality.
Now the theory behind these affirmations is that your subconscious mind does not know the difference between what’s real and what’s not, so when you tell yourself all of these statements over and over your sub-consciousness will believe them and therefore you will find yourself behave in a positive way because your behavior follow what’s in your mind.
The problem with affirmations is that they never worked for me and maybe for you as well. The theory behind them is simply wrong, your subconscious mind can tell the difference between truth and fiction. If you, deep down in your heart, don’t believe that you are loveable and deserve everything that’s good, then there is no amount of affirmations will convince you of the opposite, because this is not how the mind works.
The mind weights the evidence and then decides what to believe. If you are seeing eyes and mouth then your mind will calculate the probability of eyes and mouth appearing on some surface and the result is that the shape in front of you is human face, the eyes and mouth are strong evidence that you are looking to a face. If there is a dog chasing you, you will run away (or get ready to fight) because there is enough evidence that your life is in danger. Try in similar situations to convince yourself that your life is not in danger, tell yourself: “this is not a dog” “this is not a dog” “this is not a dog” good luck with that, it’s not going to work, because deep down you know that this is a dog and it’s coming after you. So, why you expect this kind of naïve tricks called affirmations to work in other areas of your life?
What you need to do, instead of repeating positive statements, is to convince your mind with these positive statements using logic and physical evidence. In this way your mind will know that you have those positive treats with the same mechanisms it knows anything else in life.
How to do that? Let’s take an example: “I deserve to be happy”, let’s say that you want to install this mindset (enforce this belief). The way to go about it is to gather as much evidence as you can to confirm that statement “I deserve to be happy”. What evidence or reasonable argument you can provide to convince yourself or anybody else that you deserve to be happy? Now that’s very important, there is a huge difference between laying to yourself and convincing yourself. I know that the phrase “convincing yourself” is usually means to trick or to deceive yourself into believe in something that’s not true, however, here I am going to use it in literal sense. Therefore, convincing yourself that you deserve to be happy is to prove that you are objectively deserve to feel happy. The best way to do this is to pretend that you are making your case to someone else, imagine yourself trying to prove to someone else that your name goes here is a person who deserves happiness. What should you do?
As I said before you need real evidence. So let’s look at our case here: How do you know that you deserve happiness? Let see: First: you are human being like anybody else, and every human has the right to pursue happiness and good life, otherwise the world will be living hell for everyone and no one can function at all. Second: what we mean by “deserve”? and who decide who deserves what? If someone thinks that someone else deserves something, it’s just her or his opinion. So who decided that you don’t deserve happiness and based on what? Third: since when people get what they deserve? It’s rarely the case. Therefore, it does not matter even if all the earth population sincerely believes that you don’t deserve to be happy there is no reason why the universe should fulfill their expectation.
As you noticed in the above example, I gathered three logical arguments to objectively prove that you deserve to, or at least you can, be happy. Use the same principle to install any mindset you like, “I love my self”, “I am confident”, “I should not care about what other people think of me” etc. gather evidence or arguments to prove it. If you still did not convinced, gather more and more evidence. You need to be like a scientist who tries to prove her or his theory right. Dig deep into your heart and check if you are convinced or you still have doubts. Don’t be afraid to admit to yourself that you still have doubts. It’s fine, evidence will erase all the doubts.
If you can’t think of any more evidence, don’t give up. You can search the web, you will find articles, book or videos that will help you. You can also talk to someone who you trust her or his wisdom and willing to help you.
All of the above is the first step, gathering real and convincing evidence. The second step is to do the real affirmations. Think of the evidence and arguments you gathered, discuss them with yourself the way you discuss anything else. Everyone when being alone hold conversations inside her or his head about different topics, you need to make these inner conversations fruitful. Whenever you have free time, discuss the evidence you gathered with yourself, convince yourself the way you convince anyone else. What you will find is that the more you discuss and think about them, these evidence or arguments will be clearer and more convincing. Also constant thinking will give you a chance of coming up with new arguments to support your new believe or mindset. Day after day, you will begin to see things differently, this is a good sign because it means that your world-view is shifting, our beliefs is like a web change on belief and the rest of the web will be affected.
As a summary here is what you should do:
1. Decide what mindset or belief you want to have.
2. Gather as many evidence and arguments as you can to support that mindset or belief, make sure they are sincere and real.
3. Discuss those evidence with yourself, think about them, try to convince yourself the same way you convince anyone else.
4. Keep this system, gather more evidence when you can, and think about them every day whenever you have extra time.
Osama Khader
