Subscribe

RSS Feed (xml)

Powered By

Skin Design:
Free Blogger Skins

Powered by Blogger

Monday, May 25, 2009

Why don’t my affirmations work? - Lucy Lopez

A big thank you to Lucy for your contributions and I ask all my readers to pop in to Lucy's site at the bottom of the post and check it out for yourselves.... But here is Lucy's post:

“I am gorgeous unimaginably wealthy and god’s greatest gift to humankind"

What are affirmations? They are powerful messages that we give the subconscious mind with the intention of making it conform to particular desires or goals. Generally, affirmations are presented in the simple present tense (remember what I said about this in this post?). As such, they are supposed to reflect ongoing truths.

For example, if you happen to be afraid of public performance, some affirmations that might be suggested to you are: “I am a wonderful performer”. “I enjoy performing to audiences, large or small”. “I just love every performance and look forward to each one”.

Great! So you start repeating these affirmations daily like a mantra and sometimes several times a day. (Someone recently told me they spend three hours a day repeating affirmations, bemoaning the fact that ‘nothing has changed’). One week later, one month later, several months later, you have still not shaken off your fear of public performance. If anything, you are even more of a nervous wreck when it comes to presenting yourself to an audience. Why?

The reason is quite simple.

Your affirmations lack your emotional support.

Have you noticed how the most impactful experiences in your life are the ones where your emotional response was strong and unmistakable, whether in a positive or negative way? Film makers, writers and advertisers make use of this fact to persuade you to ‘buy’ whatever it is they are selling, whether it is a product, an idea, a character or a service. To them, your emotional response is gold! Without it, they know they have lost you.

Even when we have an intellectual agreement with an idea or intention, without our emotional support, that idea or intention is about as useful to us as a bicycle tyre without air. So the question is, how do we get our emotions to cooperate with our thoughts, with our affirmations?

Belief!

Even if I can intellectually agree with an idea, it does not mean that I actually believe it. For instance, I might agree that enjoying performing in public would be a good thing but I may not believe that I can enjoy performing in public. It is at this point that my subconscious mind and I part company.

By now you might have guessed that beliefs and emotions have a very tight partnership. The stronger your emotional response, the stronger your belief. Hence, “I didn’t believe it until I saw it”. Why? Because upon seeing it, you felt it! Our senses are directly connected to the emotional centres in our brain. They arouse your emotions in a very powerful way. Advertisers, film makers and writers have a field day with this fact - they show you things rather than just talk about them.

So, affirmations need to be supported by your emotions which are deeply tied to your beliefs. If you believe something, there is little that can get in your way. I guess your next question is, How do I believe what I want to believe? Well, I tackle that one in my next post and I’ll even explain why repeating affirmations without the corresponding emotional support and belief can work against you. In the meantime, you can enjoy this, this and this.

Post from: Lucy's Planet Happiness

0 comments: