Guest Blog: Use Affirmations to Live Your Best Life
The Why, How, and Power of Affirmations
If someone were to tell you that you could change anything in your life in 90 days, would you believe them? It’s true, you can! Setting goals and achieving them can change your life. Too often, people give up and cut themselves short. Even if that has been your past, you can change that today.
How can you be different and create a new path for your life? An important part of the process is affirmations. No matter what you are setting goals toward, adding in affirmations will help you achieve them. If you have no experience with affirmations, it is important that you know what they are and why they matter.
An affirmation is defined as an emotional support or encouragement. It is confirming something. Creating affirmations for yourself are reinforcing certain ideas or goals. You are encouraging and supporting yourself. When you say affirmations, you are confirming your abilities and vision for the future.
Say them, repeat them, and make them part of your daily routine. What you tell yourself matters.
How many times do we say things that limit our abilities? Are you doubting yourself? When you start creating a goal, are you only focused on your fears? There are many things that people say to themselves that are not productive. Be better to yourself.
The scriptures say that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Does that sound like someone who should be saying negative to themselves? No! God wants more for you and you should too.
How to Compose Your Affirmations
To start, use your goal setting planner and write out your affirmations. It will help you formulate these affirmations by writing them out and there is a guide in the 90-day planner to help you. The key is to be specific and list out details.
When creating goals, you will make them in categories; spiritual, family, career, physical, emotional, social, personal, educational, and financial. Beginners should start out making a goal in one category. If you are an expert at goals, do up to three. Create affirmations for every major goal category, 3 for each goal. This means you will be writing a lot of affirmations.
The basic formula is to use “I am” statements and then list a positive result and behavior in it. Making them personal and personalizing them with specific details helps you envision them. Hearing and saying these positive things about yourself is a way to create new pathways in your brain. These positive pathways will essentially rewire your brain for success.
Let’s go over some examples on affirmations you can see the pattern. This point is clearer when we use examples and might get your brain turning over ways you can do it for yourself.
If you are creating a financial goal to increase your income, you might say “I am committed to doubling my income from ___ to ___ so that ___(fill in the blank with support your family, travel the world, sell my business, etc.)__”.
Another more specific example is “I am committed to losing 20 pounds by eating better food for lunch and going to a gym class 3 times a week from 6-7 am.”
If you have a goal to improve a relationship, you might say “I am committed to spending more time with my spouse. I will make time each night to have a 20 minute conversation where I put my phone away and limit distractions so I am present.”
⇒ Do this for every goal. ⇐
The power in affirmations does not come from just saying them, seeing them, or listening to them alone. You must believe in them and rearrange your habits and thoughts to align with them.
Ways to Use Your Affirmations
With any goal you make, a secret to achieving them is using affirmations. Create visual representation by making a vision board and hanging it where you see it often. Use your phone and record yourself saying them.
Making affirmations does no good if you do not use them. Make affirmations a part of your everyday life. Listen to your recordings by putting it under your pillow each night and play it while you get ready each morning. Creating a routine that serves your goals means finding specific times to listen to your affirmations.
An important part of affirmations is that you are listening and believing what you hear. During your day, you might find that you have negative thoughts creep in. Maybe they are doubting thoughts that come after a hard day of getting knocked back. Sometimes they are just from past failures. Having your affirmations in your head can help you to create intentional thoughts to replace any of those negative thoughts.
When you make it a regular choice to read, hear, and say your affirmations, they will help you believe. As you listen to your affirmations, visualize what you will feel like when you achieve your goal.
Be sure to put keen, thoughtful, prayerful intent behind your goals to give them more power. Include God in your routines. In Psalm 25:4, it says He will show your path. Let Him show you your path.
At the end of each week, you will review your progress for your goals if you are following the 90-day planner schedule. You should be starting each week planning out how you are going to align your schedule to fit with your goals. Read your goals and your affirmations and then one of two things will happen; either you will change your habits, or you will change your goals. If you change your goals, you will need to change your affirmations.
The Power of Why
Something we like to teach people is that there is power behind the why in your goals. If possible, consider writing your “why” into your affirmations. It takes intentional thought. It does not have to be complicated but think about why you chose that goal.
Let’s make this point clear with some examples. If someone is looking to get a better job and is choosing to start their own business, the reasons behind that, or their “why”, could be because they want more freedom in their schedule. Maybe they want to spend more time with their family or travel more.
When writing their affirmation, it could be “I am committed to starting my own business so I can spend more time with my family. I will talk to three people/businesses a day about what I do.” Writing the “why” in can help you visualize what it will feel like to get there and motivate you on days you are wondering why you left the security of your old job.
Use Affirmations to Live Your Best Life
Remember that no one assigned you your life. No one told you how you have to live it or how you have to feel about yourself. Goal setting is a great way to make the most out of your life and live more intentionally.
Breaking free of the bonds of expectations includes breaking the bonds of self-doubt, accepting mediocre, and being okay with “good enough”. If you knew that there was more waiting for you, wouldn’t you want to get there? Setting goals and using affirmations to strengthen their power, you can live any dream and do anything. Stop waiting for things to change on their own and live your life the way you were meant to.
