You're Doing Self-Affirmations Wrong

Avoid the Tug-of-War Between the Conscious, Subconscious Mind

Many of us remember the Saturday Night Live
skit from 1991, where the character Stuart Smalley looked into the mirror and affirmed:

Because I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.

Since then, it's been used as fodder whenever people talk about things like affirmations. But like most things the majority rejects, the minority embraces, and it becomes very successful.

So, why do so many people “pooh-pooh” affirmations? Perhaps it’s because, when we first start saying them, we feel a little silly. Okay, maybe a lot silly. Or maybe it’s because we’ve said affirmations over and over again but they didn’t come true. 

• “I have an abundance of money” — when you’re looking at an empty checking account.
• “I choose only good food for my body” — when you’ve downed another pint of Ben & Jerry’s. 
• “I am powerful and worthy” — when you continue to put up with someone who treats you anything but powerful and worthy!

In the end, we feel silly, they don’t work for us, and we quit using them.

And then we go to another seminar where the very successful speaker tells us they use affirmations. Or we read a book from a supposed expert who says they use them and we think, "What the heck am I missing?"

So, what’s the difference between successful people who claim to use affirmations religiously (people like Tony Robbins, Oprah, Jack Canfield, etc.) and us?

The answer is simple: People who use affirmations successfully manage to bypass their conscious mind so it doesn’t reject the new thought.

They understand that they need to get the affirmation/belief into their subconscious directly so there isn’t the tug-of-war between the conscious mind and the subconscious.

How do we do this? By getting in that light, meditative trance so the conscious mind doesn’t fight back!

In my previous book, Interaction To Transaction – How To Get Comfortable Asking For The Sale, I shared the following chart:

From this chart, we are reminded that our subconscious mind is like a sponge that soaks up what the conscious mind feeds to it.

The conscious mind will reject the affirmation if it doesn’t line up with “reality,” even though it decides to create the affirmation in the first place.

This is probably why we feel silly or awkward to begin with.

Just remember: The subconscious mind gets programmed with repetition. So, if you keep at affirmations, eventually the awkwardness stops.

That’s how you know the subconscious is starting to respond and the conscious mind is getting bypassed.