Module 7 – Visualisations and Affirmations
We are what we think we are, not what we say we are.
Our thoughts control our past, present, and future!
Man must first build in his mind through visualisation and affirmation that which he has the desire to create. You must spend time each day visualising and affirming that which you seek.
Many great men and women who have made great achievements throughout history cite affirmations and visualisation. These are tools they consistently use to take control of their minds and begin accessing their majestic powers to serve them.
Even though a carpenter knows exactly how to build a house, he must enlist the tools to get the job done.
Likewise, though you now understand how to access the powers of your mind, you will want to use the tools of affirmations and visualisation to improve and expedite the results you seek.
What are affirmations?
When discussed in the context of self-improvement, we associate affirmations with learning a new language – not to communicate with others, but one to use in communicating with ourselves.
Affirmations are nothing more than what we “affirm” or say to ourselves. The pledge of allegiance and religious prayers are all simple examples of well-known affirmations.
Although they are simple to understand, affirmations are by no means to be interpreted as simplistic, meaningless or of little value. The proper conscious use of self-made, self-induced, positive affirmations will endow you with enormous, unprecedented personal power.
Many people never learn to use affirmations as a tool consciously. The problem is that affirmations are a double-edged sword. With the repetitive use of positive affirmations, you have the power to program your mind for success.
Conversely, with the repetitive use of negative affirmations, you have the power to program your mind for repeated failure. The key is to take stock in what that little voice inside your head is saying throughout each day, accepting only those statements that empower your self-image and align with the goals you have set for your life.
Most people pay little attention to what and how they communicate to themselves. Statements such as: “I am the worst person in the world at maths” cause no surprise when this individual has a difficult time adding the prices together in their head for adding up a fast-food order or basic day to day sums.
Repeatedly telling yourself: “I can never remember people’s names” causes no surprise when you are unable to recall the name of a person you have met, just minutes after you were introduced.
If you repeatedly tell yourself: “I am not a morning person”, it is no surprise that you find it a great challenge to get out of bed and get going each morning.
When you consider how the conscious mind and subconscious mind really work and how powerful they are at giving you exactly what you instruct them to, it becomes easy to see how constant and repeated use of affirmations can be helpful or destructive.
In previous modules, we discussed how you learned to communicate to yourself and helped you begin writing out some of the common self-talk you engage in each day as you spar with life’s challenges. This was to help you learn more about the past development of your self-image and how it may be helping or hindering you from achieving your life’s goals.
The balance of this lesson is designed to teach you how to reinforce those statements that affirm what you want to do, have, or become and rework those self-talk statements that affirm things you do not want.
Affirmations point your mind in the direction you want to go.
How do affirmations work?
Picture your mind as a big mountain range covered with fresh snow. Imagine now that your mind encodes each of life’s experiences into a uniquely designed snow sledge.
Each time your senses of sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste receive a new experience, they forge that experience into habits of thought in the shape of a sledge.
Each time experience from the past comes through the senses; it is placed into the same shaped sledge.
Now imagine that each sledge is pushed along the mountain range peak until it finds the path in the snow that fits the unique shape carved out by the old sledge.
Once this path of the past is found, the sledge locks in and shoots down the identical thought path. Not because it wants to, but because it has to. Each time the thought shoots down the snowy path, the path becomes smoother and increasingly well-defined.
Like a sledge speeding along a well-worn groove in the side of a mountain, the thought is nearly impossible to stop until it reaches the end of the path.
As an adult, your mind’s mountain range already has major thought paths carved into its snowy top. Your self-image has already interpreted and created the sledge, and the accompanying memory path for most of the experiences you encounter each day.
Many of these paths are empowering and conducive to helping you set and achieve your life goals. However, many of them are not. The fact is, you are who and where you are in life based on the thoughts (the paths in the snow) that occupy and dominate your mind – no more, no less.
If you are going to improve your ability to achieve the goals you set in life, you will be required to alter some of your past thought paths and add some new ones. You will need to override the interpretations your mind has stored from past experiences about situations, things, and events, some of which represent the very essence of who you believe you are – “your self-image.”
Affirmations are the key. Their repeated use enables you to alter past thought paths by consciously adjusting them to be more supportive and conducive to achieving your goals.
By repeating them to yourself again and again, you will carve new thought paths in your mountain of snow that is more dominant and accessible than the old ones over time.
As you progress toward your goals, past experiences that used to travel down unproductive memory paths, lock into the improved memory path you have created. Also, affirmations can be used to develop entirely new memory paths that will help you achieve your goals.
Many goals you will set in life will require you to change past thoughts about yourself and your interpretations of experiences from the past. Many goals you will set will require you to develop new skills and attitudes to achieve them. Affirmations are a tool of the mind you will use to help expedite and ensure your desired results.
How to develop and use affirmations?
Affirmations are most effectively used when you have developed a goals program for your life. Setting goals in each area of your life enables you to isolate what you desire in life and provides a vehicle to begin shaping your plans to achieve them.
As you embark on a new goal and begin developing how to accomplish it, you will begin to identify barriers you will need to overcome to bring you to your final destination.
Although some of the barriers you may encounter will be environmental (external), you will find that most of the barriers you encounter are internal if you are honest with yourself. These internal barriers generally consist of;
- New habits of thought that need to be developed (like a new ability) or:
- An old habit of thought that needs to be adjusted or replaced (like a weak ability or poor attitude).
In either case, once these barriers are identified, affirmations are the key that enables you to rapidly create new habits of thought that will drive you to your goal.
Regardless of whether you will use your affirmations to sharpen, adjust, or develop new thought habits, the following steps will ensure that you see effective and rapid results.
1. Be Strategic
Don’t just develop affirmations randomly. Develop and use affirmations that you know will create habits of thought that you have identified you need. The obstacles and challenges that you have identified are your road map to developing useful and meaningful affirmations.
2. Be Exact
Because of the precise nature of the mind, be sure to develop affirmations that affirm exactly what you want. Therefore, always develop affirmations in a positive way and in the present tense. For example, you would not develop an affirmation regarding selling, such as, “I will be a great closer.”
If you constantly affirm that you will be a great closer, your subconscious mind will seek ideas, situations, and opportunities that will ensure that you are not a great closer today. If, however, you say, “I am a great closer” your subconscious mind will constantly seek out and find ideas, situations, and opportunities which will allow you to realise this goal today.
3. Write them out
Always commit your affirmations to writing. Writing out your affirmations will enable you to examine each of them to ensure that they are in the present tense, are as specific as possible, and clearly state what you wish to affirm.
4. Make them yours
Write your affirmations to you using the word “I” whenever possible. Remember, these are your affirmations, truths you wish to affirm about yourself. Use as many descriptive words as possible that raise the image and emotion you feel this affirmed train of thought should have.
5. Be creative
Place your affirmations anywhere and everywhere you will see them often. You can use index cards, “post-it” notes, etc. One salesman placed his affirmations about selling on the sun visor in his car. Before every appointment, he would pull down the visor and affirm that he desired to imprint in his subconscious as truth – a new sale.
6. Be repetitive
Effective use of affirmations will require that you use them on a repetitive basis. Keep in mind that you are carving a new habit of thought into the virgin snow of your mind. It must be reviewed repetitively to ensure the new thought is dominant enough for you to recall.
7. Involve the senses
When reviewing your affirmations, try to involve as many of your senses as possible. Keep in mind that we record habits of thought through our senses and the more senses you involve in the process, the quicker they are embedded in your memory. Therefore, read your affirmations out loud and write them out over and over again when possible.
If appropriate, physically act out that which you affirm.
Visualisations to enhance your affirmations process
We’ve all heard of visualisation. Many people visualise daily, either to improve their health or their life situation. Some people try it from time to time.
My personal experience of visualisation is that it is compelling for a few different reasons, and they have helped keep me focused and in sync with my goals and dreams for the future.
Whether you are visualising a health goal or a life improvement one, visualisation helps a lot for the following reasons:
1. It makes you feel empowered
When you visualise better health or achieve a goal, it brings you a sense of inner empowerment. This is because you start to notice small changes in your life as you move in the direction you want.
With health, you start to see improvements and it brings you a belief in yourself and in the process of what you are doing.
The effect of this is that it shifts the sense of power away from the outside world, where you often feel powerless, to the inside, where you feel you are more in control of what happens. Consequently, this makes all the difference because it breeds motivation, creativity and positive emotion.
With life goals, you start to realise that there is actually a lot you can do to move in the direction you wish.
2. Your brain doesn’t distinguish reality from something that is imaginary
Research shows that if one person does something and another person visualises doing the thing, the same brain areas are activated in both of them.
If they keep doing the thing or imagining doing the thing, their brain regions undergo actual physical change (called neuroplasticity) to the same degree.
You can harness this for health. A growing body of research shows that when you visualise improving health, the body moves towards health. Therefore, you can harness it for life goals. When you imagine living your dream, your brain processes it as if it is happening now. In fact, afterwards, to your brain, it’s a memory!
3. It focuses your willpower
Regular visualisation helps to focus your mind on what you want. One of the problems many people face when aiming for goals is that they lose focus, becoming distracted by life’s goings-on.
When you regularly visualise, especially if you set aside some definite time each day, it focuses your mind. It trains you to hold your focus despite what else is going on.
And as you stay focused, you spot opportunities to move towards your goal. If it’s a health goal, you tend to learn extra insights that can help you. If it’s a life change goal, you’re more likely to be in the right place at the right time.
4. It has health benefits
Countless people all around the world use visualisation to help facilitate their recovery from illness and disease. The most common strategy is to imagine changing a picture of illness into a picture of wellness and they do it repeatedly, two or three times a day.
You can get as detailed as you like. Some people visualise cleaning individual cells, restoring them to health and wellness, and simply visualising either their whole body or a body part in perfect condition. Both scenarios work equally well. There is now a growing body of research that shows this working.
Whether through a harnessing of willpower, a sense of empowerment, the brain processes what you imagine as real, or a combination of all three, there is no question that visualisation for better health has positive benefits.
5. If you believe in visualisation, it becomes even more powerful
Belief carries great power! The placebo effect shows us that belief can heal. Belief changes brain chemistry and brings about immune, hormonal, and physiological changes throughout the body.
When one person takes a painkiller and the other a placebo, brain scans look strikingly similar. This is because the person’s belief produces its own chemistry that brings about what they expect to happen – i.e., reducing pain. In this case, the brain produces natural painkillers (endogenous opiates).
When you do anything and believe in yourself, your ability is enhanced. Any elite athlete will tell you that. When you visualise better health, believing that what you are doing has powerful effects, your own belief amplifies the power of what you are doing. The same is true with life goals; your own belief brings you more energy and motivation and helps you spot opportunities when they arise.
Oh, one final point: you don’t need to be a great ‘visualiser’. It’s the quality of your intent that matters most. Some people ‘see’ clearly, others just have a vague picture. Some people see out of their own eyes, others imagine looking at themselves from outside.
All of these different versions work equally well. We’re all different and we all have different ways of doing things.
My experience is that your intention matters most. If your mind is pointed towards where you want to go, then you’re doing it right.
Your affirmations video is next!