Watch Out! Negative Affirmations Work Too

When I talk to people about using positive affirmations, I often hear comments like, "Affirmations are okay, but they just won't work for me," or "I could never do that."

I always think, "Did I just hear you right?" You just used a (negative) affirmation and proved your own point incorrect by demonstrating how successful that affirmation is for you. You believe you can't do affirmations or that they would never work for you, and your affirmation has come true!

Think about that for a moment. You think in affirmations all day long. You are constantly molding your experience of the world through a series of can/can't, are/aren't statements in your mind (a.k.a. positive affirmations or negative affirmations).

An affirmation, after all, is simply a statement that you can/can't accomplish something or that you are/aren't capable. I love reading articles by folks who say affirmations are a fraud, useless, or self-delusional (more affirmations). The kinds of affirmations you think have a pretty high correlation to the outcomes in your life. When you think in positive affirmations about something, your attitude and your actions fall into line, and you generally succeed. When you harbor and express negative beliefs about something, failure is almost sure to follow.

Positive affirmations are not magic pills. They don't change the laws of physics. They cannot always impact the quantitative, but they can almost always improve the qualitative. For instance, a sixty-year-old woman cannot affirm that she is twenty and wake up one morning twenty years old. However, the sixty-year-old who affirms that she feels twenty is going to remain happy and active longer than someone who affirms all day how old they are becoming.

So, the questions really are these. If affirmations are just a fancy name for the kinds of thoughts we think all day, do you choose to think positively or negatively? Do you choose to believe you can or conclude you cannot? You cannot prevent affirmations. They are an autonomic function of your mind. What you can control, though, is which kinds of affirmations you want to be pervasive in your life.

Whichever you choose, you will experience. Which will you choose today?