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How To Write Personal Affirmations That Can Keep You Focused, Persistent And Enthusiastic Day In Day Out Till You Reach Your Success Dreams

how to write effective affirmations

Personal affirmations WORK… if you Work them. How do you work them? First you must believe that they will work for you. Then you have to word them in a format that’s proven to work. And three, you have to be consistent and practice them, do them… daily.

Shortly we’ll look at how to write a very effective personal affirmation, and what makes them work so well, but first let’s look at one well-liked person who has used the above formula to achieve his goals beyond his wildest dreams…

Most people will have heard of Scott Adams. He is the creator of the popular, and much syndicated, Dilbert cartoon strip which has been published in 19 languages in over 2,000 newspapers in 57 countries. That cartoon probably would never have been published if Scott Adams hadn’t written and practiced this affirmation below, from around the age of 20…

“Eventually I decided to start the affirmation, ‘I, Scott Adams will become a famous cartoonist.’

The odds of becoming a famous cartoonist, as he later told Tim Ferris, are quite low.

“I think about 2,000 people submit packages to the big syndicates, the people who give you the big contract, your big break. They might pick a half dozen. Of those half dozen, most of them will not make it after a year or two, so it’s very rare. In fact, Dilbert was probably the biggest breakout, or one of the biggest, in 20 years.” (From Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, And Habits Of Billionaires, Icons, And World-Class Performers by Tim Ferriss)

At 20 years old he wrote an affirmation, setting his sights on becoming a best-selling author…

“The two affirmations that are notable were: First, I said I would become a number-one best-selling author. This was before I’d ever written a book, and I’d never taken a class in writing, except a 2-day course in business writing, and that was it. The Dilbert Principle became the number-one best-selling book.”

How does he practice the affirmations? In his own words:

“I’ll tell you exactly how I did it, but then I’ll also tell you that I’m positive the exact method doesn’t matter. I think what matters is the degree of focus and the commitment you have to that focus.

“Because the last affirmation I mentioned was primarily done in my head while driving, but continuously for years, about 3 years. At first, the way I did it back in those times was I used a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper, and I wrote the same sentence 15 times, once a day, I think.”

Pen and paper! Another of Scott Adams’ best-sellers is How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big in which he shows you how to focus on building systems, not goals. According to Scott Adams, 

“Losers have goals; winners have systems.”

When you choose systems over goals, you choose projects and habits that, even if they result in “failures” in the eyes of the outside world, they give you transferable skills or relationships. In other words, you choose options that allow you to inevitably “succeed” over time, as you build assets that carry over to subsequent projects.

If you haven’t read that book, we highly recommended it… Scott Adams can teach you a thing or two about achieving success beyond your wildest dreams.

How to write winning personal affirmations

What is a personal affirmation? A personal affirmation is a declaration expressed in writing or speech, made to yourself and stated as fact – something read and spoken out loud which reinforces your belief in yourself and your future goals.

A personal affirmation statement is something that you write about yourself and it lays out where you want to be in the future, including what you want to achieve and what kind of person you want to be.

A personal affirmation is useful because it lets your ideas sink in and take shape in your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is very powerful when it comes to throwing opportunities in your path; opportunities that are congruent with whatever it is you want to achieve. But your subconscious mind can also work against you… 

For this reason, you should never use the words NO or NOT in a personal affirmation. The other thing is you should use the present tense; always affirm in the present time. Let’s see…

Saying and decreeing, "I deserve and now have" makes it present tense. If you say, "I deserve and will have," you are putting the manifestation off into the future – perhaps some future lifetime. Your subconscious mind will honor the postponement inherent in this statement. You cannot live in the past, present, and future at the same time.

Some examples:

Bad affirmation: "I, John Doe, deserve to be a non-smoker and do not smoke."

writing better personal affirmations

Your subconscious mind could cancel out the negative word NOT and your affirmation would then read "I, John Doe, deserve to be a smoker and do smoke," which, of course, would be reinforcing the fact that you smoke. Instead, structure your affirmation as follows:

A better affirmation example: "I, John Doe, deserve to be and now enjoy being smoke-free".

When you use personal affirmations the idea is to “trick” your subconscious mind into believing that you have already achieved a certain status, that you are already that thing – rich, physically fit, happy, successful, etc. These statements typically cover areas of your life that you are not happy or satisfied with, areas such as your relationships, your family life, education, your spiritual life, success and wealth, your personality, etc.

The subconscious mind works a certain way and so when you wish to suggest changes to it, the suggestions have to be made a particular way. Here are some guidelines for writing your personal affirmation statements.

1. Write your affirmations in the present tense. Make sure you write in the present tense as if you have already achieved whatever it is that you want in life. So, for example, “I’m going to meet the man of my dreams” is bad. A better personal affirmation would be: “I have met the man of my dreams.

2. Your personal affirmation statements must be realistic. While affirmations work, and have helped millions of people achieve their goals, this is not magic. So, writing down a personal affirmation such as “I’m married to Beyonce” (when we all know she’s already married to someone else) or “I’m the richest person in the world” are unrealistic. 

Some things may not be physically possible, for example if you are short, it may be unrealistic to write, “I’m a basketball superstar.” 

There is a difference however between unrealistic and unlikely or farfetched. Don’t fear to have big dreams; to set BIG goals. And so, while it may not be realistic to aim to become the richest man or woman in the world, it isn't unrealistic to aim to become a millionaire. You only need to be sure it's achievable; and that this goal has a time frame attached to it.

3. Affirmations must be timely. The subconscious mind works with specifics and you need to tell it the date by which you have achieved your goal. So, for example, “I’m a pop star at the age of 33.”

4. Affirmations must be specific.  The more specific your affirmations, the easier it will be for your subconscious mind to turn them into reality. An example would be to write, “It’s July 30th 2023 and I have just sold the 3,000th copy of my book, “XYZ”. Not, “I have sold thousands of copies of my “XYZ” book.”

5. Always frame your affirmations using Positive statements. Your subconscious mind is a powerful tool, but like we saw, garbage in, garbage out. Never use affirmations that are couched in negatives; statements like “I don’t lack creativity” or “I don’t get late for appointments”.  

The risk with using statement such as these is that your subconscious mind could cotton onto the negative aspect and drive your conscious mind in that direction!

So an affirmation statement such as “I’m early for my appointment at 9:00am with X.” is much better than writing “I won’t be late for my appointment at 9:00am with X.”

7. Don’t think about the HOW when you write down your personal affirmations. Trying to figure out how you will achieve these goals as you write your affirmations is not advisable and you should not do it. It's for your subconscious mind to figure out the steps needed to achieve these goals (shortly we’ll look at how it does this). 

Simply write these goals down or say them out loud with belief and conviction each night and every morning. Sometimes it will begin to look like you’re wasting your time, or that you’re being foolish…

Ignore those voices; it happens to the best people who do this. But ultimately, this gives your subconscious mind all the information it needs to drive the agenda for achieving these goals. 

Stories have been told of people who slept on a tough problem that defied solution, only to wake up one morning with the problem “miraculously” solved in their mind! So, don’t belabor the HOW when you write your affirmations.

7. Writing and applying your affirmations is not enough if you do not open the door to possibilities. So, you have to open yourself to opportunities. One word comes to mind – serendipity. Things have a way of happening when you put yourself in situations where they can happen. 

Let’s say you want to meet the woman of your dreams. This isn’t going to happen unless you get out there where you can meet women. The thing is that once you write your affirmations and begin to suggest changes to your subconscious mind, opportunities will begin to present themselves that are in line with what you want to achieve in life, that tie in with what you have written in your personal affirmation statement.

But here’s the crux: you then have to take action to follow through when the opportunities present themselves. You have to open your eyes to snatch those opportunities as they are presented to you as a result of practicing your personal affirmations.

8. Number eight is about leveraging the power of visualization. It’s not enough for you to think and believe in what you are suggesting to your subconscious mind. A picture, as you know, speaks louder than a thousand words. And visualizing whatever it is you want to achieve before you achieve it is a powerful self-motivator. This can amplify the power of your affirmations.

One powerful affirmation we recommend for everybody

In their book, What Self-Made Millionaires Really Know, Think, And Do, Richard Dobbins and Barrie O. Pettman proposed this affirmation for us all:

“I, John Doe, am a creative genius!”

It would seem that creativity is a trait most of us lose in our early teens! According to the authors;

“We all came into the world being creative, innovative, and inventive. Approximately 97% of children are highly creative at the age of five, 36% are highly creative at the age of ten, with only 12% scoring highly creative at age fifteen… For most of us our creativity has lain dormant since childhood. We must all now learn to tap into our own creativity. We can all learn to tap into the creativity of others.”

One of the most powerful things that comes with believing that you’re a creative genius, and affirming it in your daily life, is that you’ll find you can solve most of the problems you meet in your workday, and in all areas of your life.

When this happens you begin to enjoy your work. And your work becomes play… like being a kid again!

Why personal affirmations work so well

Two processes are at work when you practice personal affirmations – neurological imprinting and the reticular activation system. Back to Scott Adams, here’s what he said, regarding reticular activation:

“Here’s why I think it seems to work, and there are several possibilities. One is something I learned long ago, and I forget who coined it but have you ever heard the phrase ‘reticular activation’? It’s basically the idea that it’s easy to hear your own name spoken in a crowd.

“You’ll hear background noise blah, blah, blah, ‘Tim Ferriss,’ blah, blah, blah. And you think, how did I hear that one thing in this whole bunch of crowd noise? Basically, your brain isn’t capable of processing everything in its environment, or even coming close. 

“So the best it can do is set up these little filters. And the way it sets its filters is by what you pay attention to. It’s what you spend the most energy on…That’s how you set your filter. So your filter is automatically set for your name, because that’s the thing that matters most to you.

“But you can use these affirmations, presumably – this is just a hypothesis – to focus your mind and your memory on a very specific thing. And that would allow you to notice things in your environment that might have already been there. It’s just that your filter was set to ignore, and then you just tune it through this memory and repetition trick until it widens a little bit to allow some extra stuff in. Now, there is some science to back that…”

Most people will remember how reticular activation works in practice. Let’s say you just bought a red Jeep Cherokee. Now as you drive along, suddenly red Jeep Cherokees seem to pop up everywhere you go (as if to validate and affirm your good choice). Or it could be an item of clothing you just bought and are wearing, or a piece of kit.

The filters in your subconscious mind are now super-attuned to the signals, opportunities, etc. relating to your choices. When you write and practice a personal affirmation you’re in essence making choices.

The other process that is at work when you repeatedly practice a personal affirmation is what’s called neurological imprinting. A good example to understand this is the mathematical tables we crammed in our head when young…

If you were asked, what is 12 times 12, most people can recall that effortlessly. 144. But if you were asked what is 13 times 13, most people might scratch their heads!

That’s because 12 X 12 was imprinted in our brains. We don’t question if really 12 X 12 = 144… we just know; no need to cross-check!

It took lots of repetition though, to imprint this fact. Do you remember how we imprinted the mathematical tables? You got asked, what is 7 times 7? Before the imprinting took place, you’d go, 1X1=2, 2X2=4, 3X3=9 till you got to 7X7. It was easier to remember the tables if you took it in sequence. But finally the subconscious imprinted 7X7 and you could remember it in isolation.

That was a lot of practice. And so it works with affirmations. Let’s say you practice “I, Jane Doe, am a creative genius” It may happen slowly but eventually your subconscious will take this as fact… a fact that needs no cross-checking, a fact you don’t doubt. 

This builds your self-belief and the subconscious then leverages reticular activation to present you with situations and opportunities where you begin to validate the belief in your creative abilities. After that you begin to stack up some successes, which builds a virtuous cycle, because success feeds on success.

And before you know it, you will behave in a manner consistent with being creative. 

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