How Affirmations Can Transform Your Life

Good morning!

You are valuable.

You are worthy.

You are enough.

Let’s talk affirmations. For many of us, our experience of affirmations has been tied to pseudoscience and the incredibly white-washed self-care sphere. But that’s not all there is to it. While it’s easy to dismiss simply telling yourself positive things about yourself, self affirmation theory (Steele 1988) posits that we can “maintain our sense of self-integrity by telling ourselves we believe in positive ways”. Essentially, self-integrity is our ability to maintain our moral responses and respond in flexible ways when our self-concept is threatened. Boiling that down further, just because something or someone may tell us that we are incompetent, bad, or stupid does not mean that that has to become the absolute truth. It allows us to separate the behavior from  becoming the absolute truth of who we are and what we offer to the world.

The three main points to self-affirmation include 1-self identity, 2. Imperfection, 3. Consistency.

When we affirm ourselves, we set up a narrative about who and what we are. This is not a fixed structure, it is dependent on flexibility and having a multitude of ways to find and define success. This allows us the opportunity to be flexible and adaptable in our thinking (and if you’re reading this coming out of 2021, you know how important that flexibility can be).

When I talk about imperfection, it’s to emphasize that our affirmations do not demand perfection from us. They ask for us to be competent and capable in the areas of our lives that we deem important. Now, the end of that sentence is important, “that we deem important”, because it’s not asking you to be competent at string theory if that’s not personally important to you. YOU get to define what that is!

Lastly, consistency, when you affirm yourself, you’re priming your brain to seek out ways to act in accordance with that view. So if your affirmation is “I’m a loving partner”, you’re being primed to act in ways that a loving partner would act and therefore moving you from just stating that you to also acting accordingly and making that true.

SO affirmations have the ability to change our world. They can make us better in the ways that WE find important and in ways that WE deem successful.

Linking this to our previous discussion around limiting beliefs, affirmations are a way to break free of your limiting beliefs.

Now that you know what affirmations are and how they work, how do you incorporate this into your life?

Start a practice. Find a time of day, usually beginning on the morning or end of the evening work well, and look yourself in the mirror. Repeat your affirmations to yourself either silently or out loud. Repeat this daily. In the beginning, you may find the practice to be silly or inconvenient, or simply ridiculous, and I encourage you to keep up the practice in spite of those feelings.

Our beliefs about ourselves take years to become salient. Oftentimes our affirmations are in contrast to those negative stories we may have started to internalize. Give yourself time to believe a new story.