How Positive Affirmations Work: The Mindset Hack that Helped me Reach my Goals

If you’re like me, you love yoga not only because it helps you feel good physically, but because it fuels success in every aspect of your life – your job, your relationships, AND in difficult situations.

That’s because yoga impacts so much more than just your body. The yoga lifestyle changes the way that you think and feel, too. It changes the beliefs that you have about yourself and about the world.

How?

Well, a combination of yoga, meditation, and coming from a place of love.

Also with positive affirmations.

Many in the yoga community rave about the power of affirmations.

Wait, hear me out.

I, for one, was never a believer. in positive affirmations.

Yet as I took the steps toward building the life and career that I really wanted, every mentor I met told me the same thing:

“Mindset is everything.”

What they meant is that while it may seem counterproductive to spend time on things like affirmations or journaling, it’s actually the most important thing you can do to ensure all your actions the rest of the day springs from a place of alignment.

It’s the foundation from which you can achieve success in every aspect of your life.

So, upon hearing this advice, I did some digging into affirmations as a way to shift my mindset and do self-work.

Don’t get me wrong: they all felt SO CHEESY.

Plus it was a big mystery to me how are you were even supposed to use these affirmations…

Yell them out loud? (No way, I have neighbors)

Repeat them to myself silently? (But then do they really count?)

Use them somehow in meditation? (I’d rather just relax)

Just thinking about positive affirmations seemed to cause more stress and negative thoughts than I had before I even began them.

But I was determined to give them a try as so many people I respected and looked up to told me that they were an important part of their success in fulfilling their dreams.

Using positive affirmations gave them the confidence to chase their dreams and abated any fear that might get in the way.

Using positive affirmations eliminated negative self-talk and brought on a feeling of happiness and joyful emotions.

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Using positive affirmations helped them step out of their comfort zone with peace and clarity.

So as uncomfortable as they made me to try them out at first, I was convinced they were worthwhile.

So how did I do it?

Ultimately, three hacks really changed the game on how I perceived and ended up using affirmations. And now I’m going to share them with you:

1. Personalization

If you force yourself to recite affirmations from a book or audio cassette, the likelihood of it feeling cheesy is very high. I found that I needed to create my own personal affirmations that were highly relevant to my life in order for them to resonate with me on a soul-level.

For me, that meant that my affirmations were about my relationships, my self-confidence, and my professional goals.

But you can make them about whatever you want. That’s the wonderful thing about affirmations.

You can use affirmations designed to reduce anxiety or increase happiness. You can even use affirmations to prepare for an upcoming job interview!

They are totally customizable and can vary from person to person. So find what helps you and go with that.

Take my feminine energy quiz to get a recommended practice for balancing YOUR feminine energy 👇

2. Repetition is Everything

If you’re like me, you’re using affirmations to shift your mindset so you can feel happier and achieve the things you want (instead of letting your vritti – your crazy monkey mind – rule the show.)

Why let you mind run amuck when you could be programming new, effective, powerful thoughts into your mind-body complex?

Unfortunately, your brain is sort of like a puppy. Training it takes a TON of time and patience, and repetition is the key.

It takes time to train your subconscious mind and make a habit out of positive thinking. They say that it takes 21 days to change a habit and the same is true for your routine ways of thinking.

That’s why my Uplifted Daily Journaling pages (which you can download free planner pages) leave space for you to write each of your affirmations 3 times — mentally and physically carving them into your subconscious.

And it’s why —

3. Listening to Your Affirmations is a Powerful Hack

Years ago, I made an affirmation tape recording my own voice saying some affirmations to myself. I’d listen to it as I walked around, ran errands, and did laundry.

The problem was that at the time, my affirmations were boring.

They were generic things like, “you are strong,” “be brave,” and a lot of other generic statements. But they weren’t targeting specific mindset patterns I was actively trying to shift.

Several months ago, I got back into the game of recording my voice in order to retrain my mind through affirmations.

This time, I spent a full hour getting into a quiet state so I could record my affirmations from a place of PURE CALM. I wanted the affirmations I recorded to bubble up through me from my higher wisdom / inner guidance. I did a bunch of preparatory journaling work to make sure that the wisdom I called forth would be directly related to things I wanted to change in my life right now.

Unsurprisingly, this tape ended up being CRAZY POWERFUL.

I listened to it while doing the dishes each morning, walking the dog, and cleaning the house. Soon I had the whole tape memorized and realized that much of this new way of thinking was now completely ingrained in my being.

I recently just created a new tape to take my mindset work further.

YOU can do this too.

Enter my special, downloadable affirmation discovery workshop you do at home this weekend with a step-by-step guide on my process.

It involves:

• Doing yoga
• Quieting the mind
• Meditating
• Journaling
• Recording your affirmation tape (I show you how to do it on your phone)
• How to make it into a 30-min loop so you can listen to it all the time

If you want to join me for this workshop (and get support from others doing the same) sign up here => brettlarkin.com/uplifted

Remember, if you think this all sounds woo-woo or you’ve been put off by affirmations before, I was in your shoes.

I hear you.

This is different because you’re personalizing what you’re saying to yourself. And that makes all the difference.

But if you want to achieve your goals and improve your life simply by getting in the right mindset, then you’ve got to at least give it a try. And I can help you start.

xo

Brett