Supercharged Affirmations. Or Something else?

Do you want to know how to make affirmations really work for you?  Keep reading and by the end of this you’ll know exactly how to create affirmations, or more importantly something else that really works and how to apply them to be the most effective.

Many of you know how I feel about the use of affirmations. When done like most people use them they are generally ineffective because most people won’t use them long enough or frequently enough to have a positive impact.

People get tired and burnt out from using affirmations over and over again spouting them off in a rote manner.

And most people are unaware of how the conscious and unconscious minds work and how to effectively reprogram the subconscious mind to work for you instead of against you.

I’m all for affirmations when they are done properly to be effective, however I still stand by my assumption that for most people, 95 percent or more,  they aren’t working well for the very reasons given above. People won’t do them at the best time, they aren’t accessing the subconscious mind, they won’t do them long enough and or they aren’t doing them frequently enough for repeated affirmations to work.

So how do we make them work better for us?

First off let’s give a little history of affirmations or what it was previously known as autosuggestion.

In the early 20th century a French phycologist and Pharmacist by the name of Emile Cuoe’ started to notice that when he spoke favorably about a drugs effectiveness he was providing for his patients, the outcome was much better than if he had said nothing about it.

Through the years with much testing Coue’ came up with his now famous autosuggestion (affirmation), “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.”

He would tell his patients to say this affirmation, with feeling, ( regardless of what some people say on TikTok and YouTube you must have an emotional component to your affirmations or you can forget about using them) first thing in the morning upon waking and the last thing at night before falling asleep. (I’ll get into why this is important later ).

He saw great success with this method and so did many others.

Norman Vincent Peal, Joseph Murphy, W. Clement Stone and more contemporary authors like Anthony Robbins, TD Jakes, Oprah Winfrey and many others all use some form of Emile Coue’s first auto suggestive phrase for self improvement.

Getting back to why people have the impression that I don’t like affirmations.

When I first started to use affirmations, I was like most people.

I had some affirmations and I would say them over and over again all day long. “I am wealthy” I am rich” etc etc.

But while saying them I knew I was lying to myself at the beginning. This was thirty years ago. I kept saying them over and over again without any positive effects. So like most, I stopped using them and gave up.

I then dug deep into Anthony Robbins stuff and Nero-linguistic Programming and had some success but not the lasting success I was after.

I had to say so many affirmations all day long that I just got burnt out on them just as many of you do.

While doing them I would say one thing but then my mind would say, “Stop it!!!  You know you aren’t good enough “. “You know you aren’t rich”.  And I’d get this sensation inside of me as if I was caught lying by someone. It was unmanageable.

This is the same thing that I’ve seen and still do see from clients that come to me now.

They’ll have lists and lists of affirmations for everything from how to feel better to money issues and family issues to trying to get their relationship back on course or how to get rid of your old boyfriend’s current girlfriend.

It is crazy sometimes how many affirmations they have. I had one client that came to me with 250 affirmations. Come on now!!!   It’s no wonder nothing is working for them.   They have way too much to try and focus on. Their energy is too spread out. Not to mention the fact that 95 percent of them aren’t even doing them correctly or at the correct time to be effective and that is a conservative percentage.

I use three affirmations and I use them only as anchors. Nothing more. But I’ll get into that later.

I read a book about fifteen years ago that talked about affirmations and this one sentence stuck with me ever since. It said that I would have to do my affirmations “hundreds of thousands of times” for them to be effective. Not just a thousand times or ten thousand times or even one hundred thousand times but “hundreds of thousands of times”.

I just knew there had to be a better way than that. That to me was just insane.

So I started digging. I started digging really deep into how people succeeded. How they thought and above all how to change my own thoughts so that I too could succeed.

To keep it simple I realized that I needed to reprogram my subconscious mind but to do that I was going to have to get past the gatekeeper which was my conscious mind.

Without going too deep here, there are five different types of brain waves.

The conscious mind, the awake and alert mind functions primarily in beta waves. This is the Thinking rational mind. This is that voice you hear all the time while you’re awake and alert. This is the conversations you have in your mind all day long while you’re awake and alert.

This is the state that will either allow information to go into the subconscious or not. It’s the gatekeeper.

While you’re doing your affirmations during this time and your conscious mind does not agree with them, they aren’t getting into the subconscious. This is why it takes hundreds of thousands of affirmations to make a dent.

We need to get past this point.

This is where Alpha and Theta brain waves play a huge role in reprogramming our subconscious mind. The mind that actually dictates what we do all day long. It runs our belief system and that belief system is what dictates how we react to certain circumstances and information that we encounter.

Alpha brain waves is the state right before we fall asleep at night and just as we awaken in the morning. This is the state that Neville Goddard calls the “state Akin to sleep”.  Many of us call it SATS.

In this state we are physically and mentally relaxed. In this state the subconscious mind is more receptive to outer input. This is the state in which you want to use your affirmations but still not in the way that 95 percent of you use them. I’ll explain why shortly.

The next state is the state in which children from the ages of 0 to about 7 run around in most of the time.

This is Theta brain waves.

In this state children are extremely connected with their internal worlds which is why it’s so easy for them to imagine and day dream. This is also why small children will “see” things that we adults can’t see and we often say “Johnny has an over active imagination “.

We also see this state in people who have practiced deep meditation for awhile and if you can get to this state and provide input that you desire it is very easy to reprogram your subconscious mind.

For now we are going to focus on the Alpha State since it’s the easiest to work with for a novice.

First though a couple of things to keep in mind.

We want to reprogram the subconscious mind and as such we need to know how it primarily communicates. Once we understand how it communicates and accepts information as true we must figure out how to form that information for easy acceptance into the subconscious mind.

Neville was a master at this and I’ll show you how to do it here as well.

First, the subconscious doesn’t use words as its primary form of communication. It uses feelings, emotions and pictures as its primary way to communicate. This is why children are so impressionable and why their imaginations are so vivid. This is how they learn. They learn through pictures, feelings and emotions. We need to get to this child like state again.

Emile Coue’ knew that the best time to impress the subconscious mind on purpose was first thing in the morning as you awaken and right before you fall asleep at night.

The ancients also knew another way to access the subconscious mind when you wanted to and that was through meditation.

Contemporary authors, Drs., and scientists like Dr Joe Dispenza, Gregg Braden, Dr. Deepak Chopra and even Neville Goddard also knew that you could use meditation to to impress the subconscious mind.

The key with using affirmations is to impress the subconscious with the information you’re trying to provide it within your affirmation. Once it accepts it whether it’s true or not it will then act to out-picture and support that new belief in your world.

The precious minutes just before going to sleep at night and waking in the morning and the use of meditation or as Neville called it, the state akin to sleep, are the tools we’ll use to get past the conscious minds security system.

So now that we know the time in which we’ll use our affirmations now we need to formulate our affirmations. And this is where I’ve had the most exciting success with myself and my clients.

Repeating sentences such as “I am good enough” or “I am wealthy” are fine but they are easily argued against by the conscious mind.

I remember using “I am wealthy” and then my mind screamed at me “NO YOUR NOT”

It made me feel icky just trying to say them.

So doing research on affirmations the last couple of years I came across an article entitled “The Persuasive Power of the Word Because”.

This article went on to explain how researchers at Harvard University conducted a study they called “The Copy Machine Study “

This study was done in 1978 when I was 18 years old. It is kind of interesting because at that time is when I got the Knick name of Why Mann because I asked so many questions. Now the weird thing about it is the only answer I can remember getting from my questions was the single word “because”.

What the researchers did was they setup up a series of tests that had a line of people waiting to use the copy machine and then they would have a person come up to the line of people to see if they would let them jump the line to make copies.

They would first have the line jumper ask “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the copy machine?”  That was version one.

Version two the question was, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the copy machine because I am in a rush?”

The last version was, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the copy machine because I have to make copies.”

As you can see the first version does not give a reason why they need to use the copy machine. Simply that they needed to use the copy machine.

The second version the question has a reason following the word because. It is a compelling reason that could illicit a reasonable response.

In version three it also has a reason following  the word because but it’s not really a reason that is different from the obvious. It’s not a compelling reason. Everyone is in line to make copies.

However, check out the results from adding the word because and giving a reason even if the reason isn’t a very good reason at all.

In the first version, 60% of the people in line let the questioner  jump the line.

In version two, 94% of the people allowed the questioner to jump the line. This was the version that had the compelling, reasonable reason for them to jump the line.

And surprisingly in version three, 93% of the people in line allowed the questioner to jump the line.

That is important to understand because simply using the word because and stating the obvious, it moved nearly as many people to comply as did the version using the word because with a compelling reason after it. Version three didn’t have a compelling reason why they should allow the jumper jump the line. It was simply the same reason all the other people were in line. To make copies. That’s how powerful the word because is.

But why is it so powerful?  What makes it such a compliant word when we use it?

Robert Cifaldini, author of “Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion” states, and I’m paraphrasing here, that we will be more successful in getting someone to help us if we give them a reason. People instinctively need a reason to help. That instinct comes from within. The inner you wants to help. It wants to help out of love.

We are going to use that desire to help, to actually help ourselves.

We are going to use the power of the word “because” to bring our desires to fruition.

Let me give you an example of the affirmations that I use.  “I am valuable and irreplaceable because I am more than good enough “  

In this affirmation I made a statement and then I gave a reason why that statement is true.  The conscious mind won’t fight against that.  In fact it’s going to want to help to prove that statement. 

We aren’t going to use affirmations in the traditional sense. That simply doesn’t work and if it does, it takes years to provide any meaningful results.

Oh sure, you can get the occasional text message or an interview for a job your searching for but not the actual relationship that you want nor the job that you have always desired. You’ll only get glimpses of what you desire. No commitments and no real income. You don’t have enough time to work with to fight all those years of negative programming.

So let’s stop beating our heads against the proverbial wall and let’s use something that really works.

I mean look.  Emile Coue’s single affirmation “everyday in every way I am getting better and better “ is more effective when done in the correct way and time with an elevated emotion and feeling that supports the essence of the affirmation itself , than any combination of affirmations from one to one hundred thousand and beyond done the contemporary right way we see them done today.

But let’s first ask ourselves this question.

Why do so many people want to use affirmations in the traditional way of repeating them over and over and over again?

It’s simple. We as physical human beings want to take the simplest route we can. If someone says that this works and it’s simple, we’ll try it. But try as you may, it is generally a futile experiment.

Saying your affirmations over and over again while in the beta state of mind, which is the state we are in about 30 mins after we wake up and all the way until 30 mins before we go to bed, is like going to a  psychiatrist over and over again digging up the pain of the past and trying to shove it back down when it’s time to leave.

You simply just argue with your own self while you’re saying them until utter frustration sets in and you give up.

Like one of my clients told me. “It’s like being on a cruel hamster wheel. You feel good going up but just as you think you feel you’re reaching the top you spin right back down to the bottom with the negative thoughts and you start the same process over again.”  That’s no way to live or succeed.

So what will work?  What tool can we use to help us reprogram all those years of negative programming?

Meditation or the state akin to sleep as Neville calls it.

We need to get past the conscious gatekeeper and into the subconscious mind. We can’t do that while in the beta wave state of mind. We need to be in an alpha state and then theta if we are going to reprogram our minds because that’s where the subconscious resides. We actually need to get out of the thinking part of our consciousness if we’re going to get to where we want to go.

Also, we must realize that the affirmations themselves are states of which you embody and experience that which you desire to be do or have. That’s why it is unnecessary and counterproductive to have more than two or three affirmations.  It is also one of the reasons that simply repeating affirmations over and over again does little to help you.

An affirmation is a statement you’re making about yourself of who you want to be, do or have.  Because of this the affirmation itself is a state that you are wanting to move to. You must feel that state. Embody that state. And live from that state in your imagination as much as you can. Simply repeating affirmations is not going to accomplish that.

The best way to do this is through meditating to get past yourself.

Once you start to meditate or get into the state akin to sleep, that is when you implant the affirmations. But instead of just saying them you are actually going to experience them. Experience the person you would be as if it were happening right now. Be that affirmation in your imagination right now in the present moment. Don’t look at it as something that will happen in the future. You must experience it in that very moment. Use all of the senses you can as you experience that affirmation. You become that affirmation right at that moment. You are it now, not tomorrow or two weeks from now. You are it now.

Feel being the person that embodies that affirmation. Who would you be? How would you act? How would you react to certain circumstances?  Be the answers to those questions in your imagination.

Do this every morning before you get out of bed and every night just before going to sleep.

Do this for no less than 30 days and watch your world change right in front of you. It has to because your inner world will have already changed.

Test it. What have you got to loose?  Affirmations haven’t worked for you to this point. You haven’t done hundreds of thousands of them yet.

Take two affirmations that deal with your self concept and be those in your imagination for 30 days and watch what the world reflects back to you. It’ll blow your mind.

That’s how you supercharge an affirmation.

Realize that it’s really a state that you must embody, feel and experience. Then you must get past the conscious mind and into the subconscious mind. Then you need to install the affirmation by living from it in your imagination.

That’s it. It’s that simple.

Now go do it.

You’ve got this. Anthony.