So, my thirty day trial of affirmations is now over. How did things go?
What was it all about?
My "experiment" was to use positive affirmations on a daily basis, to see if they made a difference in my life. The initial idea was to repeat my affirmations once in the morning when I woke up, and then again at night just before I went to bed. I started with six affirmations, most of which were inspired by content on bmindful.com.
What went wrong?
The first week went well, but I noticed something of a slow down in week two. I tweaked my affirmations to make them shorter and easier to remember, and I also increased my exposure to them by carrying them around on a small card in my wallet. I found the article "Creating Effective Affirmations" at bmindful particularly useful when rewriting my affirmations.
What went right?
As I touched on in But I Can't!, sometimes I will mentally talk myself out of a situation through a negative self voice. I've found that using daily positive affirmations has stopped me from using this negative voice, and I've often found myself overriding my negativity with my new affirmations.
It's refreshing to be in a situation that would normally cause anxiety, and to hear your "inner voice" repeating positive affirmations instead of negative ones, and needless to say it makes a difference to mood and productivity. I found that shorter affirmations worked best, so I modified my original six accordingly. I also found that more focussed affirmations worked better, so I kept each affirmation focussed on a single subject. The increased exposure was also quite effective, especially as some affirmations tend to stick better than others.
Was it worth doing?
Undoubtedly, yes. I'm sticking with these affirmations for the foreseeable future. Whilst they haven't completely transformed my life, they've made a noticeable improvement. As with everything I do, I'll continue tweaking my system to get the best results.
If you're thinking of using positive affirmations in your life, I can highly recommend "bmindful.com". It has a selection of well written articles about affirmations, and also has a list of affirmations that you can add to your own custom list.