The rules for making an affirmation are simple. For making a positive one, it must not be negative in any way and it must be in the present tense. All the other types of affirmations you already know because everything you say or think (consciously or unconsciously) is an affirmation.
It is important to understand that affirmations are not exactly true or false – they are merely possibilities. They are the lies we tell ourselves and then behave in accordance with as if they were truth. In some sense they motivate us. For example, a small infant might be told by his mother that he must wait for an adult to help him cross the street and go over to his friend’s house. To make him understand the importance of this, she might try to increase his motivation to do as she says by telling him, “if you go out in the street by yourself a car will hit you and you will be killed.” This is neither a lie nor the truth, just merely a possibility that becomes a motivation factor for our behavior. It is important to understand that affirmations are, in the best sense, merely a possibility that will become a motivation factor for our behavior.
So why do positive affirmations? We do them because one of the usual things we already say to ourselves is not very helpful to us as a motivation factor. An example of this would be, “my life sucks!” That’s the kind of thing we say to ourselves when we experience difficulties and it is the kind of self-talk that doesn’t give you any ambition to make efforts to get what you want in life. Put simply, we do positive affirmations so we can have the courage to keep trying to get what we want out of life. So, in the case of “my life sucks,” we change that to “my life is great/I love and accept myself exactly as I am/the universe supports my ambitions/life is for me/I easily overcome obstacles.” When that is what we are thinking in the morning when we wake up, it is much easier to get out of bed.
The secret to creating a positive affirmation is to listen to what you say to yourself and, if it is something negative, transform it into a more supportive form of self-talk. Mirror work can be a great help in this process. If you stand in front of a mirror, look right in your own eyes and say “I love you,” it might surprise you to find out how much negative stuff is right on the tip of your tongue. In my experience, people have a lot of mixed emotions when confronted with their own image. You might be busy expressing your self-love when you suddenly say, “I need to lose some weight/look at all those wrinkles/my lips are too (thick/thin)/I’m too old/young” and the list just goes on from there.
In the case of “I’m too fat (I need to lose some weight) that might appear to be an accurate assessment. In reality, you would be better off to say “I am the perfect weight.” Both statements are in the present tense which means you can do nothing about them at this particular moment – you are just stuck with this situation for now. Only the latter one lets you feel good about yourself at present.
We tend to believe we must hate what we are at the moment in order to get better in the future but my experience has shown that is not true. I taught college age students at the end of my working career and I quickly saw that if I told them they were stupid and needed a lot of education if they were ever going to get anywhere that, very soon, my students would be poorly motivated and would eventually become resistant to any effort to educate them. On the other hand, if I told them that they were doing well and making good progress, they tended to work hard and do well. So, I asked myself, why are we bad teachers to ourselves with our self-talk? Understanding that we need to be encouraging in order to get good results is the very reason that I am so happy with using positive affirmations and that is exactly the reason why it is better to say to yourself “I am the perfect weight.”
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