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How to Make Affirmations Work
5 steps to affirmation mastery
If you’re a bit familiair with the personal development space, you must have come across affirmations: the things you say to yourself to make you do things differently (and hopefully better).
Logical as it may seem: telling yourself how you want to be, it doesn’t work that way. If it worked, we’d all be the very best versions of ourselves already, with limitless possibility, unwavering health, your bank account exploding and all the happiness in the world.
So just using words is clearly not enough. If you want to change your behavior or your identity, you have to make changes in the reptilian part of your brain, where everything about you is stored. Your identity, your habits, your survival mechanism, everything that makes you you.
The reptilian part of the brain doesn’t like change. It wants to keep you just as you are, it wants predictability.
If you try to use affirmation on it, you’ll be trying for a long, long time. Without much result. Your reptilian really doesn’t care what you say, because mere words don’t reach it. Repeating an affirmation to yourself is a left-brain analytical action. It’s like telling your old MS DOS computer what it’s supposed to do. Out loud. Without a typed-in command it can actually process.
