Do positive self affirmations really work? The short answer is ‘No’ – unless you’ve got a few years to spare and a heavy-duty supply of perseverance. The problem is that self-affirmation is directed at the conscious mind and, sadly, your conscious mind has absolutely nothing to do with how you behave, how you react to people and situations, how you see life in general or, most importantly, the way in which you view yourself. However, as we’ve said, if you throw enough muck at your conscious mind, sooner or later – in fact, definitely later – some of that muck will eventually stick and make some kind of reasonable impression on your subconscious mind. However, you’d have to stick at it religiously and, even then, you’d be facing an uphill war of attrition because your subconscious mind will simply not believe what it’s being told if its view of reality is contrary. How come? Your subconscious mind controls your beliefs, behaviours and reactions and actually creates your very own version of reality. Self-affirmation is like trying to throw snowballs at hell’s fiery furnace!!
However, if you really do want to change your life, some part of your life, or change yourself, your own self esteem or some distasteful behaviour or bad habit, it’s your subconscious mind that you must impress. It holds all the keys, has its hands on all the levers and its feet on all the pedals that either get your life moving forward or, more often than not, grind to an absolute and juddering halt.
In order to impress your subconscious mind, you will have to become just like a little child again – not childish but childlike. When you were young you paid full attention to the reality of the here and now, using each of your five senses – that is how you learned your current set of beliefs about the world and who you think you are. As an adult, you now pay little or no attention to reality today – your subconscious mind kinda makes your reality up for you as it goes along! – with all the normal consequences. You’ve got to get real, to relearn how to pay more attention to what is before your very eyes, instead of paying attention to your subconscious baggage that’s weighing you down.
The normal subconscious mind is wallowing in the past. And the key to your future is to be found in the present. You must understand that the present moment is the only place and time where life is truly lived. In other words, you have to re-learn how to pay attention to what’s really going on, not what your subconscious mind, looking through its dirty lens of past events, thinks is going on. This re-learning process means training yourself how to pay attention to what you see, feel, hear, smell and taste. This training must be undertaken in a quiet place so that, when the wheels starting coming off in the so-called real world, you’re fighting fit and ready to perform in a way that will lead you onwards and upwards towards the life that you really want.
