Self Confidence – Do Self Affirmations Work?

Do positive self affirmations really work? The short answer is ‘No’ – unless you have a few years to spare and a heavy-duty supply of perseverance. The problem is that positive-affirmations are directed at your conscious mind and, unfortunately, the conscious mind has absolutely nothing to do with how you behave, how you react to people and situations, how you view life in general or, most importantly, the way in which you view yourself. However, as I said, if you throw enough muck at your conscious mind, sooner or later – actually, definitely later – some of that muck will eventually stick and make some sort of reasonable impression on your subconscious mind. However, you’d have to stick with it incessantly and, even then, you’d be faced with an uphill battle because your subconscious mind simply won’t believe what you’re trying to tell it if its view of reality is the opposite. How come? Your subconscious mind dictates 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!!

On the other hand, if you’re really determined to change your life, some part of your life, or change yourself, your own self image or some unpalatable behaviour or bad habit, it’s your subconscious mind that you’re going to have to impress. It’s holding all the keys, has its hand 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 – but childlike as distinct from childish. When you were a child you paid full attention to the reality of the moment, using each of your five senses – that is how you took onboard your current set of beliefs about the world and who you believe yourself to be. As an adult, you now pay precious little attention to reality today – your subconscious mind kinda makes it up for you on the fly! – with all the usual results. You’ve got to get real, to relearn how to pay full attention to what’s actually happening around you, instead of paying attention to the subconscious baggage that’s dragging you down.

The normal subconscious mind is wallowing in the past. The key to your future is to be found in the present. After all, the present moment is the only time and place where life is truly lived. As such, you have to re-learn how to pay attention to what is actually going on, not what your subconscious mind, looking through its dirty lens of past events, thinks is going on. This re-learning process involves training yourself how to pay attention to what you see, feel, hear, smell and taste. This training has to be done in peace and quiet so that, when the going gets tough in the so-called real world, you’re fully trained and ready to do your thing in a manner that will lead you onwards and upwards towards the life that you really want.