GUEST POST – a note from the writer…

Different things spring to mind depending on how deep you are in your personal development journey. For some, Affirmations are like a list of mantras that you recite to yourself every morning. Others see it as some form of ritual in which you chant a string of words. 

Putting it plain and simple, Affirmations in this context are sentences you say to yourself to profess the opposite of your surrounding situation.

It’s speaking positively even in the negative. 

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Lets dive in

Over time, a lot of individuals including myself have begun to see Affirmations as a form of ritualistic activity. It almost seems like affirmations are delusions we tell ourselves because as said by Mark Manson in his book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F**k, ‘No one who is truly happy stands in front of a mirror and tells themselves they’re happy.’ 

Ever since I had jumped off the bandwagon and stopped using affirmations in total or so I thought. I, like most people, thought affirmations were sentences you told yourself in front of a mirror every morning and that was all there was to it. 

So then I would ask myself and I’m sure you’ve asked yourself this too, 

‘Why should I say I’m happy every morning even when I don’t feel happy?’ 

Like I said earlier, it makes one feel delusional especially when those words don’t instantly make things perfect and we still go about our day feeling down. 

But what we have failed to realize is that Affirmations are never one size fits all. It’s not some ritual or only an activity that some people partake in. We all use affirmations day in and day out.

Let me show you 7 ways you unconsciously use affirmations

7 ways you unconsciously use affirmations

An ‘I’ll be fine’ on a bad/rough day.

Remember the last time you were having a really bad day, your self-esteem felt like it was non-existence and you just wanted to disappear literally. 

When you find yourself in this situation and after having a meltdown session, you clean your tears and you say, ‘I’ll be fine.’ or ‘I will get through this’.

Do you want to know a secret? That ‘I’ll be fine’ or ‘I will get through this’ or their variations are affirmations. 

But we say it so often that we don’t realize they are affirmations. 

How? 

Because everything in that moment is telling you that things won’t be fine and yet you profess the positive even in that state. 

I recall, last month I was going through a really bad few weeks and I had been trying to keep it all inside but this particular day every emotion I was feeling felt heightened and I wanted to drop everything and just go home but I couldn’t. In the midst of all that, I remember saying, ‘I will be fine, I have gone through so much and this will not overcome me.’ 

I didn’t instantly feel better but I was calmer in that moment so it was easier to face the task at hand. I know I was aware at that moment that I had used an affirmation. 

The ‘I look good’ on a bad hair/outfit day. 

We have all had our fair share of bad hair/outfit days, it’s a common occurrence in life. 

But telling yourself you look good in an outfit that you know you don’t or you could better is a form of affirmation. You just don’t pay close attention to it. The outfit doesn’t make the person, The person makes the outfit. 

So even when you are putting on an outfit that you know you look mid in, you square your shoulders and readjust your posture and tell yourself, ‘I look good.’ 

On days when you have a sudden wardrobe malfunction and there is no alternative so you make a spare outfit, you still tell yourself you look great despite knowing you could look better. 

Some books to help you on your affirmation journey

The ‘I can do anything I set my mind to’ when goal setting. 

Whether you write it down or have a vision in your head, we all have goals. 

Some parameters of what we hope to achieve. However, some days come and we are down in the dumps wondering if we will ever achieve the goals we had in mind. An experience I’m sure we all relate to is that of setting resolutions. 

At the beginning of the month or year, we set resolutions of the things we hope to achieve before the specific timeline runs out. But almost always by the middle of the month or a few months into the year, we lose our momentum, that drive that we had the day we were setting the goal is almost non-existence. 

Setbacks with goal-setting

Or perhaps we have been trying to achieve the goals but we have encountered some setbacks. 

Naturally, we begin to reevaluate our goals and attempt to make some changes but then suddenly we get this deep resilience that we can do anything we set our minds to. 

Sometimes we say this out loud. Oftentimes we just feel it and rather than change course, we tread down the same path with renewed energy and motivation. 

The ‘I’m great’ when doubt sets in. 

For every athlete and artist out there, you can resonate with a moment in your career when you were doubtful of your capabilities even when you have proved yourself before. 

The mind is a tricky place and although you know you can achieve this feat, doubt and fear have come to nestle you just right before the race, game or performance. 

You tell yourself to just breathe and calm down but your palms become shaky and sweaty. You certainly can’t perform at your best like this so you try to give yourself a confidence boost but that doesn’t seem to help. 

And then you start to take deep breaths and tell yourself ‘I’ll do great.’, ‘I’m great, I have done this before, I can do it again.’ 

I’m a university student and last semester was tough. I had done well in previous semesters but this last semester, doubt started to sink in. I would read for hours and not remember a single thing, I knew I was in over my head and I needed to get out of there fast or my grades would fall. 

So every time, right before I started reading or writing any form of test or exam, I would tell myself that ‘I’m great and I can do this. I have done it before and this time will be no different.’ I didn’t know it but It was affirmations that helped me get through that doubt. 

Tools to help you on your self-development journey

The ‘It’s not that bad’ when things are really bad. 

Affirmations don’t always have to be in the form of all positive and go skippy, they can sometimes hide in semi-positive statements especially when we subconsciously don’t want to admit that we use affirmations. 

You have been in a situation that was very bad like stage 10 bad and yet you told yourself that, ‘it’s not that bad.’ 

Like a hall, you rented for an event getting flooded before the event or you got a bad score on a test you worked hard for. 

In the midst of all this, you tell yourself, ‘It’s not that bad.’ and you move on. It doesn’t make things better but it begins to hurt less. 

The ‘Tomorrow will be better’ after a long day. 

Some days are never-ending, they seem to have 36 hours instead of the usual 24 hours. The night can’t come any faster so when you do eventually get to crawl into bed. You are already exhausted and just want to be over with the day so you tell yourself, Tomorrow will be better. Because it has to be. 

That’s affirmation at its best. You are speaking into a new day and declaring what you want from it even before the day is here. 

Some days you don’t even realize that you are saying this or speaking it into existence. It just seems natural and far from mystical. 

Lastly, we have the ‘It’s a phase, It will pass’ after a series of bad weeks/months.

This we use when we have yet another bad week after a string of bad weeks or another bad month after a few bad months. 

We tell ourselves that we know things may be not great now but no situation is permanent and it will all pass soon despite no inclination that things are getting better. 

We tell ourselves it’s a phase and we believe so. That’s the power of affirmations. 

One of the instant benefits of these unconscious affirmations is the sense of calmness and assurance that you feel after speaking these positive words into existence. 

Closing Remarks 

Affirmations don’t have to be in front of a mirror or said at a particular time of the day. That’s the hidden magic to it.

You can make use of affirmations daily without even realizing that you are. In the same way, we have positive affirmations, there exist negative affirmations. 

But now that you know the benefits of positive affirmations, you can imagine what effects negative affirmations will have. 

In what ways have you used affirmations unconsciously in your daily life?

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