How to Make Affirmations Work for You

Affirmations have gained lots of popularity recently, and they can be super helpful. With this being said, however, there are some secrets when it comes to how to make affirmations work. Here are some of the most important ones to help you out wherever you are in your personal growth journey!

How to Make Affirmations Work

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Selecting Your Affirmations

First things first in the process of learning how to make affirmations work, let’s begin by selecting the right affirmations.

In order to do this, begin thinking about what matters most to you. Is it your health? Wealth? Relationships? Do a bit of brainstorming to come up with some central themes to base your affirmations around. From here, you can either begin creating your own affirmations or choose some that have been pre-created for you.

This is the key thing, however: if you want to learn how to make affirmations work, half of the battle is choosing ones that resonate deeply with you. Ideally, you want the affirmations you select to evoke strong emotion, and possibly even a mental image. The essential thing is that the affirmations evoke the feeling that you want to achieve.

Ultimately, we don’t want things in life — we want feelings.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, we can dive into the juicy stuff: how to make affirmations work for you.

1. Be Consistent with Your Affirmations

In order for any new habit to give us results in life, we need to be consistent and give them a chance to start working. Using some “I am” affirmations for two days likely won’t make much of a difference, but if we used those same affirmations daily for a month we might begin to see or feel changes.

In order to make affirmations work for you, you need to be consistent in order to make using affirmations a habit. From there, small changes will begin to accumulate. Suddenly, you’ll notice that you don’t get as angry when stuck in a traffic jam, that you aren’t as critical of yourself. The changes that begin stacking up could also be things like having an easier time saving money or sticking to a workout plan. It all depends on what affirmations you choose to focus on!

The important thing is consistency. The more consistent you are, the faster you’ll see results!

2. Try Using them in the Morning and in the Evening

A pro tip when it comes to how to make affirmations work is this: Try using them immediately upon waking up or just before going to bed.

These are great times to use affirmations precisely because they are the times of the day when we are closest to sleep — the times where our conscious mind is less active and our subconscious is more receptive to the suggestions of affirmations.

You can try simply repeating affirmations in your mind as you wake up or go to sleep, or listening to recorded versions of affirmations. Whatever works best for you, do that!

3. Get Emotional with Your Affirmations

A really important aspect of effectively using affirmations is conjuring up the feeling you wat to achieve through using affirmations.

Depending on your personality and circumstances, this may be easy or it could be really hard. Here are a few pointers that may help you to feel the emotions you want to bring into your life while using affirmations:

Imagine a time in the past where you’ve felt similar to how you want to feel. Channel that energy into thinking about what you want to achieve through your affirmations!

Visualize your ideal life/the aspect of your life that you are trying to influence, and feel how good it will be when you get there.

Think of something or someone whom you love deeply to begin to get yourself into a positive headspace, then begin channeling that emotion into your affirmations.

4. Use Daily Affirmations in Creative Ways

The next way to use affirmations more effectively is through getting creative with them.

Try incorporating them into your days in different ways, for example, through writing them down, listening to audio recordings, making a little song out of them or incorporating affirmations into artwork. The more fun you can have with this, the better!

Using affirmations should be fun — it shouldn’t feel like a chore! If things do begin to feel a bit blah and not fun anymore, try switching things up to see if a different way of using affirmations would be more enjoyable. As with many things in life, it’s all about experimentation to see what works best for you.

5. Visualize, Visualize, Visualize

Visualization can be a great tool when first learning how to make affirmations work for you. We’ve touched on this extremely briefly above, but we are going to dive more in depth here.

In the brain, there is very little difference between what happens when visualizing a situation as opposed to actually experiencing it. Cool, right? We can take advantage of this when using affirmations in several ways.

The first of these is that by visualizing what the best versions of ourselves or our lives are, we subconsciously become more motivated to take action to get us there. We know how good things can be, so we begin taking baby steps in the right direction almost effortlessly.

The other way in which we can use visualization to help us along in achieving our goals is by practicing. If your affirmations and goals revolve around a skill, visualization can actually help us to improve those skills. Since our brains don’t differentiate much between what is really happening and what we are visualizing, it can help immensely to imagine doing what you want to improve at. An example of this from my own life is learning to do a handstand. While visualizing may not help with building the strength needed to do a headstand, it does help with getting more in touch with the body and imagining how to balance in the air. It also helped me to plant the seeds of what it would feel like to be able to hold myself in that inversion successfully. Long story short: I can now do a headstand, and for me personally visualization was very helpful.

To Summarize…

To sum it all up, affirmations can be a great tool to help you along your personal development journey, however, in order to make the most of your affirmations:

Pick ones that resonate with you

Be consistent with using them

Try using them first thing in the morning or last thing in the evening

Channel emotion into your affirmations

Get creative with using affirmations, and

Visualize

If you found this post helpful or have other advice on how to make affirmations work, I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments below! Be sure to also connect with me on my blog, Pinterest and Instagram so that we can hang out and all become the best versions of ourselves. In the meantime, have an amazing day!

Wishing you so much joy and light,

Emma