Affirmations are positive statements declared out loud with conviction and enthusiasm. Utilized correctly and with frequency, consistency, and authority, affirmations can have a profound effect on every area of your life, including your finances. They allow you direct access to your subconscious mind, reprogramming the limiting thoughts that have repressed your good intentions and cementing the bridge toward the financial life you desire.
There is skepticism surrounding the use of affirmations, because their purpose is misunderstood. It's easy to dismiss the process as maddening; after all, how much difference can it possibly make to merely repeat statements over and over? We cannot magically declare ourselves into better lives. Rather, affirmations function as the catalyst in inspiring us to act. These words suppress our negative beliefs by altering the object on which we put our attention.
This is probably not the first time you've been told that you should be saying affirmations daily. Yet how many of us do it? If you disbelieve that affirmations have power, try this experiment: Every time you travel to an audition, repeat aloud 10 times, firmly and with certainty, "I'm an untalented actor, and this audition will be a disaster." Few people would undertake such potential sabotage, because words project our viewpoint and influence our actions. If we're not consciously affirming, then we're allowing preprogrammed messages to affect our performance.
Be still for a moment and listen to the voice running in your head. Perhaps it's reciting all that you haven't accomplished today or rehashing everything that went wrong with your audition or bemoaning your inability to pay this month's rent. All of us have this voice, a lulling tape that is either moving us toward our goals or hindering our efforts. Your antidote to this poison is to give yourself empowering and motivating messages that drown out the insecurity.
The key to crafting effective affirmations is to shape them to your individual situation. Write statements that you can speak with authority. If your current paradigm assumes that wealthy people are greedy, a strong affirmation might be, "I am focused on creating wealth to benefit myself, my family, my friends, and the world." If you're terrified that you'll lose money if you start investing, try, "I can learn all I must know to invest my money wisely."
Create a list and practice speaking your affirmations aloud at least twice every day. You may feel silly at first, rather like learning a new dialect. When practicing a dialect, it's awkward to move the lips and tongue in unfamiliar ways when repeating new patterns and inflections, so we'll frequently revert to our normal sound. Affirmations work the same way. Repeated daily and with commitment, these seeds of truth will grow inside you, subtly overriding your former financial paradigms.
Set your daily intention by saying them first thing in the morning, and repeat them late at night to impress your subconscious while sleeping. Keep your affirmations with you. Read them privately while standing in line at the bank or running on the treadmill at the gym. Whenever you catch yourself in an old, negative thought pattern, immediately stop and repeat one of your new positive statements. Eventually affirmations become a personal mantra, an anchor we use to identify ourselves in our financial world.
Our past columns offered guidelines for identifying your current financial paradigms and fears. Your job is to use that information to acknowledge your thought patterns about money that no longer serve you, and then create affirmations that directly counter those patterns. Our upcoming columns will guide you through the steps that will significantly strengthen your financial position. But affirmations can help you to trust yourself, to believe that you can make decisions, make mistakes, learn from them, and move on. They'll shift you into an attitude of curiosity and discovery that keeps you going and growing, making the difference between simply reading information and taking the powerful actions that allow you to move forward.
Miata Edoga is the president and founder and Bryan Scott Bellomo the head coach of Abundance Bound, a financial-education company for actors. They focus on teaching critical money-management skills that allow actors to pursue their craft without the heavy burden of financial stress. Visit www.abundancebound.com for more information.
